EyeSpy247 HDSD review

The EyeSpy247 HDSD is as much a web service as an IP camera. The camera is tied in to an online portal which helps you view its video feed as well as store captured images and video clips, to make it easy to review them from anywhere.

It’s rather like a more advanced version of the mydlink service, which we first saw on the D-Link DCS-932L. You get a minimal 20MB of storage for free, and after that you can buy storage as you go from the www.eyespy247.com website, or sign up to a £25-per-year subscription to get 512MB.

The service is also meant to make the camera easy to set up to view over the internet, but this is where we came unstuck. It was simple enough to set it up on our wireless network; we just had to plug it into our router, run the Windows setup program to detect the camera then scan for and find our wireless network and enter the Wi-Fi password. Once it had successfully connected to our router we could unplug the Ethernet cable and put the camera wherever there was a power socket.

Unfortunately, the camera refused to register with our online EyeSpy247 account, even though its web interface seemed to have all the required information. You can add a camera manually from the EyeSpy247 portal’s web interface, but this requires some specialist knowledge; we had to set up a Dynamic DNS account with our router’s external IP address, go into our router’s port forwarding settings to forward all incoming requests on port 80 to the camera, then enter all this information into the IP camera’s settings page as well as the EyeSpy247 portal.

Once we’d done all this the camera worked perfectly – we were just hoping the portal would help us avoid the usual hassle of accessing a device on your internal network from outside it. We could see the camera on the EyeSpy247 website, click on it to bring up a live feed in our browser and view and download video clips captured by the camera. You can also manage alerts – you can set the camera to start recording on sensing motion or sound – and define whether alerts will be sent to you by email or text. You’ll need to sign up to a £25-per-year subscription to qualify for alerts, though. You also need to enter some settings into the IP camera’s settings pages, but the EyeSpy247 portal tells you exactly what you need to make it work.

Due to our ADSL connection’s limited upstream bandwidth, footage viewed over the internet was serviceable but had a low frame rate and visible compression artefacts. Footage viewed over a local network was superb, however. In normal indoor lighting, there was little noise and a smooth frame rate, and even with all the lights off (the camera switches to infrared mode with an audible click) you could still tell who was walking around in a room. If you want to use the camera locally you can record video to a microSD card plugged into the side, and it comes with some clunky but serviceable surveillance software.

We were disappointed that the EyeSpy247 HDSD wasn’t easier to set up, as once you have it going the web portal works brilliantly. Video streamed around a local network looks great, too, even at night. A big problem is price. £191 is a huge amount of money even for a high-quality camera, especially considering that it has no pan, tilt or zoom controls. Despite its obvious strengths, the HDSD’s high price stops it getting top marks.