Do you guys have any recommendation for an IP Cam for home videosurveillance? Ideally, I'd like to find a PoE one.

Thanks!

The axis ones are great, but not cheap...

Previous thread on this topic. Some of the specific recommendations are probably out of date, but there's still some useful info there.

I am also in the market for an IP cam (probably a few), as recently we had a neighbor stop by and tell us our dog bit their son. We weren't home at the time, so they left a note and a callback number, then they never returned my phone calls. It would have been nice to have a video record of what happened in case it turned out to be a real situation (we have an invisible fence, and our dog *never* runs through it, so the kid was almost certainly on our property, and very likely taunting / intimidating the dog, which my wife has seen kids doing previously.)

I found this database of cameras to be useful. The info is probably only 80% accurate and only 80% complete for current camera models, but it's a good start, and you can filter by megapixels, wifi, outdoor/indoor use, low light performance, etc. It's maintained by the developer of SecuritySpy, which looks like a good piece of software for managing multiple cameras and viewing the recordings on a Mac.

Right now, I'm leaning toward the Toshiba IK-WB16A, or possibly the wireless version, the IK-WB16A-W. It's not cheap ($400 USDish) but it has great resolution, and with pan/tilt/zoom, my hope is that I can set it up to patrol my whole front and side yard from a single camera position. It doesn't do infrared, but from what I've seen, you don't get usable IR visibility without a separate IR light source and a very expensive IR-capable camera. (Happy to be proven wrong on that if anyone has experience in this area.)

I had excluded Axis for this same reason. Having used Axis at work, I thought they only made professional level cameras; for personal usage, I was definitely not planning to spend that much.
Instead, AXIS M1054, for example, costs 300 Euros circa, and is "HD" (actually 1280x800) and PoE. Great!

Thank you Andym for pointing it out. That's exactly what I was looking for!

Also, the DB is really useful!

Thanks Guys!

I ended up ordering a Foscam FI8918W for the low-low price of $86. It's not nearly as high quality a camera as the others I've considered, but the reviews are mostly positive, and it seems like a decent starter model.

My plan now is to place it in a window that has a decent view of my front lawn until I see a good deal on one of the more expensive outdoor cameras, at which point I'll re-purpose this one to cover the back of my house. The eight meters of infrared coverage won't be very useful, but I can always add additional IR lighting later if need be.

I'll stop back here to post some thoughts on it once I have it set up.

I have the older FI8908W version of that netcam here, and it works spectacularly well.

Except I only get black/white IR images in daylight now -- it used to give full colour, but perhaps I broke something on it. It still does full-colour indoors, though.. weird.

I did swap lenses on it once; maybe the old lens had an IR filter, and the new lens lacks one. That would explain things.

Cheers

That's good to hear. It was a bit of a leap of faith on my part, as there is some chatter that many of the Foscams sold online are counterfeit, and buying from a third-party Amazon seller always gives me a bit of a bad feeling. On the other hand, I didn't see anything else in that price range with wifi, pan/tilt and decent low-light performance (0.5 lux). That sort of versatility means that even if it doesn't become the centerpiece of my home security setup, it's worth having around.

I got my outdoor Foscam FI8904W from here:
http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/wonderpcinc

It seems genuine although it does keep trying to make http connections to the outside world. I block it at the firewall.

Yeah, I was thinking about that one for outdoor use if I like the FI8918W. How has yours held up for outdoor use? The manual mentions 0-55 °C and 20-85% humidity ranges, and it regularly gets colder than that.

Given the limitations : I'm in the UK; it's placed in a sheltered position; we've had it ~ 6 months --- then it's doing fine

We have had a fairly severe (for the UK) winter and lots of strong rain if that helps

Our indoor FI8908W is actually used outside all of the time, here in Canada. It's under a sheltered overhang, but that's all it has for "protection".

Seems to cope well enough.

We do use wired ethernet to it, rather than WiFi, due to the poor RF path between it and the wireless router. And using wires removes the need to waste resources -- the wireless is normally switched off here.

cheers

I got my Foscam FI8918 setup last night, and the early results are mostly positive. Since it's in my window, I have to disable the IR LEDs to avoid glare, but the low-light performance is good enough that I don't miss infrared at all. The pan/tilt is nearly silent, and the picture quality is good enough for what I'm doing. The web interface is a bit clunky, but using SecuritySpy mostly keeps me from having to worry about it.

The one major problem I have is the apparent lack of any sort of auto-brightness function, which means that if I set the shutter/brightness options for night performance, when morning comes, the picture is totally washed out unless I manually turn the brightness down and change the shutter setting to "outdoor." I can send HTTP commands from a script to automate this somewhat based on time of day, but I'm not sure how well that will work on cloudy days, and it's annoying that I have to bother with it at all. If I can't get something that works for 24-hour usage, I might end up sending this one back and trying to find a model that copes better with changing light conditions.

Mmmm.. I wonder how easy it might be to cobble up a script that gets the average light level from an image, and then adjusts the exposure accordingly?

That's what you're asking of the in-camera microcontroller, so a PC ought to be able to manage it too. There must be something in netpbm that does this already ?

Cheers

Maybe you could use something (from netpbm, maybe?) to analyze the luminosity of a single frame and use something of a feedback loop to fix it when it's out of whack.

The older camera here has (probably the same) brightness/contrast sliders, but it still performs auto exposure adjustments. So from dark morning to bright afternoon it does adjust things by itself.

The brightness/contrast sliders appear to be +/- overrides, adjusting the auto-exposure results up/down. Just like +/- on a still camera.

Cheers

I'd be surprised (and disappointed) if the older model had auto exposure adjustment and the newer one doesn't. Mine has a "mode" option with "50 Hz", "60 Hz", and "Outdoor" settings. The first two work best in lower light situations. I could try to leave it on the "Outdoor" setting and just use the brightness control to see if I can get an acceptable nighttime image, then see how it copes with sunrise. There's also a contrast setting I can mess around with -- I think it was automatically set on the highest level, so maybe that's part of the problem.

But, yeah, I think I can probably get something going in the way of a script to work around this, but I was hoping to avoid it.

I've got the beginnings of a Python auto-exposure control script working. Unfortunately, just changing the brightness isn't enough to get a good picture out of all conditions, so I've got it changing the brightness, contrast, and exposure mode settings now. It starts by raising/lowering the brightness, then when it hits the maximum it tries changing the contrast, and if those fail to raise/lower the image levels enough, it changes the exposure mode. I don't know that I've hit the sweet spot yet for all conditions, but it's definitely better than leaving it on a setting and having a totally white/black image.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for a built-in auto exposure setting on my next IP cam.

excellent! What are you using to give an indication of the current exposure level?

The Python Imaging Library has an ImageStat module that gives you, among other things, mean RGB intensity values. I just averag those to get a crude overall brightness number.

It seems to do well enough, but I think I'm going to have to add in some notion of time of day and sunrise/sunset calculations to sanity check things -- right now, it does fine when things get dark, but when the sun rises and it gets brighter throughout the day, it's not changing from the nighttime to daytime shutter setting properly. I think I need to tell it that, no matter how bright/dark the image is, the outdoor setting needs to be used during the day. Otherwise, it tries to dial down the brightness using the night-time shutter setting and the image is completely washed out, but the brightness level is within a normal range. The necessity to screw around with three separate settings to get a usable image out of it is rather disappointing.

You've never run into this?

Not too much. For sure, I could tweak it for better quality night vs day, but I never bothered to.

Cheers

It seems like the most recent FI1918W firmware update has added some sort of automatic brightness correction. The new firmware seems to only be available on Foscam's Malaysian site due to their primary site being down for at least a month, but it was worth hunting for. This was really my only gripe with the camera, so I think I may end up grabbing another one if I see a good deal.