D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Internet Camera, Home Security

Average customer rating: 3.0

Good camera, a few caveats
Great IP camera for the price
Fine for the price
Very poor customer support from D-link for DCS-900
Good product, poor information

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D-Link DCS-900 10/100TX Internet Camera, Home Security

Manufacturer: D-Link Systems, Inc.
Product Group: CE
Binding: Electronics
ASIN: B0000CEPC0

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Product Description

The DCS-900 is the latest addition to D-Link's Internet Camera family of products. The DCS-900 Internet Camera combines the functionality of video surveillance with the reliability and scalability of Fast Ethernet. With its compact, all-in one design, the DCS-900 is a low cost remote monitoring solution and ideal for home use.The DCS-900 connects quickly and easily to your existing Fast Ethernet network and a setup wizard guides you through the set up process to get you up and running in a matter of minutes.The DCS-900 features a built-in web server, which means that you don't need to have computer to stream video images directly to the Internet. Video images captured by the DCS-900 can be viewed remotely by typing an IP address into a Web browser. With its easy-to-use Web-based interface, the DCS-900 can be managed and configured from anywhere in the world.The included Windows-based software provides even more features, allowing you to archive streaming video straight to your hard drive and monitor up to 4 cameras on a single screen.

Customer Reviews:

Good camera, a few caveats.......2007-06-02

This is a pretty decent camera for a decent price, providing that:

1. You have realistic expectations regarding its image quality.
If you expect HDTV-quality video, you will be disappointed. It does not produce good results in low light and is better suited to outdoor images. In practice, image quality is at least as constrained by limited bandwidth as it is by inferior optics. If you are interested in better picture quality and have plenty of bandwidth, there are other more expensive alternatives.

2. You have sufficient upstream bandwidth.
I set my camera to 640x480 and 'auto' frame rate. At 1 frame per second the camera consumes about 200kbps of upstream bandwidth, which is close to the limit of many residential broadband connections. If you want more than 1 fps, you may need to reduce the resolution to 320x240.

3. You are comfortable adjusting your router settings.
Your router must have port forwarding set up for the camera to be visible to the external world. Several reviewers here indicate that their camera is accessible from within their local network, but not from the across the router. This clearly indicates a network configuration issue, and not a problem with the camera. I don't think it's fair to expect D-link to troubleshoot router setups, and give the camera low scores when they can't/won't.

Nevertheless, it did take me a bit longer than I expected to set it up. I initially left the camera set to accept connections on port 80 and forwarded external port 8100 to port 80 on the camera. Static images and the web interface worked, but not video. I discovered that the Java/ActiveX applet on the client was trying to connect to port 80 (instead of 8100), which was blocked by the router (and probably by my ISP as well). Therefore the easiest way to set up port forwarding is to make sure the port the router is forwarding to and from are the same. In my case, I changed the camera port to 8100, and set the router to forward from port 8100 to port 8100 on the camera. I suspect that this may have tripped up some other people as well, although I found no mention of it. I also noticed that in this most recent version of the firmware there is no longer a separate image transfer port (e.g. 8481), simplifying setup a bit.

Overall I am satisfied with this camera. I use it to view an outside location with plenty of light and little motion. I have not noticed any reliability issues that others have mentioned, but it has only been up for about one week.

Great IP camera for the price.......2007-04-22

I was looking for inexpensive IP cameras to be used in video surveillance for our company. The fist cam I bought is the TV-IP100 by TrendNet. The second cam was the DCS-900.

The first thing I noticed was that the lens piece, mounting bracket, power supply, and even the backlabel looked awfully similar. The browser-based configuration is also nearly identical, with one notable exception: the DCS-900 lacks the "Anti-flicker" option, which caused significant image detirioration in certain places inside the office (dark waves would slowly travel up the image).

I liked the DCS-900's form factor better, so I decided to take the risk, and flash the DCS-900 with IP100's firmware. Surprisingly, it worked! So now the DCS-900 seems to think that it's actually an IP100, and it has the "anti-flicker" option.

The image quality of both cameras is nearly identical, the image is very noisy in a dark (or low-light) environment, to the point where it trips the motion sensor even at the lowest (least sensitive) setting. When used in a well-lit environment, the image quality is very good.

The cameras will be used with Linux-based video recording software (Zoneminder).

Vitaliy

Fine for the price.......2007-03-09

Overall this is a good camera for the price... emphasis on "for the price". We purchase the camera to provide very basic remote monitoring and it does that well. Specifically a maintenance team logs in from home to check snow/ice accumulations in winter and make decisions regarding plowing or closing the campus. As with any low-end digital camera, this one struggles in low light, so we added a flood light to illuminate it's view area at night. Setup of the camera was pretty straight forward, and there are a number of handy options for adjusting the image settings and frame rate. There are also plugins for live viewing in either Microsoft or non-Microsoft browsers. Overall, it's a great little camera for what you're paying.

Very poor customer support from D-link for DCS-900.......2007-02-27

I bought this camera just before Christmas, still have not gotten it to work, it is now almost March 2007. The customer support is very very poor, they hang up on you if you ask a technical question. The sofware that comes with the camera is useless unless you plan on using the camera within your network. I would stay away from this product at all cost. I have contacted customer support 8 x, still no luck, I get a different answer each time and they refuse to help if your product has to interface with a another brand of product. They tell you to contact the other manfacturer for help. Stay far away !!!!

Good product, poor information.......2007-01-11

This camera worked very good for local viewing, but the information supplied with it was very poor. The information supplied with the camera said you could access the camera remotely through the internet, which is true if you are a high tech internet person. It never says that you need a permanant IP address which very few people have and need to pay the business connection rate.

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