Toshiba IK-WB11A or similar

[smallfreak]

Hello friends!

I'm currently developing a solution for our astronomy club to set up a day/night "weather cam"

Our primary need is a high quality image, even at truly low-light conditions (night shot into the mountains). We are astronomers and simply cannot accept grainy "web cam" quality images, which essentially means CCD instead of CMOS sensor and the possibility to produce multi-second long exposures - even if it should be necessary to take hand on the electronic and/or firmware.
Due to the remote situation it is next to impossible to provide a live data stream, a still image every few minutes (and one on demand) would be enough.

The images should be requested and post processed by our web server before the result is presented in the home page, so it is essentially that the image can be acquired easily by a custom script. Guest-access to the live data is no topic.

Among us astronomers, modified ToUcams became popular which allow for multi minute exposures. However this piece still is USB equipment, not meant to be used remotely without supervision. Adding a PC, stirring control and a weather resistant and tamper proof housing to discourage burglars, quickly sums up.

We decided to start with some standard, outdoor-ready equipment instead of inventing everything from scratch.

My best research so far would be the Toshiba IK-WB11A for which I can raise enough fund.

However there are several things that puzzle me.

a) This item is non-existent all over Europe, so even If I get one sent from the US, I could still get in troubles with the support.

b) "Latest" user postings about this item date back to spring 2005, which is almost a year now. User ratings vary between "Greatest invention since sliced bread, incredible image quality, works like a charm" to "totally worthless crap, utterly unusable".

c) ToshibaNetcam.com (An independent forum for the discussion of Toshiba Network Cameras) vanished altogether

I get the impression that Toshiba rather wants to hide this product (at least from the European market) and teamed up with the CIA do clean the web of all traces of it.

Unfortunately, $2000+ camera is way out of our budget.

I'm open to suggestions..

[Administrator]

You can purchase IP Camera Enclosures. I remember looking into pricing from 4XEM for their IPCAMWPTZ and their dome enclosure IPCAMENCLODHF. I think it came up to $1000 bucks American.

Like you mentioned however it will be hard for support if you are located in Europe. You can try a manufacturer in that is not overseas. You can look into Vivotek and Gadspot. I know Vivotek offers domes and PTZ's which can be placed in Enclosures. I'm not sure about Gadspot however, I have heard their cameras are a bit cheap.
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Administrator
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www.networkcamerareviews.com

[NEShires]

I purchased this camera and love and hate it. I love its resolution and it is great in low-light situations.

It has a bunch of software issues that have been discussed but the biggest problem that I have is the audio. It does not have a built in mic. I you turn on the sound with no mic there is mechanical noise. If you add a mic, guess what, you still get the noise.

I'm using this camera in a horse barn to monitor foalings and I need to hear things like a horse laying down. The mechanical noise from this camera covers up much of the things that I need to hear.

Before I purchased this camera I had purchased the Sony SNCM3. This camera has great audio but you can't see a thing in low-light situations. It also gets stuck often, forget about having it ftp upload and watch it at the same time.

So I am on my third brand of network cameras, the Panasonic BB-HCM311A. This camera has the best FW implemenation of all. Its FTP upload is flawless. I have it set to upload 1 image a second to my server and it is great! Is audio is perfect. It has a low light mode that is good. What I don't like is that it doesn't autoswitch to lowlight mode, you have to set it manually. When in low light mode any motion is blury.

What I have learned:

- Forget about wireless. Just wire them and live with it.
- None of them are perfect. You have to decide what features are important for your application.
- The Toshiba has resolution to die for. Forget about using its FW upload. It just gets stuck. I have a script which runs on my server that pulls pictures from the camera, resizes them and displays them on my server. This seems to work well. But I can't use this camera in my barn because of the audo problems.
- The Panasonic isn't as great in low light and doesn't have the incredible resolution that the Toshiba has, but it is realiable. I have a monitor watching it live 100% of the time plus it is ftp uploading images to my server (for my barncam that more that 100 people watch at a time) 1 image per sec.

Of the three, get the Panasonic.

If anyone can help we with the audio that would be great. I contacted Toshiba tech support and they sent me a new camera. It has the same audio problem.

Thanks,
Janet

[smallfreak]

[ppz]

NeShires,

Can you post the script you use to pull down images to your server.

thanks