Sony SNC-M3W Pan/Tilt IP Wireless Network Camera w/Audio

Sounds like that last guy had a problem somewhere between the keyboard and his chair :)The sony cam has a great picture and sound. Problems - it has NO support from Sony what-so-ever. If you are like the last guy - then you need support every step of the way.Also you cannot plug this product into your website in any way.The other major issue is that it ONLY works with IE, not firefox or any other browser. Generally I would say I regret buying this camera.

I found this camera frustrating. I couldn't get it to initilize when I first got it. I ended up having to ship it back to get it reset. Once I got it back I was very frustrated in setting it up. I finally got it hooked up on the LAN but needed to set up the WLAN. That took some doing but eventually I got it running. I put the camera up and the picture quality is poor at best. I'm not sure if it's because it's wireless or just the camera itself. I was hoping for a much better picture.

Will do the job. Excellent compared to other wireless IP cameras available these days.

While the quality of the images can be a bit grainy at times, I stop and think about what is being accomplished here, transferring video through a LAN or a WAN wireless. Just 5 years ago this would have been cutting edge, but now it's becoming mainstream with the latest advancements in wireless technology. While the camera has it's flaws (uses wireless B, not G), its features in general will be able to accomplish the majority of the tasks you're probably looking for. Setup was pretty straight forward, but when you're trying to access through a WAN make sure that you add the port number at the end of the DDNS or your router IP, that wasn't real clear in the instructions.

Cool features about this product:
1. Being able to email a snapshot periodically using the "trigger" feature that is built in. One downside is it has a minimum of 1/2 hour for periodical email sending. Another downside is that this is available only in JPEG mode and not MPEG4 mode.

2. FTP client can be configured to send images anywhere. I setup my Macintosh as the ftp retriever and it drops a photo on my hard drive based on my settings and timestamps each one. Save a photo every second or one a day...real flexible ftp settings are available for this camera. Again, downside is that this is available only in JPEG mode and not MPEG4 mode.

3. Motion detection is available on this, but only in MPEG4 mode. If someone triggers the camera it will send you an email alerting you. A real nice feature if you have a cell phone with email capabilities. I set up an e-mail forward to point to my standard address and phone address.

4. Video recording software comes with this camera as well which allows you to schedule and eliminate older videos so you don't burn up valuable disk space. A nice feature is that you can automate removal of older movies you don't want anymore, and never have to worry about touching the files.

5. DDNS feature is nice. It gives you a sub domain to point to your router address e.g. http://domain.snccam.net:9000/. Note the 9000 at the end, that was the only way I could access the camera from outside of my LAN as I mentioned above (you can set the port to the more standard 80 too, the wizard throws the 9000 port by default though). If you have your own web hosting account with sub domain features you can even setup a landing page which would point to the port version making it even easier to remember.

6. You can set up user accounts and only let people in that you want. This is obviously a must. It also has advanced security settings to allow specific IP addresses only in the network.

7. Tilt and pan capabilities are nice. While they can be a bit sluggish and oversensitive at times, again I remember that we are talking wireless B and full video. I can deal with the sluggishness at this price.

The list goes on, this is a great camera for the price and all of the options you get. While it doesn't display on Macintosh (requires ActiveX), I can still control the settings from my Mac which is fine with me, majority of users are going to have a PC anyways. And as mentioned I can save all of my images to any server I want, it's not OS sensitive when it comes to ftp settings.

First and foremost -- the integrated web server requires ActiveX. Firefox, OSX, and Linux are out of luck.
I set up an ftp upload to a standard site but the frequency is limited to 1/sec and there's no way to control to pan & tilt.
In theory, I could store the video stream using the packaged software (which runs as a client app only) and then serve the MPEG4 using Darwin (yeah, right). In practice, the packaged software saves the MPEG4 stream in a new, strange format that I can't open with QuickTime.

Secondly, the setup software is essential and also Windows only -- there's no way to initialize the camera without this software (the network config page, interestingly, does work with Firefox, et al).

No problems connecting this to my Apple Base Station and manually opening the port.

Integrated Web Site looks great in Explorer 6.

If anyone has figured out how to stream with a normal browser please let me know.