Tech Gift Guide

CCTV is found everywhere with councils shouting out benefits that it’s there for your safety and security. While that’s all well and good it’s not in a place where I really want it – right in your living room. Image how cool it would be when on holiday to login with your mobile phone and browse around to see if your house is still in order. Now we’re talking…

In the words of infomercials worldwide, “But wait, there’s more!”, and indeed there is. Some network cameras such as the Panasonic BL-C131 that we tried include motion and sensor detection. With this the minute movement is trigger the camera can email or upload files to a location of your choice. This way you’re in the know when it comes to the state of your home.

Installation of the Panasonic BL-C131 was extremely easy, simply plug it into your network where (for us anyway) it grabbed an address of 192.168.1.253 where there’s a web interface to set things up. Security (and at the end of the day your privacy since this *is* a camera into your life) is important and after heading into the web interface for the first time you’re asked to set up a login name and password. Nice one Panasonic.

Click on the ’single’ tab at the top and be wowed as you see what the camera is pointing to. Controls on the left let you alter the refresh rate, image format and quality, white balance, brightness and, what must be one of the best features, pan and tilt! Yes sir, you’ve got full control and can move the camera left/right and up/down. I can’t even begin to explain how cool this is, just like in the spy movies hehe.

It seems that some companies (yes that’s you Panasonic) are still designing some features exclusively for Internet Explorer and 1 way audio from the camera is just that. Open up the administration interface in IE and you’ll be prompted to install an ActiveX control after which you’ll be able to listen in on what’s going on. Poor form on Panasonic for not managing to do this without an ActiveX control though.

The camera is quite configurable and you’re able to setup 5 different triggers. These can include motion, sensor and timer with activation output being email (including attaching one image per email), http post and ftp. We’ve been running it for over a month now with image upload via FTP for sensor and motion detection and notifications (sans attachments) being emailed through. Stability seems to be no issue with the camera and it’s not locked up once.

Files get uploaded with a prefix of your choosing as well as having the date and time added onto it. The timer option lets you perform whatever action you like (ftp, email, http etc) at a frequency of either 1 second, 1 minute or 1 hour. We’d have liked to have seen a few more options here (perhaps say every 15 minutes) or letting the user decide on the frequency.

Video streaming via RTSP and RTP are available but we’ve not yet been able to get it to work. Probably just requires a bit more fiddling but once it’s done you’ll be able to view a live video stream right from your mobile phone.

The BL-C131 can also operate in wireless mode where it advertises itself with it’s own SSID so comes across as a different network that you can connect to. We’ve stuck to Ethernet connectivity since the router was right where we wanted the camera placed.

Now onto the price, we purchased this in the UK for £186 but were considering cheaper ones. As the saying goes you get what you pay for and this is certainly no exception. The last thing you want to worry about are instability of the device (i.e requiring constant rebooting) and false positives on the detection routines. The Panasonic BL-C131 performed flawlessly and we’d definitely recommend it to anyone looking to keep an eye on their home/office. We do wish Panasonic would update the web-based GUI (we’re not in 1999 anymore) as it feels a bit dated but then it’s no worse than the Netgear systems that still use frames *sigh*.