Edimax IC-7110W review

The IC-7110W has loads of useful features, including a microphone and 3.5mm speaker jack that you can use for two-way communication as part of an entrance security system. Sadly, when configuring our camera we were also irritated to find that some of the settings screens loaded as soon as we moved the mouse over their hyperlink. This meant that a misplaced pointer movement opened a new screen before we had a chance to finish saving the information we’d been entering. It’s a minor niggle, and not one that will trouble you once you’ve carried out the initial setup process, but it’s nonetheless annoying.

The IC-7110W’s image quality isn’t the best around, either. It’s a bit grainy, with poor colour accuracy, but is clear enough to recognise faces. Stills can also be a little blurry and grainy, but are fairly recognisable at distances of up to around four metres, which is what really counts in a security camera. The infrared night vision mode is effective, although the threshold for the automatic enabling of the IR lights is bit ambiguous. This sometimes resulted in night vision mode flickering on and off, particularly if the camera is in a brightly lit area, pointing at a darker area. You can also set the IR mode to come on at specific times or be permanently on or off.

Its resolution and frame rate aren’t particularly high. It defaults to a resolution of 640×480 and a frame rate of 30fps, but this drops to a maximum of 15fps if you set the camera to its highest 1,280×1,024 resolution. We also found that once we’d switched to a higher resolution the camera’s frame rate setting menu got stuck at 15fps, even when we switched the resolution back down. We had to power off the device before we could reset it to 640×480 at 30fps.

Although the IC-7110W has loads of features, it’s surprisingly hard to use, mostly because of its confused and poorly laid out menus. Although the video quality is mediocre, it’s good enough for its intended purpose. Once you’ve set up the features you want, such as cloud viewing, saving stills to the SD and video to an FTP server, it works well. The camera’s two-way communication options and the fact that it comes with a mounting kit that attaches it to the ceiling makes it great for entrance-hall security in your small business or home, but at this price we’d want something easier to use, such as the Y-Cam Black SD.