Does it have audio?

What kind of security does it support? WPA is a minimum requirement for my network

Chris, it supports WEP64 and WEP128.

Peterbanks: No, it doesn't have a mic.

Does it support Macintosh OS setups? (I have tried LinkSys WiFi cameras before and not only was the picture horrible, but the setup required a PC)...

I guess I am rather spoiled by the superior quality of the iSight webcam...

Does the software come with the ability to record and archive month's worth of video or whatever length of time you'd like? This is necessary if it's to be used for security.

Thanks,
Dan

kc: I don't believe the cam can be initially set up using a Mac. In fact, the data sheet for the HNC230G says this: "The HNC230G can be accessed by an Apple Mac once it has been setup from a Windows PC. The setup software is not compatible with Apple computers." So, borrow a friend's Windows laptop, set it up for your network, and then you don't need a Windows machine any more.

Dan: There is a utility that I'm fairly sure lets you do these things -- I think I remember seeing it in the software, although I didn't play around with that aspect of it (have just been interested in the connected webcam functionality so far). The data sheet says this: "Also included with the camera are security and other convenient features, as well as a management and control software application for playback, recording, and more."

Follow the link at the top of the article to get to the data sheet on Hawking's website.

Do the security features include motion detection to begin recording/archiving video?

Jeffrey, no I don't believe it will do motion detection -- recording modes are manual and timed. But, hey, what do you want for $85? :-)

Kewl! I need one of those.

Oh, and just to clear up some of the questions people asked about this over at Engadget:

#1) This supports both wired and wireless network connections.

#2) I don't know what kind of range it has, but it works great 5 feet away (and through a wall) from my router.

#4) No idea, but why would it be any different than any other camera?

#5) You're right...it doesn't have a router in it (just a simple video/web server).

I would think the motion image capture only need be on the client side (your computer). The camera is stupid, and sends its imaging dependant on your bandwidth and your choice of image quality frame rate. If you want to STORE and SAVE images of something HAPPENING, that motion detection would be on your computer, telling the computer to SAVE because the image changed.

I'm thinking about buying this webcam for our satellite LA office to use when we have a question about a physical object such as a box, can, video tape... How crisp is the image if you are holding an object up to the camera from say five feet away?

Also, can it be used with an application such as Yahoo Messenger?

Thanks for the review!

mtbakerstu

mtbakerstu: I doubt that you'd call the images "crisp" since they're fairly heavily compressed. If image quality is a concern, I'd probably go with a dedicated USB webcam, since you could hook that up to a PC or laptop with little problem and some of those have great image quality and/or higher resolutions. I don't believe it can be used with Yahoo Messenger...it's not a webcam, it is a network camera (they're very different animals).

Thanks, Craig.

The challenge here is that I really need the camera to be wireless, as some of the objects to be viewed are too heavy and clumsy to be brought up to a stationary camera. That said, what device would you recommend as a best solution? Are there other wifi g camera out there with better image quality. My budget for this is about 250 dollars.

As an alternative, I might use software to enable a firewire dv camera to do the job. I can probably run a longer firewire cable than I can a USB cable, and I know there's software out there that can convert a dv camera to a webcam...
Thoughts?

Thank again for the great review.

laptop + USB webcam? or digicam + email?

I'd recommend you try a wireless laptop with a nice high-res webcam attached to it. The operator could then just save snapshots to a web-accessible directory on the network and you could look at them almost in real time. Still images will likely be much better quality than compressed video. All the network cameras I've seen max out at 640x480 and are heavily compressed at that resolution.

This camera does not support a WPA secured network. Bummer.

Regarding the WPA concerns, remember that not everybody runs max-security networks for a variety of reasons. Some figure they have relatively little to fear from trespassers (probably the same folks who sleep with their doors unlocked) and others probably believe the complications and restrictions imposed by WPA (such as device compatibility) are too much to trade off for marginally higher security. Heck, given that there are at least a dozen completely unsecured wireless networks in my neighborhood, someone could go as lean as just using MAC authentication and turn off SSID broadcasting and probably be quite safe (those looking for easy targets will hit up the "linksys" and "default" networks first).

I could not get the wireless feature to work. Camera works fine wired. I have a linksys 802.11 Wireless-b and the sales man said it would work.. But it won't. So far.Why is the image quality so yellow?

You can set this camera up using a web browser only. I have done it with my Mac. You just need to know a little about networks, etc..

Can someone please advise on how to remove the login screen from the camera?

I have a web frontend which takes the username and pswd. This application opens up the main application and the camera. However, right now it asks for password again for the camera and gets into the control of the camera which I want to avoid. I want it to start the camera itself without any username or pswd for the camera. Also want to make sure that the camera starts only when the customer logins through the web frontend.

Any help would be appreciated. Please contact me at shrads_13@yahoo.com

Thank you :-)

Just curious... has anyone tried using this at night? I want to mount it outside to use it as a very basic security cam. I live in a small little house that could use some front-door surveillance. How good is the motion detection (I believe someone mentioned it was only software based?!). I'm hoping to find something that would alert me for any motion detected... I remember someone mentioned that the Linksys cam would actually detect itself because the LED lights would flash and reflect off a window, thus detecting motion lol... Can someone let me know? Thanks :). Craig, great piece on this cam btw...

Andrew, it is not even remotely weatherproof, so mounting it outside wouldn't be a good idea. Also, I don't believe it has motion detection. This is a very basic, no-frills network camera, not a good security camera.

I bought 5 of this cam and got it working wirelessly. Very upset that I am unable to find any 3rd party software that can connect to it. I am still awaiting for Hawking's e-mail reply on the access URL needed to grab the picture out of the cam diretly when using with 3rd party software. The IP viewer software will be just great if it allows up to 6 camera and allow recording of all the cameras at the same time. You can only record 1 cam at a time now. If anyone knows the access URL, please share. Thanks.

I bought on of these and ended up returning it. It kept locking up after a few hours. I tried to contact tech support but got no response. I ended buying a Panasonic camera. They are about twice as much but are 10 times better. You can even view them on cell phones.

Alex, try using this website, http://www.networkcamerareviews.com I have a few network cameras and I use the forums there for tech support.

Alex, did you ever get an answer on the URL? The Dlink cameras do this and they give you sample HTML to embed the picture in your site.

I bought this camera, actually two of them. I am having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to get the video out on the internet. I have a Linksys router, I've set port fowarding using bboth UDP and TCP for each IP for each port (4321 and 80). Anyone with any experience having set these up, please let me know! Thanks,
Jose

> I have a Linksys router, I've set port
> fowarding using bboth UDP and TCP for each IP > for each port (4321 and 80).

Jose, verify first if you ISP allows port 80. They're usually blocked by ISPs. I'm using optimum online and they're blocking it. I end up configuring it to port 4300 (check one of the setting in the camera ... network setting?).

It looks like this camera will not connect to a network with WAP and a disabled ssid broadcast setup. Also, the image data (when you can manage to connect to port 4321 and give the string 0110) is tagged with jfif (jpeg) but I can't seem to make a discernable jpeg image out of it.

Very disappointed for using this camera without the java applet it has on the internal page.

I have set up this camera but the viewer program seems to stop (indicator bar goes pink) and require reconnect to the camera after 5-8 minutes. Also, the record mode doesn't seem to do anything (no file selection option or anything). Is there something that must be changed under wired mode to make the camera work as advertised?

Dennis, I have the same issues you describe. I've never really tried to get recording to work (have no need for it) and the browser-based viewing method seems to be more robust than the Hawking viewing application The only downside to the browser is that there's no way to rotate the image should you mount the camera upside down or sideways.

Correction. Record mode does work if just a single camera is being viewed. Of course, its about 25MB per 2 minutes (adds up). The viewer pgm is still a problem. It seems to work better if it is connected over the same LAN. At least, it worked for well over 1/2 hour vs 2 minutes through a NAT box. I've contacted Hawking and am experimenting as well and will keep the results posted. I am speculating that the NAT box is somehow causing problems. It is interesting to look at the network traffic pattern via Task Mgr. Bursts, then short drops in traffic.

Hello.. thanx for the info, but i'm afraid the Hawking products seem to have more to do with selling than with quality. I bought this camera and their Access Point with a separate booster. It was a disaster from the start. After 3 days of trying and reading, i discovered that the cable that was shipped with the camera was defective! Second, the camera would not be able to find the Access Points(s). I also tried it with the Linksys WRT54GS and it didn't pick up the signal. As to the Access Point, the switch for the booster (to change the signal power) went inside the hole when i tried to adjust the power and got stuck. I should've known that a good price may entail agony sometimes.

You definitely can configure the thing from mac or linux. Read the Quick-start guide PDF document on the CD and it'll tell you the default login. You need to configure a network interface to be on 192.168.2.nn and then you can point a browser to http://192.168.2.3/ by default and do all the admin / network setup through there. I don't know why they waste time putting a windoze-specific setup utility on the CD when a simple web-browser will do the honours.

Hi I have a Hawking Technologies HNC230G Wireless-G Network Camera but I lost my cd setup and now I have a new computer and I can not used it because I can not find my cd utillities, do you know where can I find it to download. I already try the Hawking Technologies site but the setup cd is not there to download, thanks

Bought one of these a few months ago and I must say its junk. I ended up writing a fake SMTP server and web browser simulator just to get a stream of images out of it via its "snapshot and email" feature. Support was everything but. Although I am interested in the 0110 option that was mentioned earlier to get still images out of it. Could be I made the problem a lot more complex than it needed to be.

Does anyone know what format the streaming video is in? Are there any Opensource apps that can get it?

Nebulous, the "streaming video" is nothing more than repeating the 0110 trick very fast, after all.

I've written a simple Ruby script to automate it - it requires RubyMagick (imagemagick library) to save the JPEGs out; see http://spodzone.org.uk/ for it.

If I had spent 10 minutes with ethereal instead of 2 hours writing a web spider I would have been significantly happier. I've written the equivilent script in Perl as a cgi so Motion can finally use the camera. It does have a problem with jpeg corruption, but if I pump it thru ImageMagick as was done in the Ruby script that should go away. Its pretty funny how the web interface has changing md5 challenge response passwords even though you can access the camera with no security at all with telnet. Not that I'm complaining. I can finally use the camera for something.

Hello people,
i just did jet my longshine 715 and noticed that there was no way to get a .JPG file out it. I wan't to use this Cam as Webcam... no way like this.

So i startet programming a php script whitch connects to the socket 4321 and gets a clean and working .JPG file out it! Should work for hawkins hnc230g too!

I will give this script away for a little PayPal donation. Contact me if you are interessted! j.karczewski@gmail.com

did the dog eat the baby?

I beleive the hawking hnc230g is the same as the IC-1000Wg edimax if this is so then just go to the edimax website and download Wire / Wireless admin utility and viewer for the IC-1000Wg. You could also download the firmware here also. I have done this with some compusa branded routers that turned out to be the same as the router as those sold by edimax, and have been extreamly happy.
-Jake

Hi, I have a HNC720G Hawking wireless cam, and using a Linksys WRV54G wireless router.

I have the correct lights working on the camera solid red and blinking green, which I think means it is finding my wireless network, but I only seem to be able to connect to the camera when it's wired, wireless just seems to be impossible to setup, I have 4 ports to forward 8001 for the http of the cam, and 5001/2/3 for the video/sound and control ports, I've tried to do this multiple ways on the linksys but no luck so far, any ideas here?

Hey, Dashfixer, sorry you're having problems with the wireless function. As you can imagine, it could be a lot of things and troubleshooting WiFi remotely is incredibly tough (and I've never owned a Linksys router, either). My setup works, but I only have two ports forwarded for each camera: one for video (in the 43xx range) and one for HTTP (in the 80xx range). So, I don't think you need _all_ those ports you've listed. Also, I have better luck with the software that came with the camera when setting them up than trying to go through a browser, so I'd try that. G'luck!

I found a program that works with HNC230g e HNC210 just download the demo and try VisionGS http://www.visiongs.de/

I've got one of these and get a cookie error when I log in remotely via the Internet. My port forwarding is setup fine - any suggestions?

Matt: I get invalid cookie errors sometimes too. Most often, I can reload/refresh a few times and it goes away. Other times, I need to go in and clean out those cookies manually out of my browser.

I found another software that works with the HNC230 and HNC210, Netcam Watcher Pro, go to www.beausoft.com, the only downside with it is the price per camera.

Also this camera works exactly the same as the Edimax one, seems that both companies use the same manufacturer.

Only for the record, I just know of two 3rd party software that work with them: Netcam Watcher and VisionGS

Also, if someone knows the string to get the jpeg please share so we can test on other software.

Thanks,

Astolfo

PD: I also wrote an email to Hawking asking for support and the string and I never got nothing, I wrote about 10 emails!!

We bought the same camera last year - love it. Problem, now we cannot find the setup wizard disc that came with the camera.
Do you know of any place where we can get just the setup disc?
Thanks...

This is a very easy camera to setup at a good price as well. Has anyone used it for remote viewing?