D-Link Wireless Internet Camera review

D-Link's Wireless Internet Camera lets you monitor any part of your home without the hassle of having to run cables everywhere.

It also comes with an Ethernet port, in case you plan to install it within reach of your router. It's also used for initial configuration. Once you've connected the camera to your network via the wired port, it's detected by the setup software. To use wireless, you have to enter WiFi settings manually, as the setup utility can't scan for wireless networks automatically.

At its most simple, the camera provides a live feed via its web-based interface. The default 640x480 video size was jerky and full of compression artefacts, so we had to drop the video size to 320x240 to get acceptable results. Even so, the quality was less than on a decent USB web camera. You can view the stream over the internet, too, but you'll have to configure your router to forward incoming web requests to the camera. A big feature, as proclaimed on the box, is the 3G video, so you can view video on your mobile phone. In reality, this feature is tricky to configure. The camera uses RealVideo, so you need a phone with RealPlayer installed. You'll also have to configure your router to pass the video feed, through, and then configure your mobile phone to view the stream.

For security, you can configure your camera for motion detection and automatically uploaded snapshots to a web server. It's easy to configure, and the detection settings mean you can configure the camera to pick up just human movement. D-Link also supplies its IP Monitoring software, which lets you monitor multiple cameras from one application. It records video streams when motion is detected, based on each camera's configured motion-detection settings. It's powerful, but looks dated. The playback software is clunky and difficult to use, too, and it's hard to find a specific video clip.

If you need a wireless camera or want to use multiple cameras together, the Wireless Internet Camera is a good choice. If you just want a single camera, though, a decent webcam connected to your PC does a better job and costs less.