- HD 720p video resolution
- Built-in microSD card slot supports 32 GB capacity to record video clip recordings based on motion triggers, schedules, or continuously
- 16 feet of night vision
- Motion detection triggers e-mail / push alert notifications
- 4x digital zoom
- mydlink app support for iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows phone
Could have been good, but it's not made very well
09/05/2013
This review is from: D-Link DCS-2132L HD Wi-Fi Camera
Pros:
- Incredibly easy to setup, you’ll be up and running within ten minutes of deciding where to place the camera. Although the camera is not plug and play the set up wizard will guide you through the steps to get it up and running, even if you do the steps out of order, like I did.
- The night vision is useful and works very well. The range is actually greater than 15 feet, in my tests it was around 20-25 feet in my house.
- Comes with the hardware to mount it to a wall.
- You can turn off the blinking green LED.
- In the event you did need to listen in on the audio, the range is actually quite good, I was able to hear myself talking at a normal tone around 20 feet away, the quality too is surprisingly good.
- Video transmission is flawless on a wired connection and very good on a strong wireless connection, by keeping the camera within 80 feet of my router I found it was able to transmit video with very little trouble.
- With pros stretched thin and relatively minor compared to cons, I found the mobile app to be the highpoint for this entire item. The app is incredibly simple to use, quick to install, and really helps the item to show what it has going for it. You can relax around your home or be on the go and still keep an eye on whatever you deem worth keeping an eye on. That may sound like a sales pitch but it does work incredibly well.
Cons:
- Build quality is what I would consider to be quite poor; the included Ethernet cable feels cheap, the power cable too feels cheap and wiry, the power adapter itself is made of cheap thin plastic and the camera has its own quality maladies. Chief among said maladies is just the less than quality feeling of the camera and its stand. The camera housing and stand are made of thin plastic pieces which seem to fit together poorly.
- Although this would fit under the category of quality, I feel it deserves its own special mention to highlight just how detrimental the poor build is to the function of this camera. When I first opened the camera and set it up, I found it exceedingly hard to angle the camera how I wanted because the swivel joint, although made of metal, was fit very badly and didn’t properly support the camera’s weight. After rigging up a system which allowed me to actually test the camera, and leaving it on for a few hours, I decided to move the camera and rotate it to watch out my living room window. Upon doing this I discovered that seemingly by magic, the swivel joint now worked correctly, and after some careful examination, I was able to determine why: the camera itself puts out a fair amount of heat and does a bad job of dissipating it, this in turn heated up the swivel joint (it was actually warm to the touch!), causing the metal to expand, and making the swivel joint actually function properly.
- D-link seems to have used the “cloud” buzzword to try and sell this. Really there is no cloud feature as most people have come to expect it, you certainly can’t save your camera footage to anything like a cloud, and with the obvious high compression the video receives, you have to wonder why this feature isn’t offered.
- As virtually every other reviewer has mentioned, the image quality although the correct resolution, is very grainy and of a poor quality. You would imagine the camera would just take high quality video and leave the compression to D-Link’s so called “cloud”, or at least offer this as an option.
- Local storage using an SD card strikes me as a feature which isn’t very useful, somebody using this for something as mundane as a baby monitor has no use for what their baby has been doing, but rather what they are doing, and somebody using this as a security camera wouldn’t want their video to be recorded to a device which could be easily spotted and stolen.
- The settings of the camera seem to be divorced in a very odd manner, the advanced settings for the camera are accessed over your local network the same you would your router (just go to the device’s IP address) however other settings seem to only be accessible by going to the mydlink website, such as the night vision toggle, microphone input, and the motion detection. This might all make sense if the settings manager didn’t also have its own video feed available.
Overall Review:
- The WPS button on the camera isn’t labeled as such and is instead labeled “RESET”.
- Near the end of my testing of this camera, it occurred what use perfectly suits it: a front door or front gate camera. Being alerted by movement means you would know when somebody has passed where you placed it, the short range of the speaker on the camera means it’s suitable for somebody within a few feet of it, the microphone in the camera allows them to speak back to you, and the grainy picture is less of a downfall when the camera is focused on something within a few feet of it. Too bad it’s only suitable for interior use.
- I was greatly disappointed by this item; overall the largest let down is the subpar quality and the promises the item makes that it doesn’t keep. For me to actually recommend this item it would have to be much cheaper, and made much better. I think the feature where this camera tries to overstretch itself is the resolution, as mentioned above, it is the proper resolution, but very low quality, I think that a lower resolution higher quality camera would make this a much more appealing item. Overall, if you’re thinking about a home security camera, I simply wouldn’t consider this as an option because the quality issues I highlighted mean that a draft could suddenly cause your security camera to be uselessly pointing at the floor. As a baby monitor or something similar, it is very expensive.
Share this review:
2 people found this review helpful.
Did you?
Yes
/
No
LOADING...
