Panasonic BL-C230A Wireless Internet Security Camera
by Panasonic
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Category: Digital Camera
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: PanasonicModel: BL-C230
Color: white
Product features:
- Image Sensor: 1/4" CMOS, 320,000 pixel
- 3x Digital Zoom
- Wireless Network
- Max. Video Resolution: 640 x 480 (VGA)
- 82pan, 42tilt F2.8 Lens brightness
- AmazonBasics High-Speed HDMI Braided Cable (6.5 Feet/2.0 Meters)
- AmazonBasics High-Speed HDMI Cable (6.5 Feet/2.0 Meters)[Supports 3D + Audio Return Channel][OLD MODEL]
- AmazonBasics High-Speed HDMI Cable (9.8 Feet/3.0 Meters) [Supports 3D + Audio Return Channel]
- AmazonBasics Ultra-High-Speed HDMI Cable Braided (9.8 Feet/3.0 Meters)
- AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female Extension Cable (3.3 Feet/1.0 Meter)
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Panasonic BL-C230A Wireless Internet Security Camera
Customer Review: Extremely versatile feature-packed network camera with a huge variety of uses.
Summary: 5 Stars
Fuzzy Wuzzy's Summary:
***** Highly recommended with warm fuzzies!
The world is becoming increasingly covered by webcams, real-time video monitoring systems, and closed-circuit televisions and cameras, watching over department stores, streets, neighborhoods, and rooms of houses. It was not that long ago when you had to run wires and cabling through your house in order to achieve the kind of functionality that this little relatively inexpensive camera provides. I initially bought two of these BL-C230A units early in 2010, and like them so much that I bought two more last year. I also have Panasonic's previous model Panasonic BL-C131A Network Camera Wireless 802.11 security camera. Although I can think of a myriad of uses for these kinds of cameras, including nanny-cam, pet-cam, security monitoring, and, yes, even voyeuristic/exhibitionist purposes, I mainly use my cameras for pet-cam and house-sitter cam duties whenever I am away from home.
I have used many of this camera's different configuration options, and its large set of features are truly very useful. The camera's control/administration panel, accessed through a Web browser, can be displayed in the languages of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese. You can interactively pan/tilt the camera lens and save 8 preset locations for the camera turret to aim at, assigning each preset a descriptive name of your choice. In addition to the 8 camera tilt/angle presets that you assign descriptive names to, you can also save 4 other presets that are labeled as "Home Position", "Alarm1", "Alarm2", and "Sensor". Brightness, white balance, and three different image resolutions (640x480, 320x240, 192x144) are configurable, as well as being able define the captured image quality for 'Favor Clarity', 'Favor Motion', or 'Standard' ('Standard' is midway between the Clarity and Motion settings) for the images received by the camera lens.
The image 'Resolution' and 'Image Quality' settings affect the size of the images that are captured, and you can then either store these captured images locally in the camera's memory, or use a transfer method to send the images to another device. For example, if I set my BL-C230A camera's 'Image Resolution' to the maximum of "640x480" with an 'Image Quality' of "Favor Clarity" (which increases the image size more than "Favor Motion"), the camera can store the most recent 346 images in its memory. And if I set my 'Image Resolution' to the maximum of "640x480" with an 'Image Quality' of "Favor Motion" (which decreases the image size more than "Favor Clarity"), my camera can store the most recent 692 images in its memory. If I really want to maximize the number of images that are stored on the camera for time-lapse photography purposes without resorting to transferring the images via email, FTP, or HTTP, I can set 'Image Resolution' to the smallest "192x144" size (suitable for nanny-cam/pet-cam purposes, but too small if you need facial detail of strangers) and 'Image Quality' to "Favor Motion", and the camera's memory will store 3861 images. Set up this way using the camera's timer trigger function, I can take a snapshot every 20 seconds to cover the latest 22 hours of monitoring within my defined days of the week and hours of the day.
The camera may be set to trigger based on heat sensor detection, motion detection, sound detection, or timers. You can trigger the camera to issue a JPEG image capture, send an email, issue an alarm sound from its built-in speaker, or some action based on whether the heat/motion/sound detection is set off, and the camera maintains a log of these alarm events. You can likewise adjust the sensitivity of these detection mechanisms. I have not used the heat sensor option much, but both the motion detection and timers work very well. For times when you are not viewing the camera in real-time streaming video, you can define various timers, for instance, to take a snapshot every 15 seconds during weekdays and every 5 minutes during weekends between specific hour ranges, and you can have the image snapshots transferred via email (e.g. you can also email images to your phone), FTP, or HTTP protocols for storing the images and viewing later on. The camera also has built-in memory that can store many hundreds of images if you do not want to transfer the images anywhere. In that case, using your Web browser to login to your camera's Web interface, you can view either the real-time streaming images or the images that are directly stored on the camera. With this "No Transfer" approach, you can configure the camera to either not overwrite existing images, or overwrite/replace the older images with new images as the memory gets filled up.
The camera has four different kinds of alarm sounds that it can give off. One alarm sound is a bit like a telephone ring jingle. Another alarm sounds like a police siren. And the other two alarms sound to me like odd electronic dog barks. You can cause the alarm sound to automatically trigger whenever the heat detection or motion detection sensor activates. This could be used as either an alarm for an intruder alert, for example, or I can also imagine a scenario of placing this camera in a room or area (e.g. rug or sofa) where you do not want a family pet to enter (of course, this assumes that the dog/cat would be scared off by the alarm sound which, although not a blaring 120-decibel burglar siren, is still a bit louder than many typical doorbell or telephone ring volumes). You can also operate the alarm using the camera's control/administration panel by clicking a button while watching the camera's streaming video in real-time. I find no purpose for using the two alarm sounds that sound like odd dog barks, and it would have been really cool if you could load your own MP3 sound files into this camera and use them as your own custom alarm sounds (e.g. to preload some spoken instructions for a babysitter/housekeeper or set up an alarm sound where you issue a stern "No!" command to your dog/cat). You can automatically activate these alarm sounds if a heat sensor or motion detector trigger gets set off, but, again, realize that they are not 120-decibel burglar alarms (i.e. no one outside of the building will hear it). But the camera's alarm sound may be just enough of a surprise to spook an intruder, causing the person to leave the area.
The best images are captured during the daytime. This camera does not have infrared night vision capability, if that is one of your must-have requirements. Also, this camera is not weatherproofed for outdoor use. You can configure the camera's 'Shutter Speed' for either "1/30 second", "1/60 second", or "1/120 second". Instead of defining a fixed 'Shutter Speed', there is also a very useful "Color Night View". I always set my cameras to use the "Color Night View" mode. When the camera is pointed into a darkened room or outside on a dark street at night, the images are definitely more grainy in appearance compared to daytime/well-lit images. This camera is not optimized for night vision. But at least with the "Color Night View" mode, this mode activates automatically when the camera image is dark, causing the image to become brighter. When "Color Night View" is selected, the shutter speed becomes "1/30 second" when 'Color Night View' is not activated (i.e. when there is sufficient light in the image area). When the 'Color Night View' mode activates (e.g. after the sun sets), shutter speed decreases in order to brighten the image. The decreased shutter speed does also result in motion blur on the images though. As with most webcam lenses out there, there are inherent constraints with how effective this kind of lens can be at producing clear non-grainy images in dimly lit areas (for true night vision, you really need an infrared security camera). As with a photography camera, there is the delicate balance between shutter speed for capturing moving objects/people/pets without blur, and keeping the shutter open long enough to gather enough light from the scene (this Panasonic camera does not offer the "ISO" settings of a digital photography camera though). And one of the main factors for why point-and-shoot cameras usually produce grainier night photography compared with dSLRs is the combination of the larger, more-sensitive sensor combined with the bigger better lens for gathering light that a dSLR uses. The BL-C230A has a larger, upgraded CMOS sensor compared with its BL-C131A predecessor, but the clarity of its low-light/night images is really no better than the previous BL-C131A model. There are security cameras that use CCD sensors with better low-light capability than the BL-C230A, but these cameras are also more expensive.
If you want better low-light resolution, along with the capability of not only listening into the room using the camera but also being able to interactively speak into your computer to broadcast your voice back out through the camera, consider the better (and more expensive) Panasonic BB-HCM511A Network Camera with Two-Way Audio. The BB-HCM511A has a CCD sensor that offers better low-light image clarity than the BL-C230A's CMOS sensor. And the BB-HCM511A's two-way audio that lets you speak back into the monitored area using your computer lets you do things like interactively talk with a babysitter/housesitter, or if you see your dog, Fido, standing on the sofa, you can tell your dog to get off of the sofa (assuming that it will listen to you, of course). Unfortunately, the BB-HCM511A is not wireless like the BL-C230A; it needs a Cat-5 network cable attached to it! And it does not appear that Panasonic makes a wireless equivalent of its BB-HCM511A.
The camera's microphone, while not of extremely high quality, is actually quite sensitive and when the unit is placed inside up against the window of a house, the camera's microphone can pick up the conversation of people standing outside on the front sidewalk with a decent amount of clarity (if your goal is security monitoring of people outside the house). When the camera is used for the purposes of monitoring and interacting with a nanny, babysitter, pet-sitter, or house-sitter, you can sort of use this like a "videophone" by viewing the camera's streaming video while you are talking to the other person who is within the camera's view on your cell phone.
The control/administration panel Web page can display all of the various Panasonic cameras that you have set up, and you can monitor up to 16 Panasonic cameras (not just BL-C230A models) in real-time from one page, just like how the security guards at department stores and casinos monitor various security cameras.
You can allow other users to also access the administration panel, or you can define up to 50 user IDs for general users who can login and access the camera viewing, but cannot alter the setup and configuration administration functions. For your guest user logins, you can define very specific combinations of access levels for what each of those users can control on the camera. For instance, you can prevent some of your users from panning, tilting, or zooming the camera lens, other users can be restricted from listening in via the camera, etc. You can configure the camera lens' angle/tilt positioning to return to one of the 12 saved presets after a certain amount of time has passed without any operation of the camera. The time duration for returning the camera lens back to its "home base" position may be configured for either 10 sec, 20 sec, 30 sec, 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, 30 min, or 1 hour. This is a very handy feature in situations where you may have guest users rotating the camera lens around, and you want your camera to return to a "home base" position after you or other guest users have moved the lens turret around using the Web-based control panel's arrow buttons.
The top of the camera has a [Privacy] button that, when pressed, hides the lens so that no one can snoop when you do not want them to. As the administrator, using the administration panel, you can control whether this [Privacy] button even works; this will prevent, for example, a babysitter from purposely trying to cover up the camera by pressing the [Privacy] button. (Yes, the babysitter could still cover the camera lens with a towel, but...) You can also enable or disable the camera's 'Privacy' mode using the Web-based administration panel.
The camera can be configured for access either via HTTP or HTTPS. Using the HTTPS option will encrypt the data transmissions if you are worried about someone using wireless sniffing techniques on your camera data.
I think that Panasonic totally *ROCKS* for hosting a Dynamic DNS service for **FREE**, so that you, along with your other guest users, can access your camera using their Web hosting service. Hopefully, Panasonic never decides to charge any monthly subscription fee for this service!!! Some other manufacturers of security cameras require a monthly subscription fee to access their cameras from the Internet. I have been using their security cameras with their free viewnetcam Web domain for almost four years now (you get your own personal viewnetcam Web domain URL when you set up your camera and that is how you access your camera using a Web browser), and Panasonic's servers have always been available online and glitch-free whenever I have accessed my cameras using a Web browser from various distant regions around the world.
I do have one complaint about the BL-C230A though. The provided installation and setup information is very sparse, and may confuse some users who are not computer-savvy in the areas of networking, routers, etc. Panasonic really should get a professional technical writer to write an installation/setup **booklet**, instead of just the 4-page 'Installation Guide' and 2-page 'Setup Guide' foldout sheet. The 'Installation Guide' covers mounting and positioning of the camera, and the 'Setup Guide' (which is smaller than the 'Installation Guide') covers the highly technical details of configuring the camera for wireless use, port forwarding, and accessing your camera over the Internet. On top of that, the vagaries of different computer and network configurations makes it likely that there will be no "one size fits all" approach to setting up the network camera. But the good news is that Panasonic's tech support is excellent if you call them. I phoned Panasonic's tech support once three years ago when configuring a BL-C131A, and once more last year when I had questions about my BL-C230A. During both phone calls, their tech support person was patient and very knowledgeable; I could tell that both persons who I talked to understood my configuration issues, instead of being support robots offering canned responses. When you go through the 'Setup Guide' instructions, you are guided step by step, and the instructions that are provided should work for *most* people. My environment consists of Windows with a Linksys router, and by just following the steps, I had my camera working in wireless mode fairly quickly. However, some knowledge of routers, IP addresses, and "what is a port number" would also immensely help if you want to customize your setup even more (which I manually customized with my setup that now uses four BL-C230A cameras). That kind of information is not covered in the provided installation and setup manuals for this camera, but you can read about that just by doing some Internet searches.
Fuzzy Wuzzy's Conclusion:
Overall, this is an excellent wireless network camera for the price. It comes with a 1-year parts/labor warranty. A longer 2-year or 3-year warranty would have been more reassuring. But I have an older-model BL-C131A security camera facing out through a west-facing window, and for more than 3 years now, that camera has worked flawlessly while being plugged in constantly and it gets the brunt of the full afternoon sun and heat during the summers being sandwiched between the window glass and fully closed shutters. The camera's installation instructions tell you not to position the camera in direct sunlight, but my old BL-C131A has been baking in Denver's strong mile-high sunlight for 3+ years now, and it still works every day, either pressed up against cold wintertime glass or hot summer heat. Panasonic also makes a variety of other wired and wireless cameras, including weatherproofed outdoor cameras, ceiling-mounted dome cameras, and vandal-proof security cameras. Some of their network cameras cost less, and some cost many hundreds of dollars more. This unit suits my needs perfectly.
Description of Panasonic BL-C230A Wireless Internet Security Camera
Panasonic Pan/tilt network camera- Wireless- 2 Input external connectors- Sends H.264 or MPEG-4 and JPEG images simultaneously- Image transfer by timer, alarm, motion, sound or human presence- HTTPS Data encryption deters electronic eavesdropping.Surveillance Systems
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