Panasonic Bb Hcm715a Poe Indoor Megapixel at Amazon
| Most helpful customer reviews 14 of 14 people found the following review helpful. I am using the HCM715 as a security camera in a vacation home. So far, I am very impressed by the video quality and this alone is the reason why I would rate it 5-stars. I’ve tried 640×480 as well as 1280×960 and found that 640×480 works very well, with very accurate exposure, focus, and color fidelity. The auto-white balance takes a couple minutes to adjust when you first turn it on, but does a good job. Panning and Tilting on the HCM-715 is fast, smooth and accurate. Zooming is a little sluggish, but the quality is quite good, especially when EX mode is enabled. I did notice the camera slow down in Panning performance when zoomed in – not sure if this is intentional or not. The HCM-715 offers multiple options for streaming, MJPEG, MPEG4, and H.264. I’ve tried all, and found that they all do a good job at keeping up with motion, and all have good video quality. The difference is H.264 cuts network bandwidth by 30% as compared to MPEG4, so this is what you’d like to use if monitoring through the Internet. Unfortunately, H.264 seems to prevent the camera from setting triggers to be anything more than multiple JPEG’s, as there is no way to get the Panasonic software to email or transfer a movie of the triggering event when in this mode. So, for now, i’m going to have to utilize MPEG4 for monitoring and streaming. On the negative side, I’d say that Panasonic could have done a better job with their software. Right now, it consists of a bunch of ActiveX modules that have to be installed into Internet Explorer. So, if you’re using Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc, you aren’t going to have full functionality. Specifically, you are going to lose Audio and the ability to click on an area of the screen you’d like to inspect more closely, and have the camera recenter. I did have the opportunity to try it under Mac OSX/Safari, and even though it isn’t supported, did manage to be able to use the camera in all streaming modes, with the above limitation in terms of functionality. Also note that captured videos are in .ASF format, so in order to play them on a Mac with Quicktime, you’re going to need something like Flip4Mac. On Windows, the videos can be played through Windows Media Player. The other area Panasonic should take a look at is the packaging of the software and documentation. Right now, it is a bunch of different pieces, and not tied together as cohesively as you might expect. However, the bottom line is this is a terrific camera, with exceptional video performance and capabilities, especially considering the price point. 3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Some people complain that megapixel resolution is not available when other features are activated in the firmware, but I don’t see this as a big deal, because many Internet connections are limited in their upload speed anyway and cannot stream megapixel images smoothly. So I stick with 640×480 setting on all of my cameras, and I enable the extrazoom feature which performs picture cropping to give much better zoom ability without loss in the image quality. This thing has a built-in shock sensor, sound sensor, motion detection, microphone, auxilliary I/O terminal, PLUS the great image quality. There is a LOT packed into this small unit. The 735 model is basically identical to this 715 model except with a weatherproof plastic cover for the back. So far all of the 715s that I installed under sheltered roof eves are doing fine, even in sub zero freezing temps. Just don’t expose these to direct splashes or raindrops, in which case you’d need the 735 model. |
Excellent camera with superb video quality
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