- Easily view and manage your camera from mydlink.com
- Compact design with night vision that lets you view 24/7
- Wireless connectivity
- Works with the mydlink iPhone or Android app for on-the go viewing
- Ready to use in 3 simple steps
4/5/2011: I contacted Dlink support. They said they know about the audio problem and they don't plan to fix it. Ughh! I'm going to return this one and see if a new one sounds better. I'll post more once I get the new one.
4/14/2011: I received my new DCS-932L from Amazon today. The audio is just as bad with this camera. What a shame. I even upgraded my java version to 1.6.0_24-b07. Ughh. Time to send it back or pray for a firmware fix.
8/31/2011: We've started to use this camera all the time since our baby is older and Iphone support has been added. The audio is good enough where we can hear him. I just wish Dlink would get rid of the static.
3/5/2012: This camera has become our primary baby monitor for our 14th month old. The iphone apps work very well. Our Philips Iphone dock works great with the Dlink Iphone app. It amplifies the audio and cleans up the audio a bit. I'm adding 1 more star back. I still wish the the audio didn't have so much static, but this camera has turned out to be a great baby monitor.
Buy D-Link DCS-932L mydlink-Enabled Wireless-N Day/Night Network Camera Now
I was looking for a low cost wireless camera with better image quality than the Linksys WVC80N cameras that I have been using for a while. Side-by-Side, this is how the cameras compared.Bottom Line: Unless you need Night Vision or need the mobil phone apps, the Linksys WVC80N performs better at a lower price. Linksys has better image quality than D-Link at any distance, handles outdoor scenes when the D-Link won't and will deliver video clips (not just snapshots) by email or ftp. The Linksys does not have phone-apps, but it can email a 5 second motion triggered video clip that can be viewed on your android phone.
Best Useage: The D-Link would be great as a baby cam or pet cam. The cute design, better audio and the night vision outperform the Linksys for these uses.
The Linksys WVC80N would be better for any other use where the video quality under all lighting conditions (except dark) is the highest priority.
Compare Image Quality @ 640x480
1. Color Quality D-Link is a little better than Linksys, unless it is an outdoor view. The D-Link exposure control cannot manage any sunlit surfaces. Even grass and trees are completely washed out to white if they are in direct sun. There are no settings to fix this. In moderate light, the D-Link color is better than Linksys because the Linksys has a color hue gradient of red in the center to green at the perimeter. This color balance problem is distracting when viewing a white scene like snow or other very light backgrounds.
2. Image Clarity With the two cameras side-by-side with the same scene of near-and-distant objects, the D-Link by comparison looks optically out-of-focus, though neither camera is great in this respect. If you want to recognize a face at a distance Linksys is better. The D-Link video clarity is fine for a baby's bedroom, because a near-field view does not demand the same sharp focus as a distant view.
3. Sound Quality The D-Link has good audio performance on an wireless "N" lan when accesses directly within your home using the camera's local IP address. Very little "noise", no skipping or break-up and good microphone pickup. I didn't check it out across the internet or with the "MyDlink" connection, but I am guessing audio would not perform so well there . . as other reviewers have noted.
The Linksys has more audio artifacts and is more vulnerable to the audio breaking up when the video settings are too demanding even on the local network. Across the internet with high speed cable service at both ends, the Video has to be set at "Low Quality" and 2 or 1 frames per second for the audio to work without breaking up.
Some Feature Comparisons
1. The one obvious advantage with the D-Link is the night vision. It works pretty well up to 20 feet but the pictures are very soft-focus. For your night-time application you may want to consider that the 4 red LEDS are very bright and draw your eye to the camera.
2. The D-Link camera cannot stream video to a PC without using the full web management interface or using the MyDLink web service. With the Lynksys you can play the video stream directly on an iPad or on a PC using Google's Chrome browser without the surroundings of a web interface. Internet Explorer will only show 1 frame of a video stream if you bypass the full management interface explaining why Google Chrome is mentioned. With the Linksys camera, Right-Click on the video in the normal interface to get the URL for the direct video stream to used on your iPad or Chrome.
The D-Link can display a single .jpeg snapshot without the managment interface. This feature can be enabled in the camera's web interface and it tells the address format to use. This is for direct access, not using MyDink.
2. The D-Link cannot upload a video clip to an ftp server when it sees motion. It will only upload a single .jpeg snapshot. This will often give you a useless premature snapshot of a shadow but not the person, or a door opening but not the person. With the Linksys .mjpeg video clip, no video compression is used so each frame is a good .jpeg snapshot. You can select the best frame from the 5 second video that would give you the best view of the motion event that triggered the clip.
3. The D-Link will only email 6 frames when it sees motion. You can choose 1 or 2 frames per second. It will include the 3 frames it had buffered before it saw motion which is a good feature. This makes the email feature much more usefull than the D-Link ftp upload of a single .jpeg snapshot.
For motion detection features, you may prefer the Linksys which will email, ftp (or both) a 5 second video clip at a normal video frame rate.
I had no reason to examine the motion detect performance on the D-Link camera, but the motion detection on this Linksys camera works much better that on the prior similar models. With careful detection-area and sensitivity tuning, motion detection works great. Motion Detection responds to shadows which makes outdoor use tricky but manageable. Shadows on the ground caused by wind blowing the trees will trigger the camera so your detction areas need to be carefully targeted at areas of interest.
Setup / Wireless Compatibility
Working in a related tech business, I believe the negative reviews on either of these products regarding wireless compatibility or networking issues are the result of bad programming on the manufacturer's setup CD or the buyer's lack of network troubleshooting experience. If you have a friend who is very tech-savy to help you get past wireless and networking complications, either of these products will work reliably on virtually any wireless network. Sometimes the installation CD's will simplify networking issues and sometime they won't.
Reading the complaints on Amazon about the D-Link setup, I had the same problems but they were caused by poor programming on Setup CD; not the camera. If you get failure messages going through the Wizard on the CD, just use the web interface on the camera and save yourself a lot of grief. The web interface on the camera is excellent.
Another reason to skip the DLink CD . . . it forces you to to create a MyDlink account with DLink even though you may have no need for the service because you prefer to port-forward to this camera.
I returned this camera because it was a video quality downgrade from the Linksys cameras already in service.
Read Best Reviews of D-Link DCS-932L mydlink-Enabled Wireless-N Day/Night Network Camera Here
I had heard about the DCS-932L when it made its debut early in January and had been anxiously awaiting for it to go on sale. This is a great camera that is easy to set up. The picture quality is great, way better than I expected and the night vision on it is fantastic as well. I am primarily using it was a baby monitor and have another one in my sons play room. Its a great added bonus that you can view the cameras using Apple and Android products as I have an ipad and an Android phone. Though you can't hear sound on the apps you can still view your cameras from any website and can see both the video and hear the sound. My wife liked the added feature that the camera flashes when someone has plugged in and is watching. Great product and even better with such a low price!Want D-Link DCS-932L mydlink-Enabled Wireless-N Day/Night Network Camera Discount?
This is a decent camera that will work well if you want a simple plug-and-play webcam for monitoring purposes. Setup is a challenge, though, if you decide to configure and run the camera manually, rather than using D-Link's software and portal. (If you want to manage the video without using D-Link's portal, I've included instructions at the end of this review.)Positives:
+ Good looking, fairly unobtrusive camera with a nicely designed ball-and-socket mount that can be set on a table or mounted permanently on a wall.
+ Video quality is fine for room monitoring at the default configuration (320x240 pixels) and quality can be improved four-fold by resetting the video to VGA (640x480 pixels). This isn't the same quality as an HD cam, so I wouldn't use this camera for Skyping, but it's fine for a room monitor.
+ The DLink web service makes it simple to view the video feed from an internet connection when you're away from home, if you choose to use their portal.
+ If your router supports WPS Setup, setting up the wireless connection is as easy as pressing a couple of buttons.
Negatives:
If you don't want to use DLink's web portal for remote monitoring, setting up the camera manually requires a fair amount of technical knowledge. I didn't like the idea of having DLink manage my video feed, so I went for the manual setup approach. Unfortunately, there is no documentation for doing this, so you need to be comfortable configuring network devices. Basically, DLink assumes you'll use their service if you want remote access.
If you don't need remote access (e.g., if you're using this as a baby monitor), things are a bit easier, but not trivial. You'll need to manually hunt for the camera's IP address on your subnet, login, and manually configure the camera. Once I figured out the IP and login name and password (which aren't in the setup guide), configuring the device for use at home was pretty straightforward.
If your router doesn't support WPS, getting the wireless connection established is a challenge. You have to connect the camera to the router with a Cat5 patch cable, search manually for the IP, login (again, the manual doesn't give default login credentials), and manually set up the wireless connection.
In a nutshell, this is a decent camera, and if you want to use DLink's software for configuring the camera and their portal for monitoring the video feed, it's a good, simple choice. But DLink assumes you'll use their approach, and if you want to set up and use the device without using their software (which I didn't want to install on my laptop because it's a work computer) or portal (which I didn't want to use because I didn't like the idea of DLink managing my webcam feed) then you need to have technical knowledge and be willing to spend some time, without the benefit of instructions.
UPDATE: I finally managed to configure this camera manually and have it set up for monitoring from outside my network without using DLink's portal. If you decide you want to do the same, here's how:
Connect the camera to your network with a Cat5 patch cable. Using a browser on any PC on the network, search for the camera (you can use a utility to find connected devices, or just start entering IP addresses on your subnet until you get a hit).
Once you get a response from the camera, go to the setup tab then to wireless setup and enter the SSID and pre-shared key for your router so that you won't have to keep the camera connected with the Cat5 cable.
Then go to the network setup and enter a static IP address, enter your router's IP (the one on your subnet, not the external IP) into the default gateway field, and enter a port number other than 80 into the HTTP port field (80 is the default but many ISPs block port 80).
Next, log in to your router and set up port forwarding to forward activity on the port you set in the last step to the static IP address you entered in the last step.
To access the camera from outside your network, fire up a browser and enter your router's external IP address followed by a colon and the port number. If you have a dynamic IP address from your ISP, you can use a service like DynDNS.org to get a common name keeps up with your ever-changing IP address. You can also download a free/cheap livecam app on your iPad or iPhone that lets you monitor the video feed remotely.
Important: You'll only need these instructions if you want to configure your DLink cam manually and want to monitor it directly without using DLink's portal. The easier approach (by far) is to use the CD that comes with the camera, load and run DLink's setup software to configure the camera, and use their portal for monitoring. But I didn't want to use their software or portal (I try not to load lots of potentially buggy software onto my computer, and I don't trust D-Link's security enough to have them managing my webcam feed), so I took the time to figure out the manual approach. I hope these instructions are useful to anyone else who wants to do the same.
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I just got this camera today and so far, I love it. A little bit of background, I have an iPhone and a MAC OSX. So, to begin with, I required a camera that worked with both. After an article I read, I quickly came across this camera. It seemed like it would work with the iPhone and OSX, D-Link has an app for the camera. However, I had already purchased iCam for the iPhone and was really hoping I could get it to work with that. So here is what I did:1) I plugged the camera with the ethernet cable into my Apple Time Machine.
2) I then plugged the camera into the power outlet.
3) I went into my Network configurations on OSX and found the IP address of the camera.It came up after about 1 minute.
4) Once I had the IP address, I entered it into Safari. Default login info is admin (lower case) with NO password. At this point, it is important to note that I did NOT run the included CD to get the IP address, nor did I install that CD, nor did I install the OSX application I had to download, nor did I sign up with the D-Link website. I had read somewhere that someone was getting a call from their internet service provider for having had too much network traffic going out of their house, so I didn't want that. But more importantly I did not want to sign up with D-Link and have my videos posted via their website, meaning I never created an account with D-Link. So basically, I have a stream that is only visible on my network, not outside (the iCam application on my computer however let's me stream to my iPhone over 3G).
5) I changed the default password, I think you cannot have any special characters in it as I had to reset the camera when I did that.
6) Then I entered my hidden wireless network and my WPA2 Personal password, restarted the camera.
7) I could already see my video on Safari.
8) Then I added this camera along with its password into the iCam application that resides on my Mac. I used the iCam support page to get the default URL for the streaming video and the first 2 worked. This URL I entered into the iCam software on the Mac.
9) Boom, I was done, iCam on iPhone streamed video to my iPhone.
This of course means that I have to have my computer turned on the whole time, which negates another positive of the camera, in that, if you follow their instructions, you do not need to have your computer turned on but you need to sign up with them. But for now, I am happy with my setup.
iCam also lets you pick motion alerts, etc.
So far, I am happy with the camera, seems to work well. Will post any negatives if I find any.
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