Bought this camera through one of Amazon's Gold Box Deals for $130. For the price, it's a great camera. This is my second Panasonic network camera. A few years ago I bought their BL-C1A model Panasonic Network Camera and Pet Cam (BLC1A). The BL-C210A is a much nicer camera. The picture image is several times better, especially when motion is involved. You have the option of pan and tilt to look around. You can disable the indicator lights on the camera that lets you know the camera is on. You can also disable or override the privacy mode button on top of the camera. You can configure the camera to email you a picture when it detects motion in your house. Now how's that for peace of mind while you're away? And my favorite is that the camera is powered through the network cable which eliminates the need for a power outlet near the camera. The camera has a threaded mounting hole in the back that can be used to mount the camera to a standard tripod or an optional wall mount. The cube design is nice because it allows you to just set the camera on a shelf or table. The camera is light, so a tug on the network cable can bring it crashing down if it's not secured.
There are limitations with the camera. If you want to view an entire room, you'll need to mount the camera in a corner. It can only pan 41 degrees to the left or right, 10 degrees up and 32 degrees down. The camera is powered through the network cable, but it doesn't support the industry standard PoE. Luckily it comes with its own power injector. You'll need to purchase two network cables to use this camera. One cable connects the camera to the power injector and the other connects the power injector to your router/switch. The cable between the camera and power injector must be shorter than 98 feet. The box says you can only view still images from a cell phone. The website says you can't listen to audio with a cell phone. I haven't tried either. The software works pretty good, although I have found a few minor bugs in it. You have the option of viewing multiple cameras on one screen, but the max resolution for multiple cameras is only 320x240 and not the 640x480 max camera resolution. You don't need a computer onsite to use the camera, but you'll need one to do the initial setup.
Panasonic has nicer cameras than this model, but the prices also get outrageous. $185 (current Amazon price) is not bad for one camera. But after you buy one, you'll want more so you can monitor the rest of the house. That's when $185 per camera starts adding up. If the price drops again, I'll definitely buy another.
Note: The zoom function is not obvious. There are buttons on the screen to do everything but zoom. I discovered you can right-click on the top half of the video to zoom in and right-click on the lower half to zoom out. You can also use the wheel on your mouse to zoom in and out.
Update (March 9, 2010): I did a little research on the camera model (BL-C111A) that the BL-C210A replaced. This camera has a larger CMOS sensor but the same resolution. The old model can pan 50 degrees to the left or right while this model can only pan 41 degrees. The old model can tilt down 40 degrees while this model can only tilt down 32 degrees. The old model had a 10x digital zoom while this model only has a 3x digital zoom. The digital zoom is not very good. If you have a need to zoom in on objects, you'll want a camera with an optical zoom. Some new features added are SSL data encryption for secure viewing over the Internet, power through the network cable, H.264 video compression, and the ability to operate the camera with some models of Panasonic flat screen TV's.
I bought another camera from Amazon to monitor the back door and kitchen area. It comes with mounting holes on the back of the camera so you can slide it down on a couple of screw heads. It frustrates me that you can't mount it flat on a wall and pan 90 degrees to the left and right. I ended up purchasing mounting brackets VideoSecu Ceiling Mount Bracket for CCTV CCD Box Body Pro Camera 2-6 inch Adjustable MCB1w 1A2 so I can mount the cameras in a corner. Again, I really like the ability to power this camera through the network cable. I have the cameras and my network equipment all plugged into the same UPS. This way I can still monitor my house in the event of a power failure. If you're looking for a camera to monitor the baby's room, this is not it. You can't see much with only a night light on in the room. You're better off with a dedicated baby camera. We've had good luck with a baby camera made by Astak Astak 2.4 GHz Pan & Tilt Baby Camera with 2.5" LCD Color Handheld Monitor with Night Vision. It can pan and tilt to see the whole room, can see very well in the dark even with no lights on, and comes with a handheld color monitor. The monitor eats batteries so we just turn it on when we hear something or want to check up on the kids. It also comes with an AC adaptor for continuous monitoring. Another reason why a baby camera works better for monitoring babies than this camera is that you don't have to fire up your computer in the middle of the night to see if your child is awake. A word of warning, many baby camera's operate on the same frequencies as your wireless network. You might need to play around with the channels on both the baby camera and your wireless network until they don't interfere with each other.
A year or so ago, we installed an Ademco burglar alarm which we found we could not hook up to a monitoring service because we had dropped our landline. There are services that will monitor your alarm system through the cell phone network but they are expensive. So I decided to make a project out of this. I would find a way to monitor the alarm system with zero net monthly cash outlays. I spent idle hours wondering how I might cobble together some homemade piece of equipment that can capture the alarm signal off the Ademco and fire a programmable event on one of our computers through a USB port or something like that. Tricky stuff. Iffy.
Then I discovered the fact that this ip camera (as well as many others) have e-mailing functionality. After a little research I bought a couple and they are now in service. I connected the bell circuit on my Ademco, through a relay switch, to one of the two open alarm circuits on the Panasonic and now whenever the Ademco sends an alarm, we receive an e-mail with an alarm message plus, as a bonus, a photo of what the camera is seeing at the time. When we get the e-mail, we can go online either with a computer or our cell phone and see what is going on in the house. If the situation merits, we can then call the police or we can ask the neighbor to peek over. This is intelligent alarm monitoring as opposed to the automated kind you get when your alarm system sends a signal to the monitoring station every time the system is tripped for whatever reason (I read that almost all reports sent to the police by these systems are false and are placed on low priority). I am going to document this system and send it to my insurance agent asking for a premium discount in line with the standard discount you get with automated monitoring. We have achieved our goal of a no-cost alarm notification system.
Two very good features of this unit are that you do not have to have a running computer to make it work and it receives its power over the ethernet cable. As long as your run is less than 98 feet, you can snake cable through your walls to your heart's content without worrying about how you will power the camera.
Since this camera has, in addition to its ability to take a signal from your burglar alarm, its own internal motion-heat-sound detectors, you could also use it as a sort of burglar alarm all by itself. But it does not have the capability to act as a perimeter alarm as would be the case if you have an alarm system with door and/or window sensors. And it does not turn on sirens to 1.) wake you up, 2.) scare the intruders away or 3.) if they are not scared away, heighten the level of insanity that is already going on in their minds.
Like the others, I find that the camera does not perform well in low light. But I have several lamps in our home that are hooked up to X-10 switches. These X-10s are programmed through the burglar alarm to turn on when the alarm goes off. I have not tested them with the camera yet but I am hoping that they will provide enough light to let us see what is going on in the event of an alarm.
There is one glaring vulnerability in all of this: your camera gives you notification and visual access through the internet; your house connects to the internet through a wire; burglars know how to snip a wire with a wire cutters and the more experienced burglars are going to do this before they attempt to break in. I circumvented this problem by changing my ISP. My new ISP connects the internet to my house wirelessly and that fixes that. If you do not have the wireless option, however, this issue needs to be addressed. Many alarm systems now can be fitted with an auxiliary backup device that calls you and/or the police through the cell phone network if your wire is cut. They cost extra both for the equipment and the ongoing use of the cell phone network.
We got a lot of value for our money here. It proved to be an elegant solution to our problem and added many more features to boot. I love gadgets and my heart sings whenever I see it up in the corner of my living room ceiling with its lights blinking down on me. What other people might think is 'beyond the scope of this review'.
ON PANASONIC SUPPORT: I'm not going to lower the rating on this camera because I think it is a fine product. But I will say that Panasonic support falls far short of the mark. In trying to get the camera viewable over the internet, I talked to 4 different representatives each of whom offered a different solution all of which were wrong. I wrote them a letter a week ago with no reply so far. So I did what I should have initially done which is to learn a little networking, specifically port forwarding. After my research and armed with some actual knowledge, I set up the cameras properly and they are now humming along. I can credit the reviewer who praised Panasonic support. However, that was not my experience. All these people had to do was to ask the right questions and then tell me what to do to configure the system properly. It took me, an amateur, a couple of hours to figure it out on my own and yet all four of these professionals failed to come up with the correct solution. And yes, I am fully aware that this is partly a result of a lack of committment on the part of management and not entirely the fault of the individual on the other end of the phone. 1-14-2011 UPDATE: Yesterday, I came across a puzzling issue having to do with sending sensor messages from the camera to our Panasonic Viera TV. Since I already know how good they are at fielding support requests over the telephone and through the postal service, I thought it might be interesting to send them an e-mail message via their website. The model of the camera was stated in the e-mail by way of the e-mail setup fields and I gave the model of the TV in the body of the e-mail. Later that day, I received this reply which I quote in full: 'Thank you for your inquiry. What is the model # to your cameras? If you have any additonal questions or concerns, please contact our technical support hotline at . Thank you for choosing Panasonic.' Additional questions indeed.
SETUP NOTE: If your network sits behind two in-line routers (one connected directly to the internet through the phone or cable TV wires, the 'outside' router; the other sitting between the outside router and the LAN: the 'inside' router) and you are having a hard time of it, identify both the public and private IP address of the inside router. Do a little googling to get yourself squared away on what the public and private IP addresses of a router are. Then, when you are setting up port forwarding on the outside router, you need to forward requests to the public not the private IP address of the inside router. Then use the private IP address of the inside router as the Default Gateway in your camera settings. There are other pitfalls but this particular one was my mine.
Buy Panasonic BL-C210A Internet Security Camera Now
I would change the rating to 2 and would not recommend purchasing if you need LOW Light like a nursery. I absolutely do not recommend this or the 230a for a nursery!
Review updated on 2-27-2010. I will start by saying this was a very difficult to set-up camera on a Mac using Snow Leopard with VM Fusion and Parallels. I was not able to get it to work on VM Fusion and Windows 7 and eventually switched to Parallels with Windows XP I finally got it to work. I also have Trendnet TV-IP422W which was simple to configure.
Pro's
1. Comparing the picture in bright light using Parallels, IE and H.264 the picture is AMAZING. I will use the word 'Shocking' to describe how clear the picture is. Compared to Trendnet it is laughable how clearer the Panasonic picture is.
2. Web interface is great and is not limited for Mac users like Trendnet
3. The P/T is Very quick and much quieter compared to Trendnet
4. Unit size is very nice and the POE is well thought out.
Con
1. Night 'vision' is completely worthless. In the nursery with only a nightlight the TV-IP422W switches to a b&w view and we can see basic outlines, blanket vs child is a bit of a challenge. However, turn on the night vision IR's and you can. No switch to the panasonic setting next to the Trendnet, NOTHING. When I say nothing I mean, you can't see anything just a black room. No joke!
2. The range of the P/T is very limited and I haven't figured out how to zoom.
3. It appears H.264 compression improvements only work on IE and Windows. You do not see a benefit with H.264 on FireFox or Mac browsers.
4. I found it very difficult to setup on a Mac and feel free to leave comments if you are having trouble and I will see if I can help walk you through what I did
I received a 4 pack of Synology surveillance License and it works great. You can P/T and detection appears to work. I'm using the latest beta firmware on a Synology DS 409.
Final
Bright and I mean bright light the picture is amazing. Dusk the picture is not as good as the Trendnet and in very low light there is NO picture! If you have the need for Low Light pass on this camera! I also bought a 230a wireless and I used the same approach and was easy to set up and will put details in comment response. I'm returning the 230a as it doesn't work in low light of a nursery.
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Has been playing with this network camera for 3 days and here's my opinions:
1. Setup is easy. As long as your router support DHCP, it's just a matter of popping the setup CD and click on 'Camera discovery'.
2. Good built-in software. I have another Panasonic BL-C111A network camera and both of them can show up in the same page.
3. Need two ethernet cables separately: One goes to your switch and one goes to the camera. They both connect to a proprietary PoE injector.
4. Tons of features: Motion trigger, Time trigger, Upload images to ftp, send images by email, remote access, etc.
Let's talk about the image quality, as it's probably the thing most people are interested in learning. In short, if you need a camera for mission critical monitoring (business location, identify a thief, etc), this is probably not your camera. The sensor of this camera is only 1/4" CMOS, which means it will be performing badly in low light situations. If you are looking for a camera for your business, then get a camera that have sensor size of at least 1/3", those cameras cost at least $400 or more. However, for basic monitoring, or use it as a gadget, then I think it should be fine.
Comparing my older BL-C111A and this camera, I came to the conclusion they perform almost identical, i.e. suck in lowlight, decent in bright light conditions. For the BL-C210A though, the overall image is sharper but it also gives a lot of 'mosquitoes' noise. My older BL-C111A has a softer image, but with a lot less noise. So it really depends on your preference, I find the 'mosquitoes' noise annoying, even though the image is sharper.
Another thing is, they advertise this camera as 640x480 30fps capable. This is another one of those advertising gimmicks. The camera image looks the best when they are 320x240. In 640x480 mode, they just extrapolate or enlarge it from 320x240, hence, the noise is even more pronounced in 640x480 mode. You will not see any more details in 640x480 mode than you will in 320x240. But again, this is a $130 (or $180) camera, so this is to be expected. If you need more detail in your images, then consider a 1/3" sensor camera.
In conclusion, I think (just my IMHO) the image quality of this camera is no better or worse than generic Chinese made IP camera you can get on ebay (they all use 1/4" CMOS sensor). However, Panasonic wins out in terms of support and the software features/quality. I would give this camera a 3.5 star for the image quality, and a 4 star for the value.
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The MPEG-4 and H.264 are very clear (as clear as 640x480 can be). If you need more than 2 people to be able to watch it, you'll have to not use H.264. The MJPEG is quite a bandwidth hog on LAN, so if you expect to monitor this remotely you would best try to use the more efficient H.264 or at least MPEG-4.
If it bothers you to have to switch resolution every time you open it, then set it the way you want it (640x480, etc), then create a favorite and/or desktop icon with the big long address box contents and it will open that way every time.
The low light isn't spectacular but it's better than I get with my Logitech Pro 9000 webcam. It's better to see some things really grainy than to see nothing.
The zoom is client-side, you can see when others move the camera but not when others use the mouse wheel to zoom in, it's not an optical zoom..
The audio works great and there is a configuration for 3 microphone sensitivity levels. Programming the presets sent me to the manual but it's not hard once you see how to do it (the Program button above the presets, when logged in as admin).
I have not, and will not, install any included software, so my review is limited to what you can do just accessing the camera via a web browser.
I ordered several cases but this is by far the best selection I made. I cau use it while sitting or lying down.
