FOSCAM FI8910W Review

This is part of our continuing series of IP camera reviews. The reviews focus on cameras that work with Camcloud’s IP camera cloud services. Hopefully this will help customers pick the camera that’s right for them.

For this post I will look take a look at the Foscam FI8910W camera. This seems to be one of the more popular cameras from Foscam. I’ll evaluate the camera’s Setup, Configuration and General Use.

If you want to save some time here is my summary: Overall I like this camera. Setup and configuration is simple. Picture quality is good and the features will suit most needs. Like my other Foscam camera review, price is very nice especially for a PTZ camera. Be aware that this camera only uploads images (not video) for your cloud storage. Overall great value.

Setup

First you need to run the IP Camera Tool included with the CD and you should see a list with you camera:

Here it has detected 2 Foscam cameras. I already jumped ahead and changed the name to Foscam8910 (Foscam calls it “alias”) but typically the camera name you’ll see in the list is called “Anonymous”. Double click the newly found IP to enter the Foscam webpage configuration. It will ask you for a username and password. Enter username “admin” with no password. I have a big problem with this. Too many people don’t add a password and leave it as is. Bad idea! I wish Foscam would handle this better and ask a user to create a new password immediately when you go to the webpage for the first time. Another option is that you could change the password by right clicking on the IP in the IP Camera Tool and go to Network Configuration:

Once you are logged into the webpage it has a “Device Management” button that lets you configure anything you want, including “User Settings” so you can change your password!

Here you can setup the wireless, the network settings such as static IP, date/time etc. Fairly easy and intuitive.

Configuration

Once I have it all setup I tried setting up snapshots with my cloud storage. You first need to setup the FTP Service Settings:

Then I just need to setup Alarm Service Settings to turn on motion detection and in a matter of seconds I was receiving images to my Camcloud account:

In a matter of seconds I see me waving my hand in front. You can see the full explanation of how I setup the camera with Camcloud in our Foscam and Camcloud Setup Guide.

General use

No complaints. Well actually one, I wish I could upload video. That just happens to be my preference. I prefer to see a video on the entire motion instead of a bunch of snapshots. But picture quality is great so it is hard to complain. Like my last review, functionality is minimal, for example when you setup motion detection you can’t create a motion window. This is a focused area in the cameras view, like a door or window. In addition this camera uses MJPEG compresssion NOT H.264. Refer to my previous review for details.

I do like the night vision. At first I was a little scared the night vision (infra-red) was working too well with my glow in the dark hand:

No I’m not glowing, in fact I’m wearing a long black sweater. This is when it just switched over to infra-red. It adjusted itself better:

Overall this camera is hard to beat. Love the PTZ functionality and sound detection which I didn’t even talk about. Combine this with night vision you have a pretty feature rich camera.  Great features to have for this price (last check I did today on Amazon had it going for $65 US). I must admit, being in the business I have a few cameras of all different brands. For the price and features, this one is going to be added to my collection. Check out our Foscam page to see a list of other supported cameras and info on where you can buy them and if you’re looking for cloud services for this camera, Camcloud offers a service that provides cloud storage, mobile apps, and live viewing.