Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys WVC54GCA Webcam 640x480 802.11G Wireless Internet Home Monitoring Camera

Actually, at this point in time the camera is $89. I bought one a couple of weeks ago and have ordered 3 more. I have several Pansonic BL-C131a cameras and like them a lot. But even at the $240 price they are going for now, I'd rather have more cameras than Pan/Tilt capability.

Here is what I know so far about the Linksys WV54GCA.

Setup - It took me a while to get the camera set up. It seemed much more complicated than the panasonics were. But then again, I'm not big on actually reading the instructions. Using my Vista Box was a complete pain in the ass because it kept blocking programs being loaded from the Linksys website (yea, I know there's pleanty of ways around that). But eventually I figured it out and it probably took me 3 hours total to get the camera up and running.

Included Software - The software is ok. The camera's each have thier own webserver so once you're set up you just have to point to the IP of the camera (or, if you're logging in from outside your network point to the correct port). I'm using a program at home called Evo Cam for the Mac. Its a really nice little program for $40 and integrates my panasonic cameras and the Linsys seamlessly. It also has lots of recording/FTP/email/webcast capabilities so you can put your video wherever you want. I assume there are similar programs for the PC and I would suggest looking into one instead of using the linksys SW.I use an iPhone app called IP Vision Pro and it handles this camera nicely too.

Image - Frankly, I'd like a slightly wider angle lens. The picture is a bit "cold" looking colorwise. Probably can be adjusted, just havnt gotten there yet. Not sure about low light performance yet. Will update when I can.

Wireless performance - Here's where I think the camera may be a bit weak. I have not yet put it more than 40 feet from my wireless router, but in my office, the signal seems to be weak enough that the frame rate is pretty slow. I'll be playing more with this as I go and will update.

Bottom line is that you can set up a 6 camera home security system here for under $550 (so far I only have 4 cameras operating at once, if there are any limitations on numbers of cameras I havent experienced them yet). My plan is to play with this system and optimize it for my home, then if I get around to it, maybe replace some of these cameras with more high end equipment

I cannot add much to the large number of comments about the difficulty in setting this up. I'm an electrical engineer myself that (with some help) is hosting web sites at my home on a linux server and has configured many devices on my network over the years. This one was by far one of the more difficult - not because there is anything inherently difficult about the process, but due to issues described below. There is absolutely no way that anybody who is not, at a minimum, a home-hobbyist with wireless networks will be able to set this up:

1. Like others, I'm mostly mac (6/7 computers). As others observed, you only get audio with the activex on windows, but the visual is fine on the mac. But as a network device, this should be - and is - largely platform independent.

2. WEP - the software that comes with this camera is garbage. I could write better software, and I'm not good at it. I used an old Windows laptop with XP to run the setup wizard, and when I got to the page where you enter your WEP key ("if you want to enter your key without a passphrase, leave the field blank and enter it on the next page"). um, ok. Except that you cannot do that. I called customer support and spoke with "steve" in bangalore. I rarely call CSRs as they are rarely useful, and this was no exception. I got the usual boneheaded questions and, after 30 min, a promise to call me back (never happened). What you need to do is what somebody else recommended - simply log into the IP address assigned by your router using a browser. Now, I was not able to do this with Safari or Firefox on my mac. IE worked on my windows machine. You can do the entire set up there...including the WEP key and everything else.

3. Signal Strength: what screwed me up for an hour was that after I pulled out the ethernet jack it would work for a minute in my office and then die (i.e - assign the IP address and start broadcasting) I thought it was a network issue, but after reading the comments I thought I'd experiment with the radio. Turns out this camera needs lots of signal, or it just drops the connection. It works upstairs (where the wireless AP is) but not too well in some other places. considering the application - home-wide high-bandwidth video monitoring, I hope the team puts in a better antenna system in the next version. 802.11n uses MIMO which achieves more speed with a cost of link margin (range). at 2.4 GHz and the size of this camera is should be possible to put a better antenna system in without a bit BOM increase.


conclusion: this product is good (the hardware, network elements). The antenna system is bad. The setup software is deplorable. I'd like to give this a higher rating, but the money saved on the front end for me was wasted on the back end time to configure this device.

I was looking for a camera that would let me watch my house while I was away, and this product seemed to be the best bet. Unfortunately, the product just wasn't as robust as I hoped for. The initial setup of the camera was really simple and took 10 minutes max. At that point I was able to watch the camera feed from my computer, but that's all.

I wanted to record video when there was motion and view video over the internet. The product can do both of these things, but it is explained NO WHERE in the literature. You have to dig around on the Linksys website and then find instructions in the forums from other users; the company has nothing that will help you. Eventually I was able to view the feed over the internet, but motion recording was spotty at best. While the hardware of the product is great, the software is really unusable. I would really recommend looking for another product, there has to be something better out there.

While the camera seems to do a good job, the software included with it is some of the worst I've ever seen. I installed it on Vista and the setup utility for configuring the camera crashed repeatedly. On XP it didn't crash but I was never able to get it to find the Internet version of the camera after I configured it but I did get it to work on my wife's laptop. It allows you to configure the camera's name and IP into the setup screen but will give you an error and clear out the fields because you didn't first select an empty line in the table up above. It would be nice if it at least told you to select an empty line but would be even better if it just assumed you were adding to the table when you press the save button.

The absolute worst part about it was that it was so inconsistent about recording. I set up a scheduled time and it worked OK the first two times I tried to record but I had to convert the raw files to .avi format before I could get sound. Other times it recorded video but I never got any sound. Sometimes while watching it live I couldn't get any sound and then 5 min later it started to work.

Sometimes the instant record button worked on Internet configuration where I used a dynamic DNS to see it from outside of my router's firewall. However, it rarely worked on the local (inside the firewall) configuration. Pressing the button simply did nothing and there are no error messages to help you.

With respect to the wireless there were evenings that I could hardly get any network throughput to my laptop until I got the bright idea to unplug the camera. It worked just find as soon as I did that and so I disabled the wireless by giving it a bogus network name and used it via a cat5 cable. They don't give you a way to just turn off the wireless if you don't want it. I also had some luck by adjusting the antenna on my router.

If I wrote code this bad in college I never would have graduated and I find it really discouraging that Linksys would actually release something this bad. Did you guys do ANY testing??? All I can say for them is that I'm glad they built their reputation with their routers first. If this camera was my first experience with Linksys I would never have purchased another item from them. It doesn't say much for Cisco either.

I bought this item from Best Buy and kept it a week before returning it. When I could get the camera connected it was an Ok product. It's Video quality is ok for about 5 feet then it gets very pixelated, it's NOT even the quality of a USB WEB cam. The software that it includes to find the webcam kept reporting finding the camera on a IP that was not there. It would hardly ever find the camera. The camera was located within about 15 feet of the router in another room. It appears that was the farthest away I could get it to connect. My wireless router works fine with other products including the Wii. I was able to get the camera connected twice in the week I had it. Sometimes it would find the camera an other times it would not. The included software was very glitchy on playback as well and made it difficult to play recorded events like Motion for example. I'm not a novice at networking or computers since it's what I do for a living. I felt like I shouldn't have to purchase a new wireless router for this thing to work properly. If that was the case I would buy a much higher quality IR wireless security camera for around $300-400 that would have the server built into the camera. I'm really surpised that Cisco - Linksys would put out such a piece of junk.