Xvision The Cube X100C review

At 1,280×1,024 at 15fps, the quality of the footage is pretty good. Compression artefacts are clearly visible and we found that text on stationary objects was hard to read. For this reason, this isn’t the ideal camera to have pointed at a car park if you want to read number plates. Most importantly, people’s faces were clear and easy to recognise.

The camera can cope with low-light situations in one of two ways. First, the shutter speed can be set to go to a maximum of 1/5s (five shots per seconds), which makes for jerky viewing, but captures all of the details in a dimly lit room. Secondly, the ring of white LEDs can be used to light up to 10m away, capturing a subject in full colour. It works really well and colour footage is preferred by courts if a theft or intrusion goes to trial.

The LED lights can be set to come on automatically when the natural light dims beneath a threshold, and to turn off when the light increases. You can set a timer so that brief flashes of light, such as a car passing by, don’t trigger the lights. Alternatively, you can set the light to turn on when motion is detected. This could be a good choice if you’ve got a dimly lit room that the camera can ‘see’ well at a low frame rate, but want to turn the lights on when there’s movement to capture full brightly-lit detail at a higher frame rate.

For monitoring footage, you can set two Regions of Interest (ROI) windows. These are displayed full-screen using a digital zoom, and let you quickly check your home or office when you’re out and about.

Mobile support lets you check footage from your smartphone. Using Android, the system let us choose the resolution and frame rate of the feed, plus connect to the RTSP feed; however, there’s no way to view the ROI you’ve set from the mobile site. There’s also a link to the Original Web, which lets you access everything and worked perfectly on our Android phone. We could even go into the Settings menu, although the Object Detection option was strangely missing.

If you’ve got more than one camera, you can install the Xvision X64SW Lite Windows software, which can monitor up to 64 cameras on one screen. You can automatically flick between cameras or arrange the layout to view thumbnails of all the feeds; double-clicking a camera zooms in to its feed alone.

You can set the cameras to record automatically all day or you can get them to trigger on motion detection. You can also set alarms, so you have a siren go off if motion’s detected, making it a useful system for security guards to watch. All recordings are saved to the PC’s local hard disk, although we had to run the software in Administrator mode under 64-bit Windows 7 to get recording to work.

Captured footage is viewed through the dedicated playback software to view footage. The easiest way to find a recording is to use the event log and double-click an entry to view the footage. You can also search for footage in the playback software, which gives you a time line with colour-coded entries to show you what set the recording in motion. You then highlight the time period and cameras you’re interested in to view the footage. If you spot anything incriminating going on you can save the footage or take a snapshot. The interface is a little bit clunky and it takes a while to learn how to use the software, but it does a good job once you do.

There’s a lot to like about The Cube. Its interface can be a little bit clunky and the manual needs a bit of improvement to describe some features, such as Object Detection, in more detail. Once you’ve got it configured, though, the quality of the footage and range of features make this an attractive camera. We found the Compro IP70 slightly easier to configure and it’s probably the better choice for single use (it’s wired, but a Wi-Fi adaptor is available for around £15). That said, it use IR LEDs for night use, so if you need to capture footage in colour Xvision’s The Cube is well priced and a decent choice.