Panasonic BL-C131 Ip Camera

A simple to use but fantastically geeky gadget

Internet Protocol cameras used to set you back almost as much as a small PC, but recently their prices have dropped to within the realms of affordability for your average punter.

I chose the more expensive wireless version of the camera as I thought that it may be useful in a wider range of situations. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it supports all the standard and more powerful methods of wireless security rather than just WEP. I have used WP2-PSK on a 128bit encryption.

In addition to the camera itself, the box includes a power lead, some wall fixings, a security wire, instruction manuals and a CD.  The BL-C131 looks quite appealing and feels well-made, a point that many manufacturers often seem to neglect.

The camera is quite easy to set up and install if you bear a couple of points in mind.  It will happily record motion/sensor detection events to its memory, though this memory is not very large and will work for about 10 seconds of video and audio combined. The email alerts will not work with gmail or a bunch of other web-based email providers’ SMTP servers as they see them as spam.  You could do with using your own SMTP server (maybe from ISP) or one provided with a cheap hosting package.

You may need to test and customise your detection settings if you don’t want to get too many false positives though I found the default settings to be perfectly adequate.  FTP transfer only works with stills and not video; it will happily send up to 30 images per second to your FTP site or via email, but you cannot do this with a movie.  This last point cost me hours in trying to figure out how to record to FTP, as I wanted to record movies, not hundreds of stills.  It would have been useful if there was a pointer somewhere in the instructions.  Bearing that last point in mind, setup is very simple and should take less than half an hour.

The camera will set itself up nicely as a web-server on port 80 by default on your LAN.  If this conflicts it is possible to change all the ports and settings from the interface. Most routers now have an option built-in to use a free Dynamic DNS site in order to ensure that you can always reach your camera.  I found that this option worked like a dream.

The audio is very clear and very accurate.  From a room on the first floor I could hear what was going on around the entire house as well as down the street through an open window.  The sensitivity is adjustable if you want to cut out more noise.

When most people think of CCTV they imagine a grainy picture that occasionally drops out, but while the image you get from this camera may not be HD, it is great.  Both panning and tilting are also excellent but the digital zoom leaves an awful lot to be desired.  It would make sense to replace it with an optical zoom, even if this pushed up the price of the camera.

There are some other improvements that could be made to the BL-C131, including the way in which it handles multiple users and the number of configurable options available.  The interface could be improved and the fact that the audio only works through an activeX plug-in is a little unconventional.  It would also be useful if the camera had the ability to work on batteries for a period of time instead of just the mains supply.

There are a few other cameras about for similar prices with similar features, so would I buy it again? Yes, definitely;  I have developed a craving to install them all over the house.