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Xvision The Cube X100C review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £142
inc VAT

With Wi-Fi, LED lights and low-light mode, this is an incredibly flexible camera that capture's detailed footage.

Flexibility is one of the most important aspects of an IP camera, so that you can place it where you want to keep an eye on your business or home. With LEDs to light up a dark area, Ethernet and 801.11n Wi-Fi networking and a maximum recording resolution of 1,280×1,024 at 15fps, Xvision’s The Cube is certainly one of the most flexible cameras you can buy.

We’ve seen this model recently, but our original review suffered from some browser issues (both desktop and Android), which have been resolved. Knowing this, we decided that it was only fair to revisit and update the review.

Set up of the camera is first by locating the camera on the network using the IP Wizard LAN software. Once detected, all management is done through a web browser. As with the majority of IP cameras, the configuration is best done with Internet Explorer, as the ActiveX plug-in gives you full access to all of the camera’s features and faster video streams.

The Cube will work in Firefox and Chrome, but you miss some ActiveX-only components, such as the movement threshold graph for motion detection calibration. As such, these browsers are better off thought of as for viewing only.

All of the camera’s settings are done through the web interface. It looks rather basic and we found that it could be slow to respond at times taking around 20 seconds or so to save settings. That said, it’s packed full of features and once you’ve got the camera correctly configured you’ll rarely need to come back into the interface.

By default the camera picks up an IP address from a DHCP server. As this is prone to change, a fixed IP address makes more sense, particularly if you want to access the camera from over the internet, as you’ll need to configure port forwarding in your router. Initial configuration has to be through a wired connection, but once into the interface you can add the camera to a wireless network. It automatically scans for available networks, making it straightforward to join one.

Once you’ve got your network configuration sorted out it makes sense to configure the camera’s feed and motion detection. There are settings to configure the camera’s white balance, color level, brightness and contrast. Focus is manually controlled by twisting the lens on the front.

Motion detection is done by drawing windows of interest over the image of areas you want to monitor. Detection zones can be Included (motion is detected inside the box) or Excluded (motion inside the box is ignored). The latter option is useful to cut out movement through a Window or a door that you don’t need to monitor.

Each box has its own settings for Object Size and Sensitivity. These let you set the camera, so that it doesn’t go off all of the time. The manual is a little bare when it comes to setting these options, just saying that each has a value between 1 and 100. It’s a little annoying that there’s no description of what the graph means. How it works is that the black line on the graph represents the size of object detected. The moving bars on the graph represent detected movement. If the movement bars are higher than the object size line, they turn red showing that this would trigger an event; if the bars are lower than the object size line they’re blue. The sensitivity setting defines how much movement is required. By adjusting two you can make sure you don’t get false alarms.

Xvision The Cube X100C sensitivity

Once you’ve got your Object Detection windows you need to set schedules to record footage. These say what days and times the schedule is active and what to do with footage. Captured footage can be saved to MicroSD card, emailed or uploaded to a network share, FTP server or HTTP server. You can select the type of footage you want to capture (still JPEG, M-JPEG or H.264), but you can’t set the quality of stream. Instead, video is captured at the maximum quality settings.

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Details

Rating ****
Maximum image resolution 1,280×1,024

Networking

Ethernet connection speed 10/100Mbit/s
Wireless networking support Yes
128-bit WEP yes
WPA Yes
WPA2 yes
upload images to FTP server yes
Dynamic DNS yes

Other Features

Night vision yes
Weatherproof no
Audio yes
Video recording format MJPEG, MPEG4, H.264
Movie frame rate at max quality 15fps
Motion detection yes
Software included Xvision X64SW Lite 5.0
Power consumption on 4W

Buying Information

Warranty two years RTB
Price £142
Supplier http://www.y3k.com
Details www.ipcctv.com

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