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Hawking HNC720G Network Camera
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HNC720G Review
Reviewed by
Design: 5.0 / 10
I would have to say if it is used as an indoor camera then it would work but setup is difficult.
Image Quality: 6.0 / 10
Very bad in low light. During day you see halos around objects with light directly hitting them. Indoors it's pretty good though
Easy of Use: 2.0 / 10
Bundled software is awful. Motion sensing hard to setup.
Connectivity: 4.0 / 10
webpage doesn't always connect well even over an 802.11G network
Other Features: 5.0 / 10
Can connect to FTP server.
Strengths
Cool robotic motion.
It's wireless
Weaknesses
Hard to setup.
Bad tech support.
Not great picture quality in low light.
Doesn't use java. Only Active X.
Needs firmware update badly.
(See Summary)
Summary
A firmware Engineer's review of the Hawking HNC720G Wireless 802.11 G camera.
Stuff I noticed during setup
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- Very cool robotic motion when powered on to test camera position.
- Notice that it emits a high frequency ring much like a CRT monitor but much less noticable.
Camera will not be close to where I am in my house so shouldn't be an issue at all.
I never did like the way a CRT rings and even though this is much lower in volume I still
don't like the ring but one would get used to it I suppose.
After it's been on a while I don't hear the ring anymore or at least don't notice it.
- Camera position can not be fine tuned it seems. When using the web controls it will pan or tilt
too far. I found a solution for the pan though. If I put it in auto pan and tell it when to stop
it will stop almost where I want it. This isn't working for the tilt though. I don't think forcing
it would be a good idea. I did find that you can double click on the image in the browser and it will
center the camera there though. Nice feature but doesn't always respond right away.
- Setup was difficult and I'm a computer engineer. I had to go online to get an instruction manual.
There was not one included in the box.
- I really don't like the active X aspect. I perfer JAVA. Not all browsers use active X so you are forced
to use IE which presents huge security issues.
- The active X control webpage is devided into 2 parts the control bar is on the side and can not be
resized. This means I will always have a horizonal scroll bar on the webpage. This is poor. Being
an engineer myself I can understand that you put your heart and soul into the hardware but the software
backing up your hardware needs to be robust as well. The control does not seem to have this robustness.
- Could not get my video feed from a remote location. Only could get the html snapshot. I think this is
because the firewall at work probably blocked the ports needed to get the video. Really though who is
not behind a firewall these days? This is a poor design. I can get video from websites at work. Why can't
this camera send me video without me having to have access to the firewall at the location where I'm trying
to access it from?
- You have to connect it via land line to set it up. After doing this I configured the wireless and
it didn't work right away. My LAN SSID for instance had spaces in it and the set up program wouldn't let
me use an SSID with spaces. I had to change my SSID and make everyone else on my wireless network reconfigure.
This was very lame. I only had two neighbors to reconfigure anyway. Still a poor design.
- Called the technical support center. Got a message saying that this number was inactive and told me
if I wanted tech support to call the number which I just called and got this message. How unproffessional
is that?
- Does not have a way to set the focus that I can easily find. Focus seems to be manual on the camera.
- Picture very grainy in night shots. I'm told this is typical but if you have a camera with a processor on
it and you paid $350 for it I think it would be nice if there was a built in filter to reduce the grainy pictures.
Can't manually configure exposures or anything like that.
- Picture looks pretty good in morning light with the exception of the areas where sunlight is directly reflecting
in the morning kind of have a green fuzzy aura around them.
Ok, enough with the setup stuff already. I've had the camera about a week now.
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- The security software which monitors up to 16 cameras is not user friendly at all and it was not easy
to delete video from its database. I was forced to use the FTP feature instead. This means I setup an FTP server
on my main system and setup an account for the camera to use. The camera is then configured to dump single
pictures to the server everytime the motion sensor is activated.
1) Motion sensing was hard to setup. You have two sliders. One configures the sensitivity to movement and the
second configures how small of objects to pickup. Since I'm monitoring a parking lot I would set it up during
the day to pick up the things I wanted but when the video became grainy at night the motion sensing would trigger
like mad and fill up the server with useless images. In the end I think I did find a balance by declaring two
different motion windows. One for the foreground and one for the background then configuring them independantly.
I managed to get the false triggers to stop at night but it still isn't quite as sensitive as I would like it to
be to objects moving in the background.
2) The FTP images only are taken about once every second. No video here. This isn't bad though if you're doing
security. It is still enough data to see who is doing what.
3) Can not configure the resolution of the FTP image data. All of my images are stuck at 352x240 and no way
to get the 640x480 that I paid for. This is a major flaw because resolution is key in a security situation.
4) When the images are uploaded to the FTP server you get 3 pictures. A pretrigger, a trigger, and a post-trigger.
The naming conventions of the files are stuck with the format being "videopre(timestamp).jpg"
"videotrg(timestamp).jpg" and "videopos(timestamp).jpg". This is a big issue because most picture viewers and
the filesystem sort through files in alphabetical order. This means you have to look at the pre trg and pos files
separatly. This naming convention would be better if the timestamp was at the beginning of the filename.
In conclusion the setup turned out to be difficult. I think it's still a nice toy but not worth the money
unless you're monitoring an indoor area and even then remote access to video is difficult. This camera could
probably do with a firmware update and the bundled software could use a major makeover.
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