Rob Thompson

If you’ve ever searched on eBay or Google for IP-based camera security things, you’ve undoubtedly seen advertisements for these little plastic USB camera servers called the iCAMView. I finally got curious about these things and ordered one off eBay. I’ll admit, they’re really impressive. One of the downfalls of many IP-based cameras and camera servers is always the software. In general, you get what you pay for in this regard. However, the iCAMView device software is excellent.

The one thing that grabbed my attention about the iCAMView is that they recently released a new version of the device called the “iCAMView Pro”, which can use higher resolution USB cameras. Image resolution is one of my pet peeves and largely why I generally choose to stay away USB-based camera servers.

http://icamview.com/

Once I started testing the device, a few things caught my eye. First, there is an option to automatically reboot the device at a specified interval. Most manufacturers of these things have some ridiculous idea that their devices will stay running indefinitely, without rebooting. I’ve tested many IP camera devices and they universally eventually lock up or start running slow. At least the iCAMView people were humble enough to add this option.

Secondly, you can plug a USB storage device into the thing for local storage. It even manages old files and deletes them when the storage hits a user-specified limit. This is another thing they added to the software to make the device a “set it and forget it” camera server.

Third, it’s fast! I don’t know how they manage to put a full web server packed with features such as motion detection in such as small package, but it’s amazing how responsive the web interface is, even when it’s actively capturing photographs.

Fourth, it supports many wireless USB dongles and even supports WEP encryption/keys.

Overall, the device is very impressive and well worth a look. It has user upgradable firmware and I’ll soon be testing the higher resolution USB cameras with it.