I was recently looking for an affordable wireless IP camera that had infrared and Pan/Tilt. There a quite a few of these to choose from if you are in the market for an IP camera. Foscam makes popular low budget IP cameras but I have yet to try one. The price range for a Foscam starts out at around $80. The bad news about Foscam is that there are fake Foscam cameras out there so you need to watch out.
I decided to search for an even lower budget IP camera and stumbled onto the Loftek CXS 2200 IP camera. It has the pan-tilt feature set and is even lower in price at $65 from amazon.com. This really is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to price on a pan-tilt IP camera. Let’s see how it performs.
I received it and tore into the box. The camera has it’s own padded compartment in the shipping box to further protect it. It comes with a mount so you can attach the camera to a wall or ceiling. I am not super impressed with the mount, but it should suffice if you need to mount the camera. Also included are screws for the mount, small instruction book, CAT 5E cable, ac adapter, and a CD which contains the setup program.
The setup program allows you to identify your camera on your network and assign it an IP address based on your network configuration. I read rumblings online about the camera coming with a set IP that would not work with their network. I had no problem whatsoever using the CD and assigning an IP to my camera.
Once I assigned an IP address to the camera it was super easy to log into it and configure. Below it shows the Internet Explorer log in page. Notice there is also an option for FireFox and Safari.
Once inside you are presented with this interface. Ignore the way the camera looks, it was taken through a screen.
The network settings page
The alarm page
The Advanced page
And finally the Maintain page
The night vision capabilities are good. The infrared lights only come on when a light sensor detects a certain level of darkness. The infrared lights throw light about 25 ft. The camera can also email you an alert picture. The email feature works fine but you will end up with a ton of alerts if the camera is in a high traffic area. I was easily able to upload alert images to my FTP server once I set it up.
I think the picture quality is pretty good and all around the camera is a good buy. The price of the camera at $65 is really what sets it apart. There are more features to this camera that I am probably overlooking. The best thing to do is to browse the Loftek website and learn more about it.