Compro IP 70 Network Camera Review
by Ganesh T S on July 28, 2011 11:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Gadgets
- IP cameras
- camera
- camcorder
If you do not wish to setup the Seedonk service, and you are comfortable with port forwarding on your router, there is no need to use the softwares on the CD to setup your camera. The initial configuration has to be done with the camera connected to the router in a wired manner. DHCP is enabled by default and the IP camera promptly picks up one from the router. Visiting the IP address using a web browser from another machine on the network presented the login screen. With the default username / password (admin/admin), we were soon up and running.
A gallery of the setup options available on the web page is provided below. There were some mild annoyances such as the requirement of the VLC plugin to use Firefox for viewing / configuration. Also, there were frequent prompts of some functions not being supported in a non-IE browser, but the functions seemed to work OK even in Firefox.
The wealth of setup options provided make it clear that the IP70 also caters to users wanting more analytics and management features. Some of the advanced features provided by Compro that is not usually found in other entry level IP cameras are:
- Dual stream encoding (with user configurable stream properties)
- User configurable tradeoff between higher frame rates and better picture quality
- Configurable brightness / sharpness / saturation / white balance and other video parameters
- Multicast setup
- Analytics (motion detection / trigger and event setups / scheduling / IO response / audio detection etc.)
- Recording to NAS (SMB/NFS) / local storage in case of network failure
All in all, the Compro IP70 seems to have got the feature set right, making it an attractive option for home users as well as professional home automation system installers. There is also a comprehensive guide online [PDF] describing each and every feature of the Compro IP 70.
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dac7nco - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
That picture with the banana, altoids, calculators and dolls is the creepiest image I've ever seen in a tech review. Congratulations!Daimon
GridConnect - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
I am from Grid Connect and we are a re-seller of this product. You can find it on our website here:http://www.gridconnect.com/ip70fixedipcamera.html
I believe as the posting of this article we have the lowest price on this device available, its a very nice cameras as the review said and definitely worth checking out.
If this comment is read by the author we would appreciate it if you could update the post and put in the link to the product by our name.
ArtShapiro - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
Why would a technical review of a product promote one particular vendor of said product?GridConnect - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link
They have linked to vendors in previous reviews that tell you where to buy it. If they dont want to thats fine, I was just trying to save people a step from having to Google our name, find the product, etc.Hrel - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
Only use I see for these things is security surveillance. Image quality looks WAY above minimum needed for that. Set it up to only record when it detects movement to save space and back it up to hard drives for later review. Still, I've seen whole systems for 200 bucks that include a DVR and 8 cameras. 1 Camera for that price is insane.Maybe there's another niche use for networked cameras I haven't imagined? Probably, people do crazy stuff with camera's and tech.
GridConnect - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
Actually for these types of cameras with comparable features these are very affordable. Most cameras with all of these features would cost you 3-4x that. The types of systems you are speaking of dont have things like email notifications, movement detection, and monitoring via cell phone just to name a few things.sc3252 - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
Those $200 systems suck! As someone who has setup these cameras you do not want to go cheap, it just means they will fail or something else will go wrong. As they say, "time is money" you will find this out fast if you cheap out on security cameras, you will constantly be driving to and from the place of work to reset the camera or to make sure they are working, and good luck getting a usable picture in court...PS: $200 is cheap for a security camera, the cheapest you really want to spend is around $400, going up to $2000 per camera...
bobbozzo - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
There seems to be a word or two missing on page 5:"so this is something we are not entirely about with the Compro IP 70"
ganeshts - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link
Thanks! fixed :) It was something we were not entirely happy about with the Compro IP 70Nihility - Friday, July 29, 2011 - link
Is the feed encrypted?