Cnet Wireless IP Surveillance Camera CIC-930W - CIC930W

A decent camera for the price

8/16/2009

My wife is a child psychologist, and we bought this camera to test it out for use in her play therapy room. She needed an inexpensive wireless IP camera that could be used to monitor psychological testing, interactions between parents and children, and other activities when she was not physically present in the room. To be ethical, the camera needed to be obvious (the size of this camera is) and people would be told in advance that they would be monitored remotely.

This camera is incredibly easy to set up using a Linksys wireless router. I can't speak for other systems, but it took me all of 15 minutes to get the camera going and observable with our home-based wireless system. The picture quality is decent when you have good lighting, but extremely poor when lighting is minimal. This would not be a problem for her as the lights in the play therapy room would always be on and adequate for the task.

Then we set it up in our family room to test it out. We observed our children at play using her notebook computer and my desk top computer to see if it would be adequate for her purposes. While the picture is quite good for a camera of this type, unfortunately it is not good enough for her purposes and we will need to go with a megapixel type camera at significantly higher cost.

The only irritation I have with this camera is that the software bundled with it is anemic at best. It is impossible to resize the viewing screen, or to create a small window that can be set in a corner of your monitor. You can easily view the video using Internet Explorer, but when using a web browser like Safari you get no audio. I have tried to find third party software to fix these problems, but none I have found support any of the Cnet cameras.

While this camera is not adequate for professional purposes, we have found it so useful in monitoring our own family room that we plan on keeping it at home for that purpose. I am reasonably satisfied with the camera, but would like to see more useful software for it.

THEY LIE!!!

2/26/2009

This product does not work with MAC OSX at all. I contacted their product support site & they said they didn't offer any software to configure the camera on a Mac. I tried using an older Mac as well with Virtual PC to configure the camera, but it would not recognize the camera on the network. Don't waste your time or money on this junk.