This Foscam FI8910W review is for anyone who is looking for a decent quality pan and tilt camera with some seriously cool features. Personally, I use it as a baby monitor on the local network as well as remotely. The Foscam currently sells on Amazon for $62 bucks which is a very good deal for the features that comes with it. I’ve got lucky with Amazon warehouse deals and got the camera for $40, A bang for my buck I would say. You are looking to get decent quality video and two way audio with this package. Two way audio allows you to speak through the camera as well as listen. The pan and tilt feature works flawlessly and it is very silent compared to other pan and tilt cameras on the market. And yes, you can pan and tilt the camera remotely, I’ve had a few laughs at my house while doing this. The night vision is very good also and you can see persons from 24 feet away.
There is no software needed to view the camera at home or remotely, you can do so through internet explorer. There are also apps available for iPhone’s and Android phones to view the stream; i will discuss more on that in the upcoming articles. However, if you plan to record clips to a computer, you will need to purchase the Blue Iris software from Amazon. I am not very pleased with the setup instructions that came with the camera. This Foscam FI8910W review will help you handle the setup issues much better.
Unboxing & Setting Up The Foscam FI8910W
Foscam comes with an Ethernet cable, power adapter, setup booklet and the mount with screws. You will need the Ethernet cable to configure the camera, if you are setting it up for wireless access. First, plug your camera directly into your router using the Ethernet cable and power it up. Second, put the included CD in your computer and open the setup file, this is used to find the camera on your network. The program will now list the IP addresses of the Foscam’s on your network. You can now copy this address into the internet explorer and go to the camera’s admin panel. The default username will be admin and leave the password field blank.
Once logged in, you want to click on device management. First we will create user accounts on the camera by going to User Settings. I’ve created different accounts for family members as I will be able to log who is viewing the camera everyday. Once you have done that, go into wireless LAN settings to connect to your WiFi network. Click on scan to find all of the WiFi networks available, select yours and enter the username, password and encryption method for your WiFi network. If you are unsure about the encryption standard, you can obtain this information from your router’s admin panel.
Now you can unplug the camera from the wired network, if everything is setup correctly it will work on your WiFi network. If the IP address have changed after connecting to the WiFi you can use the software that came with the CD again to find your camera’s current IP address. To keep a static IP address for your camera see related posts below on (Static IP and port forwarding).
Foscam FI8910W Review | Tweaking Your Foscam
Once you have made the connection of your choice, you want to do a few tweaks to get the best of your camera, go into Pan & Tilt settings and set the PT speed to 2, this allows for a much smoother pan and tilt experience. Next go into DDNS service settings and enable either the manufacturer’s DDNS or sign up for your own. This allows you to have a URL address to your camera from the outside world. This also ties your internal camera network address to your internet provider’s IP address. You still have to do port forwarding for this to work and access your camera from anywhere in the world. We will go into detail on port forwarding in the next Foscam FI8910W review article (see related posts below). Next we will configure email notification for any motion that is detected. You can input your Gmail username and password in the authentication part as well as set your sender and receiver email. You can leave everything else similar to how I have it setup.
If you would like to setup an ftp server for your camera image uploads, you can do so in the “FTP service settings” tab. I have my own FTP server at home so I have used that, personally I use the Xlight FTP Pro. You can setup a free home FTP service using Filezilla server as well. There is also a free ftp site online called FTP Live, I don’t have any experience using their service so i can’t validate the quality of service they provide. I set my camera to upload images at 10 second intervals.
Next we will turn on the motion detection feature to work with either email, FTP server or both. Go into your Alarm Service settings and enable motion detection and set sensitivity. You can lower the sensitivity if you don’t want to capture a lot of unwanted shots. Now you can enable options to send images via email or ftp uploads which we setup earlier.
I hope our Foscam FI8910W review gave you some insight into the setup. Now you can sit back, enjoy and play around with your Foscam on your computer.You can also turn the IR off and on from the control panel. See related posts below for viewing your Foscam FI8910W via mobile phones. Stay tuned for upcoming articles, where we will discuss the best apps to view your Foscam remotely through iPhone and Android phones.
