The Foscam FI8904W is a wireless or wired IP camera solution for outdoor use. It combines a high quality digital video camera with network connectivity and a powerful web server to bring clear video to your desktop or smartphone from anywhere on your local network or over the Internet. The high quality video image is transmitted with 30fps speed on the LAN/WAN by using MJPEG hardware compression technology. The image resultion is 640 x 480 (300k Pixels). The Foscam FI8904W camera is based on the TCP/IP standard. The control, management and maintenance of the camera is done simply by using your browser to remotely configure and upgrade the firmware. The Foscam FI8904W IP camera can reach up to 20 meters of visibility in absolute darkness with 24 infrared LED’s.
$ 78.00
Good camera, wide angle (although I doubt it’s a real FosCam),
I’ve used different types of cameras for security in the past, but most of them have very narrow viewing angles, making it hard to watch a large area with one camera. This camera, however, has a wider viewing angle than most and makes it easy to watch a large area without having to move it too far back.
This camera can be setup with a wired wireless connection. Here was my experience with both:
(I’m using Windows 7)
Wired Connection:
This was very easy and quick. I simply took it out of the box, plugged it into the router with the supplied network cable and installed the software on my computer. The software recognized the camera right away, but you don’t have to use the software if you just go directly to the camera within your network, i.e. […]. Once you access the camera within your network, you can view it right away and setup a wireless connection, your mail, ftp upload, and adjust other settings. If you plan to use the wireless connection you will want to enter your wirelsss connection info while you’re directly connected to it here.
Wireless Connection:
This is fairly easy once you directly connect the camera to your router and open it’s settings. I simply had to supply my wireless SSID (and login/password/encryption type if used) and save it. Then I tunred off the camera, unplugged it from the router, and turned it back on after waiting about 30 seconds. From that point it was connected through the wireless connection instead of the wired connection.
Accessing the camera from outside your home network:
When you access the camera from within your home network, it’s simple and easy. But when you go on a trip and you want to view your camera from outside your home network, you have to set some extra things up. This was a little trickier to do, since you will need to be able to open your router settings and adjust them. Basically you need to tell your router to allow outside connections to your camera. In short, I had to allow connections to the camera by forwarding a certain port number from within my router to my camera. Once I did that I could simply type in my router’s IP address from anywhere and I could access the camera. If you don’t know how to do this, your ISP tech support can probably walk you through it on the phone. Here’s how I did this:
(I have a linksys router)
1) I opened up my router settings by going to: […]
2) I located the Port Range Forward menu (under Applications and Gaming)
3) I entered the following into the first line:
-Start=80
-End=80
-Protocol=Both
-Ip Address=192.168.1.102 (your camera might have a different last number here, you can see it in your address bar when you are accessing your camera)
-Checked the Enable box and hit the Save Settings button
Your mileage may vary but once I did this I could access my camera by entering my computer’s IP address into a browser from any location.
Motion Detection / Alarm:
The motion alarm works well, but you will need to adjust it’s sensitivity settings for your own needs. You can set it to email you a screen capture when it detects movement and/or upload the screen captures via ftp.
The camera performs well and this model has a wider viewing angle, allowing you to view more area without having to move the camera back. I was looking for a camera like this since most I had tried had very narrow viewing angles.
I gave this camera 4 stars because the instructions were not the greatest. If you don’t have experience with IP devices or this kind of thing you might not understand what the instructions are telling you sometimes.
Overall it was an easy setup, no different than setting up any other wireless device.
I will be buying a couple more of these to cover the rest of the areas around my house.
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|Beware – viewing angle of FI8904W is 42-degrees, not 67-degrees,
I just bought the FI8904W camera to go along with the Foscam FI8918W camera I bought earlier. I was disappointed to find that the field-of-view for the FI8904W was much tighter than the F8918W, even though both are title listed by Amazon as “3.6mm lens, 67-deg viewing angle”. I went to the foscam.com website (not foscam.us) and found the spec sheet for the FI8904W. It states a “6mm lens and 42-degree viewing angle”. I found that the narrow FOV made it inadequate for outdoor patio coverage. (For the tinkers out there you can buy replacement lenses. Google “IP camera lenses”). It’s really too bad it doesn’t come with the same lens as the FI8918W. Also, the camera does not have auto-brightness, which can be a problem if you want to view in both bright sun and darkness. On a positive note, it was not too difficult to set up in both wired and wireless modes and the construction seems solid and water resistant. I returned mine but would have kept it if it weren’t for the narrow FOV.
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|No auto-exposure adjustment makes this camera useless,
I bought this camera to monitor my driveway when I’m not home. The wide-angle is nice and while not fantastic, the video quality is good enough to recognize vehicles or people.
However, the camera has no auto-exposure capability. You can manually adjust the exposure in the web interface to get a fairly good picture, but it’s only going to look good while you have the exact same lighting conditions. Get it just right for mid-day on a sunny day, and it will be too dark in the morning and afternoon or when the sun goes behind a cloud. In fact, because it doesn’t auto-adjust, the motion sensing can be triggered by nothing more than a cloud passing in front of the sun. And forget using it during the day and at night. If it’s adjusted for daytime, you won’t see anything but a black screen at night. Adjust it for nighttime and you’ll get nothing but a white screen during the day.
The bottom line is that I can’t count on this camera to send me emails when there’s activity in the driveway since it only reliably detects motion when the exposure is just right. The other 22 hours of the day it doesn’t work. I’ll be sending it back and looking for something else. I guess that you get what you pay for…
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