IP391W Outdoor Wireless Waterproof Bullet IP/Network Security Surveillance Camera, Support Smart Phone Remote View, Screen Capture, with 10m Night Vision, Motion Detection with Instant Alert

If you don't want to read all of this, skip to the summation at the bottom ...Update 24 July 2014.The cameras are still working as good as the day I deployed them, so as far as that goes everything I say about the cameras themselves below still holds. I give up on trying to figure out what's going on with the price, I won't buy any of these at more than the $55 I paid for them originally.Update 31 May 2014.The price has changed AGAIN. As of today the price of this camera is back down (barely) below $60.00. At THAT price this camera is a good deal IF the internal components are the same as the camera(s) I bought before and reviewed below. I've always been suspicious of reviewers who seem excessively suspicious ... but there's something weird going on with these cameras and this seller. I don't monitor the price of these cameras daily, I just check back every couple weeks to see what the price is now, after seeing the price of these cameras jump all over the place. The thing is, if you didn't know any better and I didn't do that you might have bought a truck load (well, probably not that many) when the price peaked out and never have been aware of the pricing fluctuations on this item. If you don't see a price of $60 or less on these, check back in a week or two and you might get lucky.Update 12 May, 2014.The price has changed AGAIN. As of today it's $65. THE CAMERAS I BOUGHT ARE GOOD CAMERAS AT A PRICE OF $55- You're taking a risk on them at anything more than that. The fact that the vendor keeps changing the price is very, very suspicious. It is very unlikely that the quality of the components in the cameras have improved and a higher price than I originally paid for them is not justifiable. The way the price of these cameras is bouncing around it would not surprise me to learn that the components inside the camera housing are being switched around and that probably is not an indication of anything becoming higher quality. More likely the exact opposite.Update 04 May, 2014.The price on these has changed AGAIN. Now it's ten dollars less than what it was two days ago. As of today it's $70. Two days ago it was $80. When I bought them they were $55. There's something weird going on with these cameras, this seller, or both. Just in case, I've saved my review on my computer and I'll be watching for this product listing to disappear and reappear with new pricing and reviews. If that happens, or if the price on these cameras keeps wandering up and down and never goes back to what I bought them for I'll bring the situation to the attention of the powers that be at Amazon. Because this is really weird for a price to jump around this much this often. I bought these cameras less than a month ago and they were $55 each.Update 02 May, 2014.I now have five of these cameras in operation and I'm very satisfied with them. Nothing has changed as far as the cameras themselves are concerned and everything I say below in my original review stands regarding the cameras.What is disconcerting is that I wrote the below review and bought these cameras when they were selling at $54.99 each. At that price, they're a heck of a good deal. At the current $80 price as I write this update not so great a deal at all. That's almost a 50% increase in price which NOW makes them no more attractive than any other camera in the new price range. You can get new Foscam exterior cameras for just a couple dollars more if you look for them. This is significant for anyone buying cameras for either a new system or to expand an existing camera system because what I originally paid for 5 cameras will now only buy you 4 with change left over. That, in my opinion, is a serious pricing differential for the same product.I don't know if the seller(s) were letting this camera hit the market cheap to build a reputation or what their purpose is in this huge price hike, but as far as I'm concerned these are $55 cameras not $80 cameras and would advise people to do some serious comparison and bargain shopping among better known brands before buying these Tenvis cameras.The thing about ANY new brand name of IP cameras is the longevity factor. I'll never buy WansView or HooToo cameras again because I've had them fail for no apparent reason while operating in environments and conditions that other cameras of similar cost have yet to fail after many years of service. At $55 each these Tenvis cameras were an acceptable gamble but that is no longer the case.I've been running IP cameras for about 7 years now and I've seen some evolutions in the products and the market. Some brands steadily improve while the price steadily declines. As people buy more of that brand and the brand sells more units they turn some of that money back into improving their product while lowering the price to reflect greater sales and lower per-unit production costs. These products become more competitive and better products over time.I have ALSO seen situations where a very good product is offered in it's original release to market but the quality decreases over time. After establishing a good reputation in a very competitive market the makers get greedy and start using cheaper components while the price tries to mirror better products like I described in the previous paragraph. Sometimes the manufacturers of these lower quality products will take advantage of the better products reputation by buying the same housing or case from the same source as the good cameras use. As volume goes up the factories that make the housing or case charge less per unit also. The makers of poorer quality cameras buy the same exterior components but put cheaper interior components in that housing or case and their own brand on the outside. This is where a review system like Amazon really shines because it's hard to pull that particular form of gouging and get away with it for long.This is an extremely serious issue and should be considered carefully when buying ANYTHING made in China. Some Chinese manufacturers have learned to use a good business model that sells well in America and so steadily improve their product while lowering the cost per-unit to remain competitive. Some Chinese manufacturers simply take advantage for short term gains and don't care about long term business models. Caveat Emptor applies in spades to Chinese products.So either these Tenvis cameras were seriously under-priced when I bought them OR there is an attempt at market and consumer manipulation occurring here. Those are the only two possible explanations for a 50% price increase- everything else being equal*. Only time will tell if these cameras have the quality and durability to be worth that higher price. If you need several cameras at one time you would be wise to hold off a year or two on these cameras at $80 to see what the reviews are regarding longevity.If these cameras begin failing even at the $55 price I paid for them I'll be back to let everyone know in this review.(* There are other factors, when a typhoon decimated factories in Taiwan that make hard drives and RAM the prices soared until sufficient production came back online to fill the demand and bring the prices back down. Market scarcity is a driving factor in pricing also but I'm not aware of anything like that which would apply to these cameras.)(Edited 14 Apr. 2014) I liked these cameras enough, and I liked the price of them enough, that I bought three more of them to replace failed/aging/nearing failure cameras. That makes a total of 5 of these I have on my system. There were no duds, no DOAs, no defects and no differences in any of them. All five are up and running well within their designed parameters. The color on these is far superior to some older Foscams I have running. The old Foscams don't have IR cut so for instance anything with green chlorophyll (plants) looks a purplish pink color. These cameras show color very close to what my eyes see. Because these cameras are positioned and aimed with care there is no more auto-exposure flashing than with any other of my cameras, even those that cost almost twice as much as these did. Auto-exposure flashing or pulsing is a common problem with cameras that view bright sunlight and dark shadow but these cameras are handling it as well as anything else I have. I'm still convinced this was a good value for the money.Original Review-I bought two of these and deployed them yesterday, so I cannot speak to longevity yet. If there's any issue in that regard I'll come back and amend my review.For the money this camera is as good as any other outdoor camera I have in the $100 and less price range. I use Blue Iris software for an NVR (Network Video Recorder) program and have used it for years. I can't recommend Blue Iris highly enough, it's great software and it's highly configurable. For all it does it's also very cheap, less than the price of a single camera as a rule. I'm running 18 cameras at the moment. The cameras include Foscams, Wansviews, Trendnet, ZoneNet, LofTeK and others. So I've got a bit of experience with cameras in this general area.The only complaint I have with my Tenvis cameras so far is the field of view. The FOV could be wider and wider would definitely be better. Other than that they're doing just fine.I don't know if some of the reviews of this camera are for an older model or not but my cameras have really good color and IR images. When I say "really good" I mean the color is very close to true and the resolution is adequate for this kind of camera.I have one mounted on my front porch (to watch for packages delivered to my home and catch anyone messing with them, to see who's at the door, etc.) which is facing a brick wall 20 feet away at the end of the porch by the door. The colors of the bricks are easily discernible, the lines in the mortar between the bricks are clear and sharp, I can see individual leaves on a tree about 35 feet from the camera, the image is very good in daylight for a camera in this class. The IR image at night OF COURSE doesn't show true color, it shows the shades of gray reflected from the IR emitters. Blue jeans look white for instance. All infrared cameras are like this and I have no complaints with the IR cut feature of the cameras.At this price point you're making some compromises. You're not going to get high definition studio quality video from a camera like this so if that's what you're expecting then you need to spend about 5x or more on each camera. Better but not true hi-def images can be had from cameras costing 2-3x as much. For my purposes I can live with a lower quality standard definition image and get more cameras which means more views by buying cheaper cameras rather than a single, expensive high end camera. If I had to pay $250 -$500 per camera at 18 cameras now online it would have cost me somewhere between $4500 and $9000 in cameras alone so far. As things stand now I have a little under $1000 invested in working cameras which I have bought over a period of appx. 5 years.Another thing to consider when designing your own camera system is bandwidth. A high quality image takes up a lot more of your available network capacity. It's not a big deal if you are only ever going to have one or two cameras working at a time. If you're going to have a lot of cameras working at the same time it becomes a very big deal very quickly. If I were running 18 - 20 high definition cameras I would need a complete separate network with it's own hard wired cables because that much load on my network would render it useless for anything else and might even be too much for that many high definition cameras even with nothing else running on the network.The viewing software that comes with any of these cameras is next door to useless. I don't care which brand you're using, they're all flaky. That's as it should be because the market for these cameras is very tight, if they came with better software they would cost more. If they cost more people wouldn't buy them. If people wouldn't buy them then the point of bundling better software becomes null. If you want really good video capture and recording buy software that does that exclusively.You need computing power to run a bunch of cameras. The more cameras the more computer it takes to handle them well. My system is an eight core processor overclocked on water to 4.5 GHz with a 4.8 GHz turbo and 32 GB of RAM. It doesn't even breath hard running 18 cameras and Blue Iris so you don't really need a super computer you just need enough computer.Which are more of the reasons I really like Blue Iris. It does a good job of utilizing the available computer hardware without overloading it with bloat. It will handle pretty much any camera I care to attach to my system. This allows me to shop for cameras and buy the cheapest ones that are suitable for the places I need them. I have a couple of older $25 cameras on indoor views and they don't even have wireless functions. I have several outdoor cameras of several different brands also. Blue Iris also allows me to access my camera system on my Android (they have an iPhone app too) from anywhere AND control the whole system from my phone. I have a fairly elaborate configuration so I won't go into all the details but I can walk out my door, arm the camera system using my phone and it acts exactly like a burglar alarm. Blue Iris allows me to configure a "profile" specifically for this purpose. Certain cameras that should not otherwise be detecting motion will then call my phone, send me text messages on my phone, and/or email my phone with video and still pictures of what triggered the recording. If I wanted to I could call the police and report a burglary, save video of the culprits in action, and sit down the street telling the cops exactly what the burglars are doing and what room they're in at that moment. I have a system in place to keep them from disabling the video but this is already a very lengthy review so I'll skip that unless someone asks in the comments.Another nice thing about using software like Blue Iris is you only have to configure it alone to be accessible from the internet, not multiple cameras. It will let you access all your cameras from one connection ...A camera built to withstand outdoor conditions is going to be more expensive than an indoor camera which is why I was so happy to find these Tenvis cameras at this price. No matter what you pay, having the camera outside is going to put a strain on it. It's an electronic device sitting out in the rain, snow, heat, wind etc. They die eventually from all kinds of issues so the less I spend on them the less ticked-off I am when I need to replace one that's gone belly-up from being outside.I mentioned cameras without wireless capabilities a paragraph or two back. Generally speaking I don't care if cameras have wireless or not, I'm never going to use wireless except as a backup if I can help it. I'm a systems engineer with 30 years in the IT field and I don't care what anyone else tells you, using wireless for a video stream (ESPECIALLY multiple streams) is just asking for failures. Wireless standards are more of a suggestion than they are mandatory. The variations in various wireless systems are huge. Many, many things can mess up a wireless signal and especially a signal carrying a video stream. Wireless is just a radio signal, I'm also a Ham operator and know a thing or two about radio transmission problems. Wireless networking is just not as good as wired networking and it's never going to be as good because wireless devices will never have the transmission power to make it as good.Just because you can connect with a wireless device and send email doesn't mean you can connect with a camera and send video, it's not the same thing at all. In order to get usable video at useable resolutions you need rock solid packet transfers on your network. Wireless will rarely provide that and will almost never provide it without adding more equipment than just wirelessly connecting a camera to your home router. So avoid wireless connections like the plague and when you absolutely MUST use wireless then think about using wireless repeaters and range extenders rather than the built in wireless devices like these IP cameras come with. There just is no way at the current state of technology to make a wireless connection as reliable as a wired connection.All my cameras except 3 are hardwired with Cat5e or Cat6 Ethernet cable. The three that are not are under the roof of the gazebo at my pool and they're hardwired to a wireless repeater that cleans up, boosts and regulates the signal much better than any little chips in cameras like these ever will. Meaning I'm not using the wireless function of the cameras themselves. I have that handed off to a device that does it better than the cameras. Even so, I'll eventually string some cable out to the gazebo or use a power line Ethernet adapter out there. Power line adapters run somewhere between wireless and Cat5e/6 cable for reliability and functionality depending on the condition of the electrical wiring you plug them into.The reason I went into all of that wireless stuff is because I see a lot of people complaining about connecting these and other cameras wirelessly. It's most likely not the camera's fault. It's much more likely that there are environmental issues or wireless standard incompatibilities. That camera I described on my front porch is only about 6 feet from the wireless router. It gets a signal of 2 - 3 bars strength but remember- strength and quality are different things. My phone gets about the same signal strength from that router in that position. That's not a very good signal for transmitting a video stream and video on my phone jumps, lurches and disconnects the same as the camera does. That signal has to traverse an interior wall full of electrical wiring in the vicinity of two fluorescent light fixtures and a brick wall at an angle that makes the wall appear TO THE RADIO SIGNAL like it's about 4 feet thick. Radio signals travel in a straight line like a bullet, it's called "line of sight". If you draw an imaginary line from the camera antenna to your router antenna note the thickness of the material it has to pass through AT THAT ANGLE. Also note duct work, wiring, light fixtures, and anything else that will interfere with passing a radio signal and you'll probably see why your wireless connection is so bad. So don't expect the laws of physics to be transcended by a tiny little weak wireless networking signal, it's not going to happen.If you can configure and connect your camera wirelessly when it's sitting on the (desk, table, whatever) in the same room as your router but it disconnects constantly when you mount it where you want it, this is probably the reason why.This camera does NOT have pan/tilt/zoom or voice capabilities and the product description doesn't say it does. I see several comments by one person asking that question.You need to know how to "find" the camera on your network. Even if you know your subnet (like 192.168.0.x or 10.0.0.x) there are still 255 possible IP addresses that the camera can use. It will take you all day to go through all the permutations possible. If you don't know your LAN subnet you'll never find the camera. So furtunatly these cameras come with software to find and configure the IP address of the camera. Follow the directions, they're not hard. If you find those directions insurmountable then IP cameras are not something you should be buying in the first place. If you don't know what "IP" stands for in "IP Camera" then my advice is to either avoid IP cameras or get some help from someone who understands such things.The directions are fairly well written and easy to follow. This is somewhat rare for lower priced goods coming from China. It looks to me like Tenvis actually hired someone who writes English reasonably well to do the manual and instructions.All cameras will "flicker" in certain bright light conditions. This is the automatic exposure trying to adjust itself. This will be especially a problem if you have the camera pointed at something really bright (like a white concrete driveway or a white car on a sunny day) and also in view of the camera is something really dark, like shade from a tree or a building. The auto-exposure gets confused about which to adjust for. Some cameras do this more and some do it less. I have cameras that will only do it for a few seconds before locking the exposure to brighter or darker and I have cameras that will do it all day on a sunny day. You should not configure cameras that have to deal with that kind of situation to automatically notify you when they trigger, you'll get a lot of false alarms. Try to position and aim the camera so that it's either looking at a bright field or a dark field. My porch is in shadow all day, that's a dark field. In late afternoon the sun shines on the porch, that's a light field. At the transition point between dark and light and depending on the time of year no matter what camera I put there will flicker more or less. This is not a malfunction in the cameras. If it's an issue then it's a malfunction in the understanding of the camera owner/operator.As far as remote access goes, you can do as you like but it will be a cold day in the hot place before I use DDNS (Dynamic Domain Name Service) from a Chinese manufacturer running on a DNS server in China or under control of the Chinese. You have NO idea what kind of back door they may have built into anything electronic including these cameras. For all you know the cameras can be accessed through that DDNS routing. If you use their DDNS they have your routing (they know where your camera is on the internet and how to get to it) and all they needed to do is put a blind Admin user and password in the firmware that you can't see and don't know about. My cameras do NOT talk to the internet, they talk to Blue Iris and Blue Iris talks to the internet. The cameras themselves are blocked from any internet access at my firewall. I use DynDNS . org and a free account for a dynamic DNS service. It's an American company with their servers in America and it is NOT under control of the Chinese manufacturer of these or any other cameras or electronic devices.Although these (and any other similar) cameras are outdoor rated cameras, try to locate them in as sheltered a spot as you can when you mount them. The more sun and rain/snow you can keep off of an outdoor camera the longer it will last and the better it will work. It's not always possible to do that and still get the view from the camera that you need to have but do put some thought into where you're going to put them. The hardest thing on the electronic components is heat, so try to avoid mounting them where they will be in hot, bright sunlight all day long if you can. Besides being hard on electronics heat causes air to expand, which creates positive pressure. Some air will leak out of the camera housing when this happens. Then at night when the camera cools down the air inside it contracts- as the dewpoint comes up the camera will be exposed to moisture or moist air and will have a negative internal pressure. Meaning it will suck moist air in from outside the camera housing. It may do this very little at first but as the seals age it will do it more and more. I've opened up failed cameras and poured water out of the camera housing. More shelter is better, less heat fluctuation is better, less exposure to moisture is better. You get the idea, I'm sure.To sum this all up-Positives:1. Good, usable video in colors very close to what the eye sees in daylight.2. Good, usable video in shades of gray to about 30 feet while in infrared mode at night.3. A really good price.4. Easy to install with the included camera-finding software. If you're using DHCP on the camera then the IP can change when the camera is powered off. You need to set a static IP on your local LAN for cameras.5. No problem for someone with modest networking skills and a basic working knowledge of networks to set up. Easier by far than many other cameras, especially those manufactured a couple years or more ago. If you understand the terms and language in this review then you should have little trouble if any.6. Clear, easy to follow instructions (which I read after I deployed the cameras but did not use).7. Reasonable expectations will yield reasonable results with these cameras.8. The mounting bracket is exceptionally well constructed for this kind of camera. It tightens down and holds the camera very rigidly.9. So far I have no serious issues with them. So far there is nothing about these cameras that will keep me from buying more of them.10. While there are certainly cameras that generate a better image available on the market, there are no cameras that I'm aware of that yield video this good at this price. The saying goes "You get what you pay for" and in this case you do actually get a good value for what you're paying.Negatives:1. The field of view is pretty narrow. This could have been corrected by the manufacturer using a lens that has been ground to provide a wider angle view. There is no significant difference in the cost of one lens over another. A lens ground to provide a wider field of view will also distort some of the image accordingly. That's probably why they didn't use a wider angle lens- because people would complain about distortion. I could live with some distortion to cover more area.2. The power/wired networking pigtail (cable) is VERY short. It's only about a foot and a half or so long. Because of where I positioned the two cameras I bought this was not an issue but it certainly could be depending on where you intend to place the camera(s). I.E. if you're going to put them on the side of a house where there's no access to the interior in the immediate vicinity of the camera you're going to have to make a hole to put the cable through. Not a small hole either, it's going to have to be about 1.5 - 2 in. in diameter for the square network plug to fit through. Other cameras I've bought in the past had a good 4 feet or more in cable length so they could be mounted near a corner and the cable snaked around to a soffit vent. This part of the camera system has the power connector, the wired network connector and a reset button on it and should not be directly exposed to weather. Bear that in mind when considering these cameras. I don't care about holes as I'm not ever going to move from where I am, but you might care.3. Apparently the wireless function cannot be completely disabled. This can be problematic because the cameras "see" each others wifi signal and list those signal sources as choices in the wireless connection list of options. So if you have two cameras in close proximity with two separate views (like on the corner of a building) then the cameras can be misconfigured to connect to each other, making the connection useless. This is also an issue because the more wireless traffic the greater the wireless congestion becomes. If you don't need the wireless functions and have the cameras hardwired via Ethernet then this causes unnecessary congestion and confusion. Confusion because it took me a while to figure out what was going on with my wireless system. Confusion because I had a wireless repeater in the vicinity that would connect to the cameras (causing a loop, which rendered the wireless signal useless)instead of the wireless base station it should have been connecting to- because the proximity of the cameras created a stronger signal that the repeater defaulted to. The cameras almost act like wireless repeaters themselves ... but not quite. If this is a feature of these cameras then I'm not aware of it and it's not documented in the manual(s). It would be great if the cameras were wireless repeaters (wireless to wireless) or even AP's (wireless Access Points that connect from wired to wireless) because then you'd have an expanded wireless network anywhere you put one of these cameras. I don't think that's the case, I think that because these are cheap cameras the assumption was made that they would always be used wirelessly and so shortcuts were taken in firmware coding and hardware. If you're having any issues related to this quirk and you don't need the wireless system on the cameras then be sure to NOT create a wireless profile and be sure to click the "Disconnect" button at the top of the wireless configuration page. If you scan for wireless networks or click the "rescan" button they'll try to connect even with out a profile. This is an irritating quirk not something that causes loss of functionality so I didn't take a star off for it. I'm putting it here where people can find it in case others have issues with this problem.I like these cameras and at this price I will probably buy a few more of them.

Excellent packaging, nicely made articulating support arm.The setup instructions started out very simple and led me to say, "I can do this, no problem.", but it was all downhill from there.When I connected an ethernet cable from my router to the camera and plugged in the 12 Volt power adapter I was supposed to see the green LED blinking and the yellow LED on steady. Didn't happen, both LEDs blinked continuously. My network could not "see" the camera. I spent about 45 minutes replacing ethernet cables and restarting everything in my network and got nothing but 2 blinking LEDs. I knew that the 12 volt power adapter was powering the camera because when I unplugged the power adapter the LEDs stopped blinking. I decided to check the output of the 12 volt power adapter. My digital multimeter showed an output of 23 volts! No wonder the camera was not working! A few minutes of rummaging around in my junk box produced a 12 volt power adapter with the correct plug and when I plugged it in the camera was happy and my network found it.Very little of the "automatic setup" worked. When it asked for the User and Password I tried everything on the data plate of the camera without success, then finally realized that THERE IS NO PASSWORD, it's left blank. Tenvis has a YouTube video showing how to set up Tenvis cameras, but it's little more than someone with a Chinese accent reading the instructions that I already had in front of me.I somehow managed to fumble through it all and it works now, but I honestly can't tell you how I did it.Update: The Tenvis software will not record video from the camera unless your browser is Internet Explorer. It will take a "snapshot" with all the other browsers, but no video (this according to Tenvis).Next update: WiFi died about 8 hours after installation and resisted all efforts to revive it. Still works fine on ethernet cable but the location where I need it will never have a cable, so back it goes. Star rating amended to 1.Update 7/03/13: After I received the RMA from Amazon for the defective camera I ordered a replacement (I liked it while it was working). Amazon shipped from a different vendor this time.After unpacking the new camera (and checking the 12 volt power adapter for the proper voltage) it connected to my network via ethernet cable immediately but then consistently refused to connect wirelessly throughout an entire afternoon of starting, restarting, changing cables, watching YouTube videos, searching forums, trying various IP addresses, etc.. Step 3 of the Camera Wizard always assured me that it was, in fact, connected wirelessly to my network, but my network never saw it (I have several other wireless video devices on my network and they all work perfectly with no more effort than entering the SSID and the password).Back it goes again. No more Tenvis cameras for me.

Its pretty crappy. It did not read the WiFi signal from 8 ft away I ended up having to move a wifi range extender close enough to plug the camera into it. It does not have pan /tilt or even a zoom feature. The motion detection is spotty at best and the picture quality is so so. It is what it is a cheap camera. Which Sux because I have an indoor dome camera from Tenvis which is a much better product. The app is pretty simple and I can see people outside my house now so that's why I give them 2 stars.

Seemed to be good quality, once I got it to work. Problems right from start, the CD was broken, had to go web site to get programs. Was unclear if even got correct ones. two or three different downloads for basically do same set up, but, were different enough to be sure which should be correct one to use. Never could get it to let me know if was seeing something or E-mail me notice there-of. Also could not get it to record, said I needed something additional but did not explain what, and these record set ups did not follow what the directions in setup book showed. Quality of video feed did seem fairly good, but if could have gotten set up would have known for sure. Also problem with antenna, didn't take long and it's internal connection was broken.

If you want a easy setup buy something else. I have been trying to setup this camera via their Android app and it doesn't allow for email alerts. The iPhone app has even less fuctionally.