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| Product: Axis 2100 Network Camera |
Company: Axis Communications |
| Web: www.axis.com |
Phone: 408-730-0270 |
| Platform: Ethernet-based LAN or Windows PC |
SRP: US$470
Street Price: $400 |
Cred Rating: | Special Award:
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The Axis 2100 Network Camera is a unique piece of tech. When I first saw it, I assumed it was just another webcam. When I read what was inside, I became much more interested.
The biggest difference between the Axis and your average webcam is that the Axis isn't designed to attach to your computer -- it attaches to your network. The camera has an Ethernet port on the back so you can plug it into a home or office LAN and access it from any computer on the network. You also have the option of using the included null modem cable to attach it to your computer's serial port if your PC is not on a network. This review focuses on the LAN option, since that was what attracted me, and the feature that the cam is marketed under.
The box for the Axis says it's "the only true 'Plug & Watch' Network Camera available," and though setup is relatively painless, implying "plug-n-play" is a bit of a stretch. First, you need to give the camera its own IP address. I installed it on my home network, so I simply picked a number out of a hat, but if you're interested in using the camera down on the cube farm, you're going to have to "acquire" a usable IP address from your company's network guru. Armed with the address, the next step is to use a computer on the network to tell the camera its address using a DOS command (or the Windows software that you can download from Axis' website).
From here, you can now access the camera's Web interface from any computer on the net, which brings us to the Axis 2100's second biggest departure from typical webcams. The Axis doesn't just take pretty pictures -- it runs an embedded version of Linux and a tiny personal Web server. To get to it, you simply type its IP address into your browser. If you've set it up to use a password, you'll be prompted to enter that before you can get to the Web-based interface. From there, you can change all of the cam's settings, and most importantly, view live video piped directly from the camera to your browser. And when I say video, I don't mean a jerky, chunky, postage-stamp-sized excuse for video. With the assistance of a browser plug-in, the Axis can deliver 320 x 240 video at 10 frames per second. Not Hollywood, but the image quality is certainly a refreshing difference from most webcams on the consumer market. You can bump the resolution up to 640 x 480, but once you do, the frame rate drops to 6fps.
Aside from boosting image quality, there are tons of things you can do from the 2100's Web-based control panel. You can adjust the camera's focus, manage usernames and passwords, change how the image is displayed and access lots of online help. However, it's in these menus that we find the first of the Axis cam's minor flaws (which we'll discuss below).
The "Image" tab in the control panel is where you adjust image resolution and quality. One of the best features of this panel is that you can adjust for room lighting conditions. I chose the "Fluorescent Light" setting and the image looked 100% better than it did on the default setting. From here, you can also change the image orientation (e.g. flip it upside down if your cam is mounted on the ceiling), the date/time display and the caption. The captioning is a sore point for me 'cause it only allows you to type in 15 characters, not even long enough for a URL. So what's the point?
Perhaps the most important control is the "Application" tab. While viewing images from the cam over your local network is great, it doesn't do you much good when you're out of the office or away from home. From this tab, you can configure the Axis 2100 to send scheduled images to a specified email address or FTP account. There are a good number of options here. You can set it up to send an image every second (which isn't really practical) or once a week. Unfortunately, this is where one of the Axis cam's biggest (fatal?) flaws comes into focus. Trying to use the FTP option, I encountered a world o' trouble. To begin with, I told the scheduler to upload an image to my website every two minutes. I set up a simple Web page with a two-minute refresh rate so that the image would automatically update if I left the window open. Anywhere from once every 10 refreshes to every other refresh, I saw my browser's broken image icon. When I increased the frequency to every 30 seconds, I got broken images more often than not. I tried this on two different servers and got the same result. From what I could tell, there was some sort of problem with the upload process, but I couldn't find any way of fixing it. When I talked to Axis's tech support , I was told that this problem had never been reported before. While I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, testing on two different servers with standard configurations should have produced at least one successful setup.
Even with the Axis 2100's shortcomings, I think products like this have a lot of potential. If you already have a network running in your home or workplace, and want to keep an eye on the kids or your employees, a product like this could easily stand in for a dedicated CCTV (closed circuit) system or the like (easily justifying the US$400 price tag). The bottom line for the majority of users is that, while the Axis takes excellent quality pictures (and even video), it's a bit of feature overkill if you're simply looking for a solid, high-quality webcam.
- Jordan Running [6/26/01]
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