D-Link DCS-932L review

D-Link’s DCS-932L is the first IP camera we’ve seen which supports D-Link’s mydlink service. This is designed to make it easy to view your IP camera’s feed from anywhere on the internet without having to fiddle with your router’s settings or worry about Dynamic DNS. It also has night vision and 802.11n wireless networking.

Setup is straightforward. With the aid of clear illustrations and text, the CD-based setup program takes you through physically plugging in the camera and connecting to your network, over Ethernet or wirelessly. Connecting wirelessly is far easier if your router supports WPS – you just press a button on the back of the camera and one on your router, and a secure connection is made.

If you’re without WPS you have to plug the camera in with an Ethernet cable, then scan for wireless networks in the wizard and enter your password, before restarting the camera and unplugging the cable. We couldn’t get the camera to connect to our WPA2-enabled Fritz!Box 7390, however – we had to change the router to WPA-TKIP encryption before the camera would work.

Once you’re online, you’re prompted to sign up for a mydlink account with a username and password, which associates your camera with that account. When you log in at www.mydlink.com you can pick your camera from a list, and view its live feed from outside your home network. You can even view it using an iPhone or Android app – we tried the iPhone version, and it worked perfectly.

The mydlink interface also lets you access your camera’s settings page from wherever you are. This is logically laid out, with subsections for settings such as video quality. You can choose from 640×480 at 20fps, or 320×240 and 160×120 at 30fps. We preferred the higher-resolution option – 20fps was easily enough to recognise people from the video, even when walking past the camera.

Unfortunately, we found mydlink temperamental at best. We had to use Internet Explorer to log in (Google Chrome just threw up an error) and half the time it would just direct us to a page with an advert for various D-Link cameras rather than show us our camera. This happened on three different PCs running Internet Explorer 8 and 9 and on three different types of network connection, including an ADSL link with no firewall.