The entry hall in my house has been a test bed for home monitoring cameras for years. I like to be able to record people coming into the house and see what's going on around the front door. Anyone with a family and occasional babysitters will understand. So I continue to look for simple, robust video-monitoring solutions, and vendors keep obliging by improving the state of the art in home remote cameras.
The latest: Two interesting and very different products, Avaak's Vue and the Astak Mole. Both are very easy to get up and running, and neither require monkeying with arcane router settings to get offsite access to the video streams--something that can be a problem with the Panasonic BL-C131a cameras that I otherwise favor. (I've also tried the Logitech WiLife system, and find it quite good.)
The Vue.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The Vue
The Vue is the most unusual remote camera I've seen. The product is unchanged from my March 2 preview, but I had a chance to experiment with the shipping version recently. The big benefit of the Vue: The cameras are tiny, battery-powered and thus completely wireless, and the system is extremely easy to set up. You plug an included controller box into your router or switch and tuck it out of the way, and then you can place the cameras anywhere in your house on their clever little stick-on magnetic dome mounts. The standard kit comes with two cameras.
The Vue is great for monitoring a location but there's a big downside: The cameras don't have motion sensors. If they did, the batteries wouldn't last. So you can see what's happening when you want, or record images on a schedule, but this product doesn't work as a security camera. It is very easy to share the output from a camera with friends, though. A two-camera kit is available now for $299.
The Vue experience is simple all the way around.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The aptly-named Mole.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)
The Mole
I also recently received the Mole, from Astak. This is a single camera for $299, but unlike the Vue cameras, this unit must be plugged in for power (it has Wi-Fi as well as Ethernet for connectivity). It can be panned and tilted by remote control over the Web, so one camera can see more than two Vues in some setups.
The Mole also has infrared illuminators for low-light capability, and a microphone, so you can see and hear what's happening at all hours. Since the camera is always on and can see in all conditions, it can also watch for motion and perform actions--alerting you and recording video and stills either to the Web or to its own memory card--when it detects movement. It even has a speaker so you can talk back through the camera. It is black and industrial-looking, however, befitting its name --not so great for installation in a nice white-painted hallway.
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Mitsubishi's new DLP sets include a 60-incher for $1499.
(Credit: Mitsubishi)Rear-projection HDTVs have been waning in popularity with the waxing of flat-panel plasmas and LCDs, but Mitsubishi's new lineup of DLP models proves that the technology will be available in stores for at least another year.
In 2008, Samsung and Mitsubishi were the only two companies selling rear-projection behemoths and, due to lack of demand, we only reviewed one model from each company: the Samsung HL61A750 and the Mitsubishi WD-65735.
The LED-powered Samsung was clearly better, but that company has not announced any new DLP models for 2009, although it will continue to sell its 2008 models. I asked Samsung's reps last week about the company's DLP plans but they refused to provide any information, and I have a hunch they won't announce any new models this year, or ever.
That leaves the market for gigantic-screen HDTVs wide open for Mitsubishi. DLP-based models are generally less expensive and more efficient than LCDs or plasmas of a similar screen size, and despite sagging sales, rear-projection may still have legs, especially in a down economy. Mitsubishi's betting it does, and the price is right. It's least expensive 2009 model, the 60-inch WD-60737, lists at $1,500--the same as the 61-inch Samsung commands at Best Buy today and a lot less than any plasma or LCD in that size range.
Mitsubishi announced two new series of big screens, starting at 60 inches and going up to a new size peak: a colossal 82 inches.... Read more
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The Vue is a unique, battery-powered Web cam.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)Avaak is launching its very attractive Vue Web cam system at the Demo 09 conference Monday. It's designed for home monitoring, like cameras from Panasonic, Logitech, and DLink. The kicker: The Vue cameras are tiny, light, and battery-powered. You don't have to screw them into a wall or run power cables to them. That changes a lot.
The mount for a Vue camera is a small metallic dome that you can screw or tape onto a surface. The cameras themselves have a curved base with a magnet inside so you can just stick them to the domes. You get two domes with each camera, which is supposed to encourage you to move the cams around as your monitoring needs change.
The internal battery (a standard lithium CR123 cell) in each camera is said to provide enough power for 1 million images, or about 10 minutes of video a day for a year.
The system includes a base station that you plug into your home router. The radio system the cameras use is a proprietary mesh protocol. It has a 300-foot range indoors, but the mesh technology lets you string together a network of cameras with a 900-foot radius around the hub. That's enough for most homes.
The cameras are tiny
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET Networks)The control and viewing system is Web-based. In the preview demo I saw, it looked easy to set up a system, view live and recorded videos, and share a cam with others. You can also upload to YouTube.
Sounds great, but there's a snag: there's no motion sensor on the system. That makes it useless as a security solution. Sure, you can use it to see what's happening at your house right now, and you can also set the system to snap an image at regular intervals, but there's no way that Vue can alert you when someone moves into a camera's field of view.
The cameras also don't pick up sound.
Avaak CEO Gioia Messinger told me that future versions of the system will have improvements, quite possibly including sound and motion sensors. Until then, the use cases for this system tend toward novelty, not utility.
The base Vue system will be sold directly and via Amazon, for $299 with two cameras (and four mounts). A service fee of $19.95 a year (reasonable) will be charged after the first year.
Mitsubishi's LaserVue TV.
(Credit: Mitsubishi)Just a couple days after we noted the first comparison involving Mitsubishi's LaserVue HDTV, the HD Guru has posted the first in-depth review of the set.
The Guru, a.k.a. Gary Merson, put the $7000 65-inch television though its paces at Mitsubishi's California headquarters, and definitely liked what he saw. Lauding nearly every aspect of its performance, he especially highlighted its brightness capabilities and wide color gamut in "Brilliant" mode. Overall, he placed this rear-projection set in the same league with the best flat panels on the market.
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Man, it sure would be nice if we could do this comparison here at CNET.
Mitsubishi's LaserVue TV (not actual size).
(Credit: Mitsubishi)The first third-party side-by-side comparison we've seen between Mitsubishi's LaserVue rear-projection TV and Pioneer's Elite Kuro plasma appeared at TheTechlounge Friday, and according to its authors, the LaserVue more than held its own against what's widely regarded as the best TV on the market.
Author Cameron Baker and editor Kurtis Kronk sat down before a 60-inch Kuro and a 65-inch LaserVue at a San Antonio, Texas, HDTV retailer and watched a pair of Blu-ray movies: Ice Age: The Meltdown and Iron Man, along with Pioneer's Kuro test disc. They were unable to get their hands on a distribution amplifier for true side-by-side comparisons, apparently, so they based their observations on watching "the scenes back-to-back on each display a few times, juggling HDMI connections," and on still photos.
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CNET Networks)
General Motors has begun development of the world's first plug-in hybrid production vehicle, which will be offered as a version of the 2008 Saturn Vue hybrid. The announcement was made at the kickoff of the 2007 Los Angeles Show this morning at the Los Angeles Convention Center by GM's CEO Rick Wagoner. The front-wheel-drive 2008 Saturn Vue hybrid will incorporate GM's two-mode hybrid system, which will make its first appearance in the Chevrolet Tahoe hybrid, due to come to market next year. Wagoner said that no definite timeline had been decided for the Vue hybrid plug-in, but he suggested that the car would make use of a lithium-ion battery pack. He added that the 2-mode hybrid 2008 Saturn Vue would deliver a 45-percent increase in fuel economy over the gasoline-only Saturn Vue. We expect to get more details at the GM press conference later this morning.
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