Linksys WVC54GCA versus Logitech Alert 750e

11May11

We recently upgraded the home survelience system here at the house and the improvement is like ‘night and day’, literally!  This new system puts the old one to shame in a big way, but then again, so does the price tag.

The Linksys was around $90 dollars per camera and supposedly had all the motion detection and email triggers built in, but in practice they simply didn’t work.  I consider it more of a toy if you need to see whos at the front door or take a peek at your pet while your at work.  I tried to set it up pointing outside and there are just too many ISO white balancing fluctiontions in the image that it creates a lot of false positives.  (reviewers of the camera have pointed out this is a flaw in the firmware of the camera which makes it unsuitable for motion detection apps).   This model works over 802.11G and the new one’s operate on the N protacol.  It was pretty easy to set up, even setting it up to be viewable via your smartphone remotely, should you know how configure your router.  The image is terrible in low light as it provides no IR capabilities.

My roomate requested we upgrade the system to a camera capable of viewing images at night and after a lot of research, I ended up choosing the Logitech Alert 750e.  The price tag jumps up to over 4 times the cost of the Linksys at $350, but the feature set is about 4x that of the Linksys as well.   To start with, as seen in the picture, it has excellent optics capable of night vision at a few hundred feet in nearly complete darkness.  I find the motion detection to be extremely reliable with nearly no false positives.  The software is what really ties this package together and puts a complete DVR of history motion events at your finger tips.  It’s a breeze for my ~60 old roomate to use and I’m confident that she’ll not have any problems that require my technical support after I move out.  She could have even set it up because there are really no technical steps of configuring a router required.  Since it communicates over powerline (plugs into your wall power; no cat-5 cables or wifi signals) all you do is plug the camera into the wall and run the software on the computer to get it going.  I am a little let down by few things:

1. The software can only run on one computer, which makes it nearly impossible to view motion events from another computer.  Also, because the software uses ActiveX (or some advanced graphics) it’s not possible to remote into the computer via software like Remote Desktop or VNC.  Some people have had luck purchasing a subscription to Go To My PC of which supports the graphics used in the Logitech software.  Another method is to run motion detection software on a different computer and have it’s source pointed at the camera.  But that means your system needs to be on all the time and it’s going to take some serious cpu cycles to process the motion detection instead of using the onboard motion detection in the camera’s hardware.
2. They require you to pay a $50/yr subscription in order to view your motion detection results remotely.  Logitech says the cost is because they are using their servers to proxy your computers connection through them.  This is a technique called ‘NAT punching’ that foregoes any router configuration and what makes setup so easy.  However, I wish that they would at least give me the option to configure the router so I could connect remotely.  This just seems like a money grab by Logitech and dishonest because this price or mention of a subscription is not listed anywhere on the products box.  One caveat though, you can view live motion remotely without the subscription.  The software is fairly nice, but very buggy for the Andriod when I tried it.  (It only connects the first time, and coming back to the application gives and error and you have to do a ‘force close’)
3. The Logitech cameras are prohibitively expensive.  If you want to upgrade your system you have to buy another camera at nearly full price.  That means a 3 camera system is over ~$1000.  I’d say that if you plan on even adding one additional camera that you instead invest in an all in one DVR from newegg (they seemed to have the best price for this logitech and other DVRs.

All and all, the Logitech Alert system beats the Linksys camera’s hands down.  There’s an initial sticker shock, but once you have the system running in a few minutes and you use the software working flawlessly, it justifies the inflated cost.   Logitech products seem to be on the high end of the price scale lately, but I’ll hope that with time the price is lowered.   I can’t even imagine going back to a webcam or linksys wireless camera again with all their system ‘hiccups’, as I call them.  Well worth the money.

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