Manufacturer Description
See there when you can’t be there. Monitor your home or office, live, in color, from a web browser or compatible cell phone with the Panasonic BL-C160A outdoor network camera. The splash-resistant body expands the scope of applications by letting you install the camera outside, like on house or store eaves. The included Power Transfer Unit supplies the camera the power through the LAN cable. It allows you to install the camera anywhere, like on the ceiling (more…)
This cam was to be a replacement for an old Toshiba web cam which was slowly dying. The specs looked *great* and I loved the PoE (power over Ethernet) feature with the included injector (normally $30-60 extra.)
Performance of this product was very disappointing unfortunately. The major issue I had with it was the lack of picture ‘tweaks’ – for example you cannot fine-tune and permanently set the white balance. White balance can only be adjusted on-the-fly while viewing a live image. Not believing how poor the white balance was, I tried different angles of the camera and moved it so it pointed North to eliminate any odd lighting situations. The results were always the same. Even indoors, our cream colored walls were a light green.
If your requirements are *only* viewing motion video, you can alter the white balance when you are viewing the cam and get a reasonably decent picture. If you will be uploading (or emailing) still images to a server (like I do) for viewing, the white balance will be horribly off. Naturally there is always the chance I had a defective camera, so perhaps other reviews will appear with a validation (or not) of my problems.
The other issue was the quality of the picture – I was disappointed with the resolution.
On a positive note, the cam’s administration interface was quite well done, very intuitive and easy to use. Toshiba should take a note of this well-designed interface.
After a few hours of trying to get the cam configured, I realized I was never going to get acceptable picture quality and packed it up and returned it to Amazon and ordered a Toshiba IK-WB15A. The Toshiba has a myriad of picture adjustments available and a better resolution (although not *nearly* as good as my old Toshiba IK-WB11A.)
This was the first time I ever had to return a product to Amazon, and I was pleasantly surprised how easy the process was; don’t be afraid to try this cam out if you are in the market for one, maybe you will have better luck than I did.