Product Description

The DCS-900 Internet Camera is the latest video surveillance product utilizing the reliability and scalability of Fast Ethernet in an inexpensive remote monitoring solution. The DCS-900 features a built-in web server which bypasses the need for a PC to stream images directly to the Internet.   By entering an IP address into any web browser, the easy-to-use web-based interface allows users remote access to their DCS-900 from anywhere at any time. Additional features include the ability to monitor up to four cameras at a time and to archive streaming video directly to your personal computer's hard drive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30803 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: D-Link
• Model: DCS-900
• Dimensions: 3.00" h x 7.00" w x 4.00" l, 4.00 pounds

Features

• Compact design with Integrated Web Server
• View up to 4 cameras on one screen
• Web-based Remote Access Using any Java Enabled Browser
• Archive and record streaming video to hard drive
• Bundled software for Multi-Camera Monitoring and Management

From the Manufacturer
Introducing the DCS-900, the latest addition to D-Link's Internet Camera family of products. The DCS-900 Internet Camera combines the functionality of video surveillance with the reliability and scalability of Fast Ethernet. With its compact, all-in one design, the DCS-900 is a low cost remote monitoring solution and ideal for home use.

The DCS-900 connects quickly and easily to your existing Fast Ethernet network and a setup wizard guides you through the set up process to get you up and running in a matter of minutes.

The DCS-900 features a built-in web server which means that you don't need to have a computer to stream video images directly to the Internet. Video images captured by the DCS-900 can be viewed remotely by typing an IP address into a Web browser. With its easy-to-use Webbased interface, the DCS-900 can be managed and configured from anywhere in the world.

The included Windows-based software provides even more features, allowing you to archive streaming video straight to your hard drive and monitor up to 4 cameras on a single screen, and update the firmware on your DCS-900.

Customer Reviews

Easy Setup But A Little Bit of Effort for Web Access
I bought this camera as a means to check my house while I am gone on vacation. I never heard of internet cameras before until recently while looking at PC catalogs. I ended up buying the DCS-900 because of the price and the good reviews I read here in Amazon.com. Let me tell what my experience has been so far.

Getting the camera setup on your local LAN is fairly straightforward. As long as you know the IP address of your router and how to do simple network configuration for the camera, you should be up and running in 10 minutes.

On the otherhand, configuring the camera for access from the web took me 2 days of searching for info on the Internet, emails to D-Link technical support, firmware upgrade for my router and constant rereading of the manuals and the D-Link Knowledge Base. Listen carefully because here's what they don't tell you about the product beforehand if you want access your camera from the web.

1) Camera's default port is 80. If you have Cable or DSL broadband, most ISPs do not allow access to port 80 to discourage their customers from setting up webservers on their network. You have to set the camera to some other port like 800 or so.

2) You must be comfortable with setting up your router and understand how port forwarding and virtual server table works. If you have a firewall, then you must make more configuration changes. Make sure you access to your broadband router and you feel comfortable making these changes. D-Link documentation only reference their own routers as examples.

3) If your broadband connection has Dynamic IP addressing which most cable and DSL subscribers do, you have to set up a Dynamic DNS account with services like DynDNS.org or TZO.com. There, you create a DNS address (i.e. - www.myname.com) that will map to the dynamic address of your broadband connection. The software on camera will perform updates to the Dynamic DNS for you if your IP address changes.

4) You will also need a static web service account for the ActiveX Xplug Control software to be located when accessing the camera. Essentially this is a place where you can host webpages onto for access from the Internet. My geocities.com account prevents me from uploading the xplug.ocx file onto the server w/o an upgrade to a premium account at this time.

5) Make sure your router has the latest firmware to support virtual servers. This was the last step that prevented me from making the camera visible on the net.

Soooo....after all these steps, I was very successful in getting my camera up and running just the way I want it. I think this is a great product and I highly recommend it. You do have to have a little bit of network experience to comfortably configure everything.

I can not give it the full five stars because I think the documentation was fairly lacking when it comes to describing what you need to do to set the camera up for Internet access. As a matter of fact, even the description for the camera setup itself was somewhat vague and very terse. However, once you get pass all that, I am happy to say that it all works well!!

Not too bad, not too good
Pros
Built in webserver
Reliable
Good Value
Good quality in good lighting

Cons
Hard to configure for novice users (was easy for me)
Heavy on system resources when recording video to hard drive
Picture quality is every grainy in low light

pretty neat for the price.
first off, when I received the unit I thought it was rather big compared to the images on the websites. I wanted to share this advice for those people that does not know how to get this thing started. The original ip address of the unit is 192.168.0.20, which means if you have a home network set at 192.168.1.xxx or 192.168.2.xxx, etc. It will not be able to recognize the camera because it is in a different subnet. So you will have to set your laptop/desktop's ip address to that range between 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.254 except 192.168.0.20 (since that belongs to the dcs-900). once you launch the crappy wizard software it will recognize the camera's ip address so you can configure it to your home network address.

I hope this helped a lot of you. :) It only took me 2 minutes to configure this thing.