DIY surveillance for home owners and small businesses

The broadband revolution has promised many things, not least the ability to log onto the internet at work and take a peek at your empty home via remote video camera.

The wonders of IP (internet protocol) networking mean digital video cameras can be treated the same way as ordinary computers, by being assigned IP addresses that allow them to be located on the internet from anywhere in the world.

Web cameras now peer down on us in all sorts of public locations. A few years back, Mount Maunganui's Mount Wave Cam web camera was labelled a "pervert's paradise" because it allowed web users to zoom in on sun bathers. The hysteria soon died down and the web camera remains at citynews.co.nz, where its serves to let people see whether the waves are good enough for surfing.

You can easily and cheaply install your own remote web camera and as a security measure it makes a lot of sense. I installed the Edimax I-watcher camera on the windowsill of my office, positioned so it looked down on my car parked in the parking lot below.

I can keep an eye on the car from anywhere in the world simply by opening a web browser and connecting to the camera feed via the internet. The I-watcher has the appearance of a silver baseball with a large eye embedded in it. It will tilt and pan smoothly according to your directions.

As well as keeping tabs on the car I can pan around the office to make sure I don't have any unwanted visitors.

The camera displays images at various resolutions up to 640 by 480 pixels. That provides a decent quarter-screen picture as long as there's sufficient light. At night, the I-watcher strains to see properly.

It connects either directly to your computer or to your wireless router via an Ethernet cable and it also supports power over Ethernet (PoE), which means you can do away with the mains power cable if you connect via Ethernet and your router supports PoE connections.

Getting an adequate network connection to cameras positioned in awkward places away from the router and Ethernet points could be troublesome were it not for the fact that the I-watcher also supports wireless networking.

Plug a USB wi-fi connector into the I-watcher, configure the connection and security settings and it will communicate over your wireless network like any other computer. All you need is mains power for your camera to operate.

While setting up remote networking and security settings requires some technical knowledge, the I-watcher is simple to install. The camera's functions are controlled through a web browser.

Once the camera has been assigned an IP address, it's simply a matter of typing the numbers into the web address bar to bring up the control panel.

Here you take command of the camera and snap photos and video clips remotely.

Digital photos are saved back to your computer and so are video clips which are recorded at up to 30 frames-per-second as AVI video files. The small microphone on the I-watcher picks up sound but audio isn't its forte.

The remote monitoring features are very clever. Armed with a motion detector, you can programme the I-watcher to email you images when it detects movement.

It can be set to move to pre-defined positions while recording footage to your computer or a chosen server on the internet.

Digital video recorder software, included on the installation disc, is designed to handle multiple camera feeds so you could set up I-watchers all over your house or business premises if you wanted to. Multiple users can watch the camera feed via the internet at the same time.

A few things let the I-watcher down: there's no zoom control so you can't move in for a close-up. Its manual also features some dodgy English that can cause confusion.

I puzzled over the word "getway" until I realised that the writer meant "gateway". Some passages to go with the screen icons too are badly written. I-watcher's user interface is a little rough around the edges and while delivering a lot of functionality needs to be improved to suit less tech-savvy users.

But for small business and home owners with broadband connections, I-watcher is a cheap, versatile answer to do-it-yourself surveillance.


I-Watcher Camera

Pros: Easy installation, wi-fi capable, web camera access
Cons: No camera zoom, patchy documentation
Price: $471
Herald Rating: 7/10