My friend bought a IP camera with pan and tilt the other day and I agreed to help him set it up.. turned in to a real nightmare.

This camera connects via a network cable and allows you to log in from anywhere in the world via the internet and view the camera, allowing you to pan and tile and to zoom, great security device.  Trouble is that the instructions supplied are hopeless!

I wasted a whole afternoon, when I try to log in to the camera I just get the admin panel of the router, I decided it was because they both use port 80 so I changed it but it still doesn’t work.

In the end I found UK company on the ‘net selling the same camera, cheaper than it was in Thailand and the UK site has a set-up guide in clear English that explains it all, but it’s still more complicated than it should be!  It turns out that the gateway IP on the camera was wrong, I’m convinced that without the manual downloaded from the UK site I would never have got to the bottom of it.

Cheap Chinese electronics can be a bargain, but they never ever have a manual that makes sense, if you are buying a IP camera and you need to access it via the net then better to buy a brand name that offers support, I see the D-Link do a nice one.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.