D-Link DCS-932L review

D-Link’s DCS-932L is the first IP camera we’ve seen which supports D-Link’s mydlink service. This is designed to make it easy to view your IP camera’s feed from anywhere on the internet without having to fiddle with your router’s settings or worry about Dynamic DNS. It also has night vision and 802.11n wireless networking.

Setup is straightforward. With the aid of clear illustrations and text, the CD-based setup program takes you through physically plugging in the camera and connecting to your network, over Ethernet or wirelessly. Connecting wirelessly is far easier if your router supports WPS – you just press a button on the back of the camera and one on your router, and a secure connection is made.

If you’re without WPS you have to plug the camera in with an Ethernet cable, then scan for wireless networks in the wizard and enter your password, before restarting the camera and unplugging the cable. We couldn’t get the camera to connect to our WPA2-enabled Fritz!Box 7390, however – we had to change the router to WPA-TKIP encryption before the camera would work.

Once you’re online, you’re prompted to sign up for a mydlink account with a username and password, which associates your camera with that account. When you log in at www.mydlink.com you can pick your camera from a list, and view its live feed from outside your home network. You can even view it using an iPhone or Android app – we tried the iPhone version, and it worked perfectly.

The mydlink interface also lets you access your camera’s settings page from wherever you are. This is logically laid out, with subsections for settings such as video quality. You can choose from 640×480 at 20fps, or 320×240 and 160×120 at 30fps. We preferred the higher-resolution option – 20fps was easily enough to recognise people from the video, even when walking past the camera.

Unfortunately, we found mydlink temperamental at best. We had to use Internet Explorer to log in (Google Chrome just threw up an error) and half the time it would just direct us to a page with an advert for various D-Link cameras rather than show us our camera. This happened on three different PCs running Internet Explorer 8 and 9 and on three different types of network connection, including an ADSL link with no firewall.

The DCS-932L switches from day to night mode automatically depending on light levels, or you can force it to stay in full-colour day mode or to always use its infra-red LEDs for black and white night vision. We found this did an amazing job in a pitch-black medium-sized room – everything in the room was recognisable, and we could make out most details on a person, such as height, clothing, hairstyle and whether they were wearing glasses, but true facial detail was only discernable at around two metres.

The web interface also lets you set up to 25 blocks of the screen as motion-detection areas. You set the threshold of tolerance from 0 to 100% to determine how sensitive the camera is when detecting motion, and it can email you snaps or upload pictures to an FTP server when triggered. Unfortunately, although setting the camera up to email us was easy enough using Google’s SMTP server (see FAQ) we found the pictures usually missed the subject they were trying to capture. This is because the camera can only be set to email six frames, and would trigger with a shadow falling across the doorway and run out of frames before the culprit reached the door. Upon seeing the camera he would scarper again, and avoid being captured. No matter how much we fiddled with the sensitivity we couldn’t get the camera to ignore the shadow and take corporeal shots.

To record video from the camera you’ll need to use the D-ViewCam utility. This supports up to 32 cameras, but we found it clunky to use. It couldn’t find our camera on the network so we had to enter the IP address manually, and the application is full of confusing icons and is generally unfriendly, especially compared to the slickness of mydlink.

When the mydlink service works, it makes Dlink’s DCS-932L the easiest IP camera to view remotely we’ve seen, and the iPhone app works brilliantly. It also has a logical web interface and clear night vision mode and is good value. It’s a shame mydlink is so temperamental, and the tricky motion detection setup and unfriendly PC software mean the Compro IP70 coupled with its optional wireless adaptor is still our top choice for an IP camera.