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

I purchased this camera to watch inside my house when we're out of town, We have an 18 year old, and he's been known to have a little more then a couple of friends over.

Since I have a linksys router, which I'm happy with, I purchased this camera, figuring it would work perfect with my router. What a disappointment. After 3 calls to tech support, I had to return since Linksys could not correct the problem (Excelle cust. service from Amazon, No questions asked !!) .

The camera setup and was working very easily. No problems at all, Maybe 15 minutes. I was getting emails when there was activity, that worked fine. I have 3 problems with this camera however, 1 was serious enough to return.

1) Alot of false alarms on motion, even after adjusting the sensativity area so that my dog would not be able to be seen.

2) Horrible resolution. Expected ALOT better from a camera these days. My cheap cell phone provides better quality then this. I guess I was expecting too much, but since this was a "camera", I expected nice clear quality pictures.

3) And this is the killer, the camera stopped working after approximately 12 hours. Had to power on-off to restore functionality, and since I purchased this 2 days before we were going away, I had to attach to a timer to shut on/off 2x per day, just to keep it working. After 3 calls from tech support, who were responsive, however, they gave the plain vanilla tech support nonsense, 1) Reinstall the firmware (even thought the latest was already on there), 2) Upgrade the firmware on my router (Even though they never had this problem before). 3) after the 3 contact, we'll send you a new one.

Sorry, to little , to late.

So, I would definitely not recommend this camera to anyone. I will be tring the CREATIVE camera, it cost a little more, but if it stays on, and produces quality pictures, it might be worth it.

I'll still recommend Linksys products as a whole, have NO issues whats so ever with my Wireless G Speedboost router, but definitely not this camera.

-Bob

The WVC54GCA is a great little camera which needs some better software to be shipped along with it. It took some effort to get it working correctly. The first problem I ran into was that the installation wizard doesn't handle WEP quite right, so I had to reconfigure the cam using the web interface while cable-connected after getting it half-configured with the wizard. Once wireless was working, I found that the camera would drop off of the network about once every hour or so. Switching from DHCP to a fixed IP address seems to have solved that, as it has been rock solid for over a month now running at a remote location.

Aside from the setup glitches which I hope Linksys will fix in future updates, I feel that this camera is a good value for tech-savvy users. The default resolution in the viewer software is horrible, which almost convinced me to ship it back. I finally found that you can actually get good video quality (i.e. about as good as you can expect with fixed-focus 640x480) by tweaking some configuration settings and viewing the video with a web browser instead of the supplied software.

Linksys needs to greatly improve the software bundled with the unit, and possibly fix some issues with the firmware, but if you are looking for a wireless webcam that doesn't cost and arm and a leg, this is a good option.

First off, I'm a computer tech and know a great deal about networking. It took me about 20 minutes from start to finish to set this up, throw it on the web, and tweek it. From a user prospective, Linksys is lacking as the manual is not consistent with the software (version difference?) as is the Faq's and such. I wouldn't even consider this product from a new user standpoint. Ok, now the gritty. I have to unplug the camera about every 12 hours to "reboot" it as it quits working after awhile. I have it setup perfectly without any of the add on's (such as recording or motion detection, or even the mic!), and it's stand alone so it's locking up on it's own on the most basic settings. Going to return it for another brand. Even the best reviews on here admit it just locks up alot. Not a stable camera at all. Why even bother if you have to keep pulling the power every day? your call..

The camera advertises that it does 640x480 mpeg4 and mjpeg as well as image capture. The quality of the images and video it captures is no where close to 640x480 quality. It may send back an image or video of that size, but it appears as though the image has used a very low JPEG quality level that causes a large amount of blocking/bloxing in the image.

I have this monitoring my front lawn to catch a dog dropping presents there for us to pick up, and at this range a 640x480 camera should easily be able to make out face details, but all I get are blobs.

I've also had problems with the camera locking up after 12-24 hours of operation and has to be powered down and plugged in again to reset. This makes it nearly useless as an automated motion detection camera.

This camera system by no means provides HD video. Quality is pretty good though, but you can increase or decrease the quality depending on your preference. Software that manages different cameras is very good. Allows for viewing 1, 4, 6, and 9 cameras at a time. Also you can record video, which is pretty nice. All and all, great product!