Sitecom WL-404 review

Sitecom’s WL-404 wireless IP camera is compact and easy to use, with handy features including a built-in microphone and a 3.5mm speaker connector so you can speak to the people you’re watching and they can hear you.

This is handy if you want to use the WL-404 as part of an entry-phone system.

A helpful wizard and printed installation guide mean that setting up the camera is simple. Once you’ve installed the software and allowed it to switch the camera into DHCP mode, you can connect using Sitecom’s Monitor Manager utility. The quick start guide that comes with the camera goes wrong at this stage but, as the buttons all have Tooltips, it wasn’t hard to work out what we had to do.

The setup screen lets you add up to nine cameras to the Monitor Manager. It will locate them on your network, so all you have to do is enter the camera’s name and password, choose between MJPEG and MPEG4 video and add it to the management list. You can also enable the camera’s motion capture mode.

The camera defaults to a resolution of 320×240, which can only be changed using its web interface. Once we had increased its resolution to 640×480, video quality was good enough to identify people, but was slightly grainy and pixilated.

The web interface’s video feed works in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Once you’ve logged in, you can easily switch the camera into wireless mode and set up DDNS. Audio and video settings let you enable the highest 640×480 resolution, add a time code, enable RTSP streaming so you can monitor the camera’s feed on a mobile phone and configure the video feed’s frame rate so that it doesn’t consume too much bandwidth. The Event settings let you set up to three motion detection areas, but only if you’re using Internet Explorer. When motion is detected you configure the camera to email you or upload shots to an FTP server.

Sitecom’s WL-404 is a great camera that’s easy to use, but it’s beaten by Linksys’s WVC54GCA, which is a lot cheaper and has a similar range of features.