BIOS: Technology Means Business

D-Link's DCS-5300G is a cost effective Internet security camera that records both video and audio, making it a very useful product for monitoring your home or office. The really neat thing about the camera is that you can view it in real-time over the Internet, or use the latest 802.11g wireless technology to securely communicate at a maximum wireless rate of up to 54Mbit/s. You can record high quality video to your hard disk using MPEG-4 compression, playback video, monitor as many as 16 cameras on a single screen, and set up motion detection to trigger automatic recording and e-mail alerts - and all for just £329 (ex. VAT). Highly recommended.

Pros: Pan, tilt and zoom lens; motion detection; works over the Web
Cons: Poor quality microphone; focusing can be tricky

The DCS-5300G (104x102x112mm, 346g) is a fully-featured, CCD sensor-based surveillance system that connects to either an Ethernet or wireless broadband network and captures relatively high-quality video and audio. The camera works using either a WLAN (802.11g) or LAN 10/100Base-T Ethernet connection (supports TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, Telnet, NTP, DNS and DHCP), and can also be accessed over the Internet - should you want to keep an eye on the office on the move or from the comfort of your home. The camera also has a built in Web server and it's own processor, which means that it can be hooked up to a router rather than a dedicated server.

D-Link supplies the product ready to operate out of the box. It comes with a RJ45 network lead, mounting bracket for fixing the camera to a wall or screwing it onto a desk, an A/V lead for connecting the camera to a TV for a larger image or for recording on a separate device, remote control (a tad small and fiddly), and well as the usual installation discs and a Quick Install manual. D-Link even supplies a 30-day trial copy of the excellent firewall software, ZoneAlarm Pro.

The DCS-5300G was a breeze to install onto our test network and took just 10 minutes before it was fully operational. Having said that, you may encounter a few slight complications if you're not entirely sure how your network is configured, as you need e-mail and IP address settings. Once you have this info to hand, installing and configuring the camera should be straightforward.

By signing up with one of the many free Dynamic DNS services available on the Web, you can even assign an easy-to-remember name and domain to the camera (such as www.mycamera.myddns.com). This allows you to remotely access your security camera without having to remember the IP address, even if it has been changed by your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

In its basic form the DCS-5300G can be used with Internet Explorer 6. Once logged into the camera's management Web site using an IP address, you're then given a bird's eye view of the camera. From here you can use your mouse or the supplied remote control to manoeuvre the camera. It has a side-to-side viewing angle of 270 degrees and a horizontal/vertical angle of 90 degrees, which should be more than enough to capture an entire room. You can also zoom in up to 4X using the camera's digital zoom lens.

The real power of the camera - and a feature we think is its strongest selling point - is the bundled IP surveillance software, which allows you to control up to 16 cameras simultaneously (you'll feel like the commander of your own private surveillance company). Extremely easy to configure to your own requirements, the software allows you to create a folder that will hold your images, adjust the image quality of video, alter the camera's position and motion capture area, as well as the frame rate and video size. Incidentally, the unit captures video using MPEG-4 format (JPEG compression for still images), allowing you to capture video at 160x120 pixels (30fps), 320x240 pixels (30fps) or 640x480 pixels (10fps).

The motion detection feature also sets the camera apart from others. Allowing you to define an area for the camera to focus on, you can set parameters that tell the camera to start recording when there's any motion detected. You can also adjust the motion detection accuracy, which is useful when you don't want to capture small movements. The major benefit of this feature is that you can save hard disk space, bandwidth and search time by only recording scenes where moving images are detected. We also liked the patrol function of the camera, allowing you to add zones for the camera to move within at a speed that you define.

You can even set off alerts to coincide with an event being tripped. The alerts range from e-mails informing you that motion was detected to recorded images being sent every 5 seconds, for example. Scheduled snapshots can also be configured and sent via e-mail/FTP during certain days and times. Recordings can be saved to another computer on the network, in the event that the camera was damaged or stolen.

For one of our tests we set the DCS-5300G to pan (the speed of which can be adjusted by the software) around our office for an hour to test hard disk utilisation. For this we set the capture quality to high and we used a video resolution of 320x240 pixels (30fps). After 1 hour, the camera had consumed about 435MB of hard disk drive space, which included both audio and video. Video quality was very good, even in dark rooms, but the built-in microphone struggled. Thankfully, the camera supports external microphones, should audio capture be important to your company. Overall, the DCS-5300G is a cost-effective and versatile security solution for either your home or your business.