The Foscam FI8905 is a wireless or wired IP camera solution for outdoor use. It combines a high quality digital video camera with network connectivity and a powerful web server to bring clear video to your desktop or smartphone from anywhere on your local network or over the Internet. The high quality video image is transmitted with 30fps speed on the LAN/WAN by using MJPEG hardware compression technology. The image resultion is 640 x 480 (300k Pixels). The Foscam FI8905 camera is based on the TCP/IP standard. The control, management and maintenance of the camera is done simply by using your browser to remotely configure and upgrade the firmware. The Foscam FI8905W IP camera can reach up to 30 meters of visibility in absolute darkness with 60 infrared LED’s.
$ 171.99
Best outdoor camera for the bucks. Pretty easy to setup too!,
I usually don’t write review on Amazon but I specifically want to spend some time to review this product. So, I was looking into an outdoor camera for my house, after much research, I decided to get Foscam for their quality and value. I saw in this review, there are a lot of people having problem setting up their camera which includes an IT guy. I’m myself an IT guy so I was kinda worry when I saw that kind of feedback from other IT guy.
So after I order and received this camera, I got it working right away and set wireless, virtual server (port forwarding), giving dynamic DNS, etc. in about 30 mins. I don’t even install the included software. Seems pretty straight forward to me. So here’s the step I did.
1. Plug the camera using the power supply to an outlet and the CAT5 cable to the back of your router.
2. Go to your router backend (usually 192.168.0.1), login and see from status if there’s a new device attached to it (the camera name itself as “UNKNOWN” or simply no name), you should see some IP like 192.168.0.101, etc.
3. To test it, go to the IP you see on the browser ex. […] – if it loads up then you are good!
4. Then you login to the camera backend interface as “admin” with no password, from there I setup my WiFi
5. You need to click scan twice in order to saw the access point list, once it show up, choose your connection and put in your WEP or WPA key if you have your WiFi secured then hit submit
6. To test your WiFi, just disconnect the CAT5 cable and then the power supply then reconnect it again. Wait for a little while and go back to your router management website and see if there’s any new Wireless device connected.
7. Once you see the new wireless device, write down the IP and try to connect using your browser.
8. After that you can use DHCP reservation to make sure your camera have static private IP. Remember: Wireless and Wired connection have different MAC address so make sure you reserve the correct one (you should be able to see the MAC address for wireless and wired at the back of your camera, top right is for wireless)
9. Setup a virtual server / port forwarding so anytime you want to access the camera from the Internet anywhere in the world, you could do that. For example, forward any port 7000 to your camera IP ex. 192.168.0.101 and port 80. Then setup a dynamic DNS from your router so it will be easier to remember (most router should support it, I know my DIR-601 does). If not, then you can setup up the dynamic DNS within that camera itself.
10. Setup your mail settings / FTP settings from the camera backend, remember you have to hit submit first after you enter the information BEFORE you can hit the test button.
11. I have tried using motion detection and it send out to my email just fine.
I guess that’s it. I think it took me longer to write this review than setting up the camera but I hope you guys can learn more from this.
Some people may deduct 1 start because the manual is almost useless and written with poor English. But any IT guy should be able to do it without even reading the manual. The product itself is great and the night vision is awesome (I just wish there’s a switch to turn off the night vision so it doesn’t show glowing red at night when I don’t want to use it).
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|Avoid this Camera,
I must say I’ve read all of the other reviews before purchasing this, so I was warned. Unfortunately, I still had questions after reading the reviews and the only way to answer them was to have a camera in hand.
THe FOSCAM camera brand is not all bad; the indoor cameras are quite worth the money and function superbly. This OUTDOOR camera, however, is one to avoid.
It wasn’t particularly difficult to install. All the other reviewers focus on the network setup. I’ll say only you have to know your way around your router to be able to make this work wirelessly. No step-by-step procedures from me: they’re avialable elsewhere.
My complaint is twofold: the design of the camera and the quality.
As the camera is supposed to be an outdoor camera, I give it an “F” for design. It has a huge tri-purpose cable leaving the back of the camera that cannot be disconnected from the camera. On top of that, it has a massive ethernet jack at the end to plug in to the computer, a jack to connect the decidely INDOOR power supply and a reset button (all connected to the cable). The idea is that you run this all-weather cable INTO your house and if you need to connect to it later you can do it. My question is, How?
I would rather have an easy way to DISCONNECT the cable from the camera and BRING IT INSIDE than have to haul a computer up to my attic to plug it in. Also, I had to drill a 1.25 inch HOLE in the facia to get this monster connector through. Poor poor poor design.
The second complaint is quality. The camera is only 30 feet from the router yet it updates maybe every 3-5 seconds. Not really video as much as a lot of stills. It also has a very narrow field of view that, when mounted under the eaves of my two story house (all the way to the side of the house) it barely allows visibility to the front door stoop centered on the front of the house. To cover my front door and the approach, I actually need 2 or 3 cameras. Very disappointing.
After having it only 2 weeks it also appears to be failing now – not connecting on the network despite many trip up to the attic to press the conveniently located “reset” button.
The fact is, I ordered the two-pack of the camera and one is working like a champ (but 50{fa0f407a56ebf26e8755ec9e145523374db89e13015bb27dc750b111d8cc035c} is still an ‘F’ in my book) – although it has inaccessible cable connection because of the difficulty in running the wire into the house (I actually have it connected to a LONG extension cord that hangs down the side of the house into a backyard socket – but I had to DUCT TAPE the indoor power supply to make it all weather.)
I don’t know the answer to your question of “What kind of outdoor security camera should I buy”, because I’m still looking. The FOSCAM Outdoor Camera didn’t meet my expectations and unless you have VERY unique and convenient mounting requirements, you’ll be disappointed too.
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|nice cameras for the price,
Setup requires you to connect via ethernet, and find the IP address of the camera (If you run windows, they provide a utility for this step). I had to access my router to get the IP address of the camera.
The UI is fairly straightforward for setup, and is very responsive. It would be nice if the documentation described the APIs that are used on the camera to make settings changes so one could script them, but this isn’t difficult to figure out if you know what you’re doing (I needed to change the brightness settings from daytime to nighttime automatically).
The mounts supplied with the cameras get the job done, but are a little flimsy, relying on friction from drawing two opposing plates together against a ball joint to prevent movement. I had to use a small pliers to get the mount to a point where it was not moving.
While the housing itself seems quite weatherproof, there are several connectors that hang off the unit, ethernet, reset, sound, power, and I am unclear as to the suitability of those connectors to weather exposure. In my application, however, I can get those connectors to a dry place.
The antennas on these units are fixed at a right angle. They can only be adjusted by rotating the mounting nut. There are other brands of this type of camera that allow the mounting nut to be fully tightened but still allow the antenna to rotate on two axis for best signal strength.
The IR emitters are quite bright, but are narrowly focused. With the 6mm lens that shipped with my cameras (I was expecting the 3.6mm lenses) the field of view would be completely illuminated by the emitters. With the 2.8mm lenses I have since installed in the units, there is a very distinct illuminated circle in the center of my image at night. This is no fault of the camera, as the 2.8mm lens is well outside the design parameters of the camera.
For me, the cameras shipped with outdated firmware. Foscam’s website has an update available but to get it you must enter your email address and sign up for their newsletter via email; they then email you the links to the firmware update. Seems kind of scummy to me, firmware updates should be freely downloadable from the website without having to agree to get newsletter spam.
Cameras that do what these do, from brand name sources, cost upwards of $300 and don’t have much better image quality from what I’ve seen.
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