Labs

The RoboCam 8 is the only camera in the group that can be panned around the room. It has two separate motors that can move the lens horizontally and vertically.

The installation wizard took two searches to find the camera on our wired network. The RoboCam supports WPA wireless encryption, but we couldn't get it to connect to our WPA-protected wireless

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network.

Unlike the other IP cameras here, the RoboCam doesn't have a built-in motion-detection system. To detect movement, you'll have to use the PC software and leave a computer running whenever you want to monitor the room. When viewing the camera via the web, you can use either an ActiveX plugin, which we got to work only using Internet Explorer, or Java, which is useful for FireFox users. You can also view video via a compatible 3G mobile phone. The camera has no microphone so, unlike the D-Link and Vivotek products, you can't listen in on what's happening near the camera.

The image quality from this camera isn't as good as that from the D-Link, with more noise and less detail. It couldn't produce a clear picture in low light and, like the other IP cameras, it's useless in the dark.

Unless you need to monitor a very wide area, the D-Link camera's superior performance in low light is probably more useful.