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Axis 207MW Wireless 1.3 MegaPixel IP Network Camera
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Design: 8.0 / 10
Seems well built enough - I have been careful with the focus as have heard others had trouble with it being flimsy - mine seems fine. Connections and mountings are well thought out and useful.
Image Quality: 7.0 / 10
Well, it's the perfect focal length, but full resolution looks blocky and interpolated, much like early 1MPix stills cameras. Framerate drops hugely at higher res - I question whether it's worth it.
Easy of Use: 4.0 / 10
First impressions are great, and if everything worked as it should, then everything would be fine. The interface is well laid out and intuitive to any techie. Sadly, a few things just don't work - wherever Java is used, expect browser lockups. I've tried Safari and Firefox on Mac, and IE, Firefox and Chrome on Windows. Managed to hang all of them just setting things up.
This thing is unreliable beyond belief - feels like a beta product. I've upgraded to firmware 4.44 but I couldn't get motion detection to send an email until after another factory reset. Even now, the motion detection is finicky and error prone.
Connectivity: 3.0 / 10
This thing takes about half an hour to connect to my wireless network. Why? Because it predates 802.11n, I think. If I downgrade my wireless network to G it connects more quickly, but why should I have to degrade my network to accommodate one badly-behaved device?
Other Features: 6.0 / 10
The feature set seems nice at first glance, but then you notice how maddeningly unreliable the important ones are. The aforementioned SMTP is the worst offender - wouldn't work at all until a factory reset and is now sporadic at best. The Java implementation is similarly unreliable, and the motion detection setup screen sometimes just stops detecting any motion. Don't forget to click "Save" a lot on this screen - the real-time graph is NOT real-time if you forget to do this!
Strengths
Build and image quality; perfect focal length for many applications
Weaknesses
Hugely unreliable wireless connection, motion detection and email support; Terrible low light capability (don't believe the "excellent low light" schtick you get from Axis here - my eight year old Philips Toucam performs better in low light)
Summary
I wouldn't buy this again and I'm going to try and get a refund on it. The motion detection / advertised low-light / wireless function were the primary reasons for buying it and it's outperformed by an eight year old webcam hooked up to webcamXP.
If I wanted best-in-class live image viewing through a browser I might consider it (except for the browser hangs), but the security aspect is not reliable enough and neither is the basic connectivity.
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