I received an email from "Nate", who had the following to say…
Quote:
After reading through the online manual, there's a few things that you should add to your review or contact the company about.
#1 Outside access. It would be really hard to access this camera from
outside your network. They say it can be accessed from anywhere and even
your cell phone, but that's not true.
You have to set up your wireless router to allow a "port forward" to
your camera, give your camera a static IP and also you would have to
know the IP address of your wireless router on the internet, if you can
access it from there.
The only easy for them to offer this capability is to do something like
"go to my PC" does and offer a "proxy" server. Or if the user has his
own server, he could do some sort of forwarding of packets from there
(the camera is always connected to the server, it's a outgoing
connection for the camera). They should provide better instructions
on this issue.
There's lots of problems with their claims of being able to access it
from anywhere and you should try doing it yourself to see what the
problems are. I know because I have a few things set up here myself and
would like to safely access them from outside and it's always a pain in
the ###.
#2 If it's Mac OSX compatible, it's also Linux compatible, but yet they
don't list that and they should.
#3 It looks like they are using GPL Linux internally to run this thing,
I didn't see any links to source code.
#4 They should show the pan and tilt angles right up front, most people
would think it does a 180 X 360 or something like that.
#5 Oh yea! WEP sucks! Don't put this in your bedroom ! Why didn't they
do WPA and also the mail POP3 stuff isn't encrypted so your password
goes out over the air in the clear. It's really not that hard to include
better encryption anymore with these MIPS processors and so much RAM.
I really like the $500 version of this camera, .03 lux and megapixel.
Wish it was only $200 !
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The $500 version of the reviewed camera Nate mentioned is the
Toshiba IK-WB11A, which does appear to have many improvements over the IK-WB01A.
I have to somewhat disagree with Nate's #4 point only because it seems like ALL specs are equally "buried". Toshiba could definitely do a better job at presenting their cameras, but in truth, a large percentage of IP cameras I've looked have a similar specs page, so Toshiba is not so horrible in relative terms. A quick look at the
specs page does reveal a Pan of 112° (+56° to -56°) and a Tilt of 54° (+5° to -49°).
Port forwarding is something very new to me, but once you get the concept down, it's
fairly straight-forward. It would still be nice if it was easier, however. I may still play around with Toshiba's built-in web server and port forwarding for internet-wide viewing, as I don't really want to keep my iMac running SecuritySpy open all the time.