Product Reviews

Monitoring your home with a network camera is a good way to increase security or, in the event of a break-in, provide valuable evidence to the police. LevelOne's motorised pan-and-tilt WCS-2060 is one of the most flexible cameras you can get. This webcam has both wired and wireless network connections, so placement is never an issue. What's more, because it runs its own web server, it doesn't need a PC to be turned on, and you can access live video from any internet-connected PC. This also makes it incredibly easy to configure.

First, you need to connect the WCS-2060 to your wired network and run the setup utility on the bundled CD. This scans your network for cameras and lets you change settings, including IP address and wireless network settings. Wireless networks have to be configured manually with the ESSID and encryption settings, so you'll need to have these to hand. It's a shame that there's no scanning utility to look for available networks.

Regardless of whether you use this camera on a wired or wireless network, its video feed is managed and viewed through the web interface. It's clean and simple to use, and

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you can password-protect access. The WCS-2060 defaults to a video resolution of 640x480. Quality was very high, and we were able to pick out detail easily.

If you plan to view video over the internet, you'll probably find that this video setting is too high to stream properly and you'll need to adjust it. As well as changing the resolution, you can either choose the video bandwidth from between 20Kbit/s and 4Mbit/s, or select one of the arbitrarily named fixed video quality settings (good, standard or excellent). We found that a resolution of 320x240 and a video bandwidth of 64Kbit/s proved a good trade-off between speed and quality.

One of this camera's strengths is its motorised pan and tilt. You can either control these manually and move the camera to view what you want, or you can set predefined points to which you can jump directly. These points can be put in a list and used to set the camera's patrol route, so that it scans an area constantly.

Motion detection is easy to implement, and the camera can be set to send still photographs to an FTP server when triggered. This is useful if you want to catch a criminal at work. If you like, an email can be sent so that you know that your home has been invaded straightaway.

The camera can't capture video in this mode and you'll need to install the IP CamSecure software, which can monitor up to 64 cameras. Unfortunately, this dated-looking application is tricky to use and not very reliable at capturing video.

LevelOne's WCS-2060 isn't perfect, and an optical zoom would have been nice, but it's good value and gets all the basics right. If capturing video easily is important to you, though, the CamSecure application will disappoint.