Y-cam YCB003 Black SD Wi-Fi IP Camera

I was admittedly a little bit skeptical about this camera but have to concur that it's a fantastic piece of kit. Everything you need to get up and running is included in the box. At first we had some trouble getting the software to work on Windows 7 but after a bit of tweaking it's been running perfectly. The Camera is exceptionally well made and crated in plastic and metal. It's far superior to the usual web cameras you can purchase for under £50. Clearly this camera is worth the money you pay for it. The picture quality is 10 out of 10 and again superior to grainy web cams. It switches between day and night mode effortlessly. I did wonder what uses I might find for the spy cam beyond a bit of light amusement but it has been useful. We've used it to spy on the kids, to watch the baby whilst sleeping (like an expensive baby monitor). We've spied on the babysitters (sorry), my husband has been spying on me whilst at work using the mobile application on his cell. We've also used it to watch the house whilst away. There is a feature you can set up for the camera to email you when it detects movement in the house. I must admit it's been a been strange watching the house from someone else's computer - it's a bit creepy! The soundd quality is also excellent. A few further points to note. There is a light on the camera which indicates it's on but you can switch this off so burglars won't know. However when it goes into night mode it lights up like a Christmas tree which will probably give itself away!

I can really see this camera being popular with nosy neighbours, small businesses etc. It works seemlessly. The only improvement I would like to see in the next model is a remote system to rotat the camera! Otherwise it's perfect.

-- Update 5th February 2010
I continue to be impressed with Y-Cam's ongoing updates and as a case in point they have just released firmware version 4.16 which makes some changes to the capabilities of the camera. It is available from the Downloads site on the Y-Cam website. The page warns "If your camera has a firmware version between 1.98 and 3.22, you have a 2nd generation Y-cam and should not upgrade to 4.xx" but now also indicates that as long as your camera has an SD slot it can also be updated - I imagine that cameras shipping now have more up to date firmware installed on them but the early version I received came with v3.30 I went ahead with the upgrade to v4.16 and saw no issues.

The main feature added is a Quicktime stream. This will now appear as the default in a browser like Firefox or Chrome (both of which I have tested) and I presume in Safari on a Mac (which I have not been able to test) and includes audio (as opposed to the M-JPEG which was your only option outside of Internet Explorer before this). This works well but (probably due to more taxing encoding requirements) introduces a 3 second lag in the image and audio not present in the M-JPEG (which can easily be switched to as an alternative view) or the ActiveX control. This may or may not be important to you but is worth being aware of. You can also now set up motion detection within these other browsers - removing a couple of the niggles from my original review.

Y-Cam have also released a new PC-based client which allows you to view four or nine cameras in one interface - a nice touch if you are using multiple cameras to monitor a site.

Oddly, this firmware update adds a /iphone URL option which simply redirects you to the M-JPEG stream and adds no features to access from an iPhone (e.g. still no sound) so this is not a "new feature" to get too excited about.

In addition, Y-Cam now claim that their latest firmware and v1.1 of their Mac client setup software "bring full compatibility for the Mac". As lack of decent support for the Mac has been the only negative in reviews of this product if you do have a Mac using these latest versions and you have the time to post a comment to my review letting people now how you got on then I am sure this would be appreciated by other Mac users.

-- Original Review
This camera is the latest interation of the Y-Cam range which adds a Micro SDHC slot to the YCB002 model. It ends up costing about £30-40 more (once you have bought a memory card). If you don't need the ability to record to internal storage then you should consider the Y-Cam YCB002 Infrared Nightvision IP Camera Black which is otherwise identical.

On first removing the product from its box I was immediately impressed with the build quality. The camera itself is encased in solid black plastic with a small stub wireless aerial. It comes with a solid metal hinge for mounting fitted with a ball and socket screw that attaches to the camera body and allows for any angle of mounting. The mounting socket on the camera is a standard photographic camera screw mounting so the camera body will also fit on any existing mounts you may have - a nice touch.

The supplied power cable is of a decent length (~2.5 metres) and is required to power the camera (no battery option).

Initial setup is best handled using the (supplied) internet cable. I found the simplest approach was to attach the camera to my wireless router, then to login to my router and see what IP address it had been assigned (it uses DHCP by default) and navigate to its home page using this address. You can then configure it to attach wirelessly and hence remove the need for the cable.

NOTE: My camera was supplied with the latest firmware version (3.30) and connected to my WPA-PSK and TKIP network with no issues. I'd recommend a quick check under the "System" tab to confirm you have the latest version and then to save yourself any hassles by upgrading straight away if you need to (download new firmware from the y-cam website).

Once the camera is connected to the wireless network the connection remains steady and reliable for weeks in my experience.

A live feed from the camera can be streamed to a wide variety of devices running any modern internet browser (it uses the MJPEG format for maximum compatability) including, amazingly enough, my iPhone. Note, however, that if you require sound then you will need to use Internet Explorer as a client as this uses an ActiveX control instead of MJPEG. Also, the sound has a noticeable lag of half a second or so. When we have used this as a baby monitor we prefer to have a seperate audio monitor (e.g. BT 150 Digital Baby Monitor) and use video only from the camera.

The web server in the camera had no issues streaming a solid 640x480 video feed over my home network to 3-4 clients at once.

The picture itself is clear and high quality (easy to identify faces/monitor a baby) but not of photographic quality. In later versions of the camera the manufacturer points out that the colour rendering may not be completely true to life as this is an infrared camera and indeed, the palette is a little saturated but nothing that should deter you from using this camera as a monitor.

When darkness falls, the camera can switch automatically to infrared mode (can also be manually configured), it includes an array of infrared LEDs surrounding the central lens which produce a very clear black and white image at the same high resolution. This is an *excellent* option to mount over a cot to monitor a baby at night.

Version 3.30 of the firmware and this iteration of the hardware add a Micro SDHC slot. Slightly disapointingly, the package does not include a Micro SDHC card so you will need to purchase one to use this feature. This is not too painful these days with a decent 8GB card (e.g. Bytestor 8GB Micro SDHC Class 4 Memory Card) currently priced at £10-15. This is the one I used and had no problems with.

An additional "SD Functions" menu is now included in the setup screen which allows images and videos to be recorded directly to the inserted SDHC card. Motion detection can now be used to trigger the saving of a fixed period of video or an image snapshot. In addition, images can be stored at periodic intervals to the card (as well as FTP'ed or emailed as below).

The web interface includes the ability to browse videos and images stored in this manner on the memory card. As a five minute video (stored as a .mov file in Apple QuickTime format at 640x480x24fps) is about 22MB which can take a few minutes to download over a wireless g network videos are more "clunky" to view in this fasion than images so you might want to invest in two SDHC cards and physically swap them once day. You can also ask the camera to record continously and it will produce "chunks" of video labelled with date and time. You are probably going to want to change the "chunk size" from the default one hour length to make files more mangeable!

Other, well implemented, options inherited from earlier models include the ability to add a time/date stamp to the video feed; the ability to set up multiple user login accounts (including "read-only" users as well as admins); the ability to detect motion and in response to send an email or upload images to an FTP site of your chosing; the ability to periodically send images (e.g. one a minute) to an FTP site or email address; and the ability to set schedules when motion detection/periodic sending should be active. I captured snapshots every minute and recorded five minute segments concurrently for several days with no issues.

I found it easy to open a port on my router which I forwarded to the camera's address and hence to view my video feed across the internet on the iPhone over a 3G connection whilst out and about (don't worry we didn't leave the baby behind as a test subject) - quite an experience and very high quality.

All in all a definite five star product.

Potential Niggles to Be Aware Of

- the supplied software (to find and setup a camera on the network) requires a PC (the y-cam website now claims beta Mac support but I can not verify), although to be honest if you are using a *nix box you won't have any trouble doing this through the web interface instead
- you only get audio as part of the stream if you use the ActiveX client in Internet Explorer, again restricting you to PC only
- setting up motion detection (areas to monitor, sensitivity) also uses an ActiveX client in Internet Explorer, if you don't have any access at all to a PC then this will stop motion detection being of use to you
- trying to send one image a second to an FTP server on my home network overnight was not 100% reliable (no frames for ten minute periods at time), writing to the internal SD however was

This is generally a decent product but sadly spoiled by a well below par wireless card. Whereas other devices I have (several laptops and smartphones) can easily stay connected to my wifi network with good data transfer speeds when placed in the location I was going to install the y-cam, the y-cam itself cannot. When it's not dropping off the network, the y-cam's "System information" page shows network strength at what it rates to be one bar (out of five), and the video flat out will not stream. Even with the y-cam in the same room as the wireless router and in line-of-sight, it claims to only have three bars of reception.

I should say that the internal walls of our flat are brick (single thickness only), not hollow partition walls, so others may not find they have any problem. Through a single wall the y-cam will get "two bars" reception for me, which seems just sufficient to keep video streaming working without much stuttering, but that's its limit.