Y-Cam Black Wireless Night-vision IP Camera Review

In response to a previously related incident involving the security of our postal delivery arrangements, I recently invested in a Y-Cam Black. I have had suspicions regarding the moral integrity of some of the regular users of the footpath that runs past our house for a while now, but the theft of sixteen Chuck Ds worth of train tickets confirmed them. In an effort to thwart any further attempts at stealing my possessions via this particular method, I moved our postbox inside our front porch, and affixed the Y-Cam Black in a suitable position to monitor both the box and any parcels placed on the floor inside. Triggered by the motion activation feature built into the camera, it uploads still pictures to an FTP server whenever anyone enters the porch. This arrangement allows me to see any activity related to postal deliveries to my property, and, potentially, any criminal efforts on the part of the mentally subnormal, mail-bothering yokels that frequent our lane.

The Y-Cam Black has a pretty impressive set of features compared to most webcams on the market today, and it looks great on paper, which is why I bought one. Various networking options cover most possible setups: fast ethernet and 802.11b/g wireless are both built in, with the latter supporting WPA and WPA2 encryption, as well as useless old WEP. Setting up the Y-Cam Black will be pretty painless for any moderately competent geek, but only if said geek has access to a Microsoft Windows system. The camera streams video via an ActiveX control, so Linux or Mac users are out of luck because calibrating the motion detection and recording the MPEG4 video output require the use of Internet Explorer on Windows. I have a Windows XP install running under Parallels on my Mac, which is how I was able to get things up and running. Physically fitting the thing is easy enough given a little D.I.Y. knowhow, the bracket allows for fairly flexible placement and angling, and the only real limitation on this front is the rather short power cord; a few extra feet of bell wire would really help here.

Picture quality is pretty much what you’d expect from a webcam. Daylight pictures are good enough to give a positive identification, but you won’t be printing them for the family album. Night vision shots are also adequate, the infrared illumination is good enough to capture quite a lot of detail in full darkness. The camera’s motion detection is able to pick up things as small as a cat, but once the camera has been triggered, it waits four whole seconds to take another picture, and this is a major limitation. You could probably nab a crook with the pictures this thing takes, but given that the camera fires as infrequently as it does, you’d need some luck with the timing. Should your felon happen to be looking the wrong way when the camera first snaps him, sizing up whatever he’s about to nick perhaps, he could well be out of range by the time the four seconds required for a second picture have elapsed, giving you very little chance of getting anything like a decent mugshot.

The obvious solution to this problem would be to use the camera’s video streaming capabilities. Apparently there is Windows-only software available to do just that, but as I don’t have a dedicated Windows machine in my house I can’t try it out at the moment. I don’t really want to shell out for another Parallels license just to run this program on my Mac mini. Oh, if only there were some technology that enabled cross-platform development around formats like MPEG4. I suppose I’ll just have to wait until someone invents this miraculous, futuristic solution.

According to this review there have been vague burblings from the manufacturer regarding development of some slightly less narrow-minded firmware for the Y-Cam, but, as ever with such promises, it would be foolish to hold one’s breath whilst waiting. Better still would be some mechanism for uploading snippets of motion-triggered video from an onboard buffer to an FTP server, thereby obviating the need for a dedicated box to stream video to. At the very least it would be nice to be able to override the four-second timeout on the motion detection to something a bit less uselessly long.

It’s a shame that the software isn’t better, because the hardware is rather nice, and is probably capable of doing the job it is advertised for perfectly well. With a bit more work, the Y-Cam black could be a really good bit of kit, but as it currently stands it isn’t quite up to the task, especially considering its £130 price-tag. Still, it’s better than nothing, so I going to have to leave it up and running for now and wait and hope for better firmware. Besides, the postman would sue me if I fitted the postbox with cunningly angled razorblades, which was my other plan to prevent the local letter-lifting Cro-Magnon population from swiping my stuff again.

2 comments 2008-03-01 22:00 Categories: Computers, Consumerism, Geek Stuff, Reviews