The Vstarcam T7838WIP IP Camera aims to make home security affordable and easy to do. Although designed to sit upright the Vstarcam IP Camera can be mounted on a wall using the included bracket, this is an indoor camera only and shouldn’t be mounted outdoors as it’ll likely fail if exposed to the elements.
Also included in the box is an ethernet cable which is used during the setup process. The camera can be left wired into your network, but it works really well on Wifi and offers a lot more flexibility in positioning it when a cable isn’t required.
The Vstarcam IP Camera is very nicely designed, you won’t mind it being visible as it looks rather nice with it’s white plastic finish and rotating camera, like a little robot eye checking things out. The camera has a good range of movement left/right and up/down and around the lens is a ring of IR lights, allowing you to illuminate a dark area if there isn’t enough natural light. In use looking out of a house the IR lighting wasn’t required, the street lighting provided ample light to see what was going on, but if using indoors (e.g. to watch a baby) the IR lighting means you’ll be able to see what’s going on even in a pitch black room.
The Vstarcam IP Camera takes a micro SD card allowing it to record directly without any external storage. Pop the card into your PC and you’ll find that files are stored in a .H264 format, something the PC didn’t know what to do with. Fortunately the manufacturer provides a downloadable video player to view the files. This software is OK but lacks basic features of other media players, such as a timeline showing how long the file lasts and allowing you to skip forwards and backwards.
The Android software is very good and gives you access to your camera as long as you have internet access, be careful if not using Wifi as video streaming can eat up your data allowance. The mobile app doesn’t just give you access to a live view, it also allows you control the pan/tilt/zoom functions as well as take photos and video while on the move. It can be tricky getting the camera into the position you want, especially with the lag introduced by controlling this remotely, so it’s good to see the app has the ability to store pre-set camera positions which you can press and the camera will automatically pan/tilt as required.
When at a PC or laptop you can make use of the Windows client. It’s not the nicest looking bit of software, but it does the job well. You can manage multiple cameras, for example viewing 4 cameras at the same time, and as with the mobile app you can control the camera pan/tilt/zoom movement as well as take photos and videos.
Image quality is OK. There is always a trade off with security cameras, do you want high quality for a short amount of recorded footage, or low quality and days of footage. With a maximum setting of 720p the Vstarcam T7838WIP strikes the right balance, picture quality is easily good enough to see what’s going on and make out faces, but it’s not so good that you only get a few hours of footage recorded.
A nice feature built into the apps is the ability to both listen to what is going on at the camera location as well as being able to talk out of the camera via the inbuilt speaker.
There is also alarm out functions available, but these were not tested.
For the low price this is an impressive package. The camera unit itself looks great and it’s good to see the manufacturer supporting multiple platforms. It’d be nice to see the Windows software given a design overhaul, and it would be useful if the camera recorded in a more common format, but aside from those little niggles this is a great bit of kit.
Available from Amazon now: https://amzn.to/1tp950g
