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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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.
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