Personal review on Vstarcam T6878WIP
Who: Limited experience user - 5 days
IT knowledge: medium (know enough to do port forwarding)
The good
1. order on Sunday evening and receive the product by Monday afternoon. Super quick response - very happy with that.
2. support quick reply. My very 1st email was answered in less than 10 minutes. The support team is committed to answer all questions , be it there's a solution or not
3. the free DNS comes in handy, as I believe dynDNS is no longer free. There are other simlar services, but dynDNS was the longest - so in a way more trustworthy.
4. camera perform as it should (record, pan, tilt, IR, trigger alarm, FTP, email alert)
5. Price is competitive. Very similar to Foscam though - but I decided to go against buying Foscam because there are so many problems reported in their forum.
The bad
1. Click sound when camera notice insufficient lighting. When IR is on and off, the sound is made. When I pan my camera across my room, the different brightness level triggers the IR on and off, hence the click sound is always heard. No use turning off the IR itself! The click is always there and support believes there's nothing can be done for this model.
Anyone using the same camera - are you having this ?
2. Motion Alert is trigger happy
Sensitivity is set from 1-10; with 1 being the most sensitive. It doesn't matter whether it's 1 or 10; the motion alert is triggered every 5-10 minutes. I thought that this is because the sun shine causes different coloration. BUT - even at midnight, this is still happening. From midnight to 6 am, there are 51 alerts. I set email notification and FTP. It's easy to get 250++ emails within 8 hours. The NAS where I FTP my pictures into, in the past 4+ days have 45000++ pictures.
Btw, there's no possibility to mark a rectangulare area for motion alert (at least not that I can find). Unlike the capability I see in Dlink 5222l
3. picture quality
I know this is 720p quality camera. I can view it, take picture with it - but quality is not that great. Don't get me wrong - i don't have bases to compare quality with other camera such as Dlink, Aztech or Foscam; so this is purely personal feeling.
4. delay between action and what's seen on camera
Compared to Foscam - based on youtube video by "awkwardHamster", there's bigger delay. You wave your arms and it take 0.5 second or more before you see the same movement. BUT -- honestly, the current speed is good enough for me. It captures fine.
5. Security is pretty bad
I use wifi - but my wifi password is clearly shown in the setting. If anyone manage to log into my camera; they can see it clearly displayed.
the webUI clearly stated the username and password in clear text. Again, very easy to capture on the network. Considering that i'm viewing the camera from outside home network, it's easy to sniff my admin/password to gain access to my camera setting and thereafter to my home wifi.
BTW - gain access to camera is enough for you to be able to control the camera and view my home.
6. Settings and configuration are messy
I don't know if I"m wrong. But certain settings can be found in the WebUI and some settings can be found in the "IP Camera Super client" (client running on PC).
Dr. Archer - seems you're the only one having multiple brand camera. What do you think of the Vstarcam that you recently bought?
I'm still working with Matrix support still on the alert trigger happy camera. They have logged it to the factory but factory says that this is normal behaviour.
It's useless to be notified 300 times a day when there're no actual movement. (note: I use my camera as security and place it to face the door hallway, so there's no movement, unless someone open the door).
) - so my knowledge is limited.
