Panasonic has an interesting camera, the Panasonic BL-C111. This camera can just be plugged in to your router and you have the ability to check on your home, office, or anywhere else you need to keep an eye on things. If you can’t or don’t want to run network cables, they have another model available that is wireless.

We have set up these cameras in our 3 office locations and it is nice to be able to ‘pop in’ and see how busy they are at any time. It will also come in real handy then next time I get a call from our security monitoring service and I will be able to see what is going on in the office without having to drive to the office. Or at least be able to take a peek and see if someone is actually in the office or if it is, more likely, a false alarm.

I would be real tempted to put one at home to be able to check on things while on vacation as well as to just be able to keep an eye on things when I feel like snooping

The cameras, which can be panned up and down and side to side, can be viewed and controlled from a standard Web browser. I have not been able to get the audio to work with Firefox yet. You can even pull the image up on a web-capable cell phone. The camera can be set to automatically record video at certain times and can also be set to record and/or notify you by email when someone enters the room.

Retail price runs about $199. We paid about $165 each for ours online.

Features

• Pan/Tilt/Digital Zoom with Presets
• Simultaneous MPEG-4 and JPEG
• 1 Lux Color Night View Mode
• Up to 30 Frames per Second CMOS
• Full-screen Monitoring
• Remote Monitoring from Cell Phone
• 4-up and 12-up Multi-camera Pages
• Built-in Web Server/IP Address (IPv4/v6)
• Built-in Microphone
• Thermal Sensor
• Image Transfer by Motion Detection, Sensor Alert, Timer
• Privacy Mode
• Plug-and-play Installation
• Free Web Address
• Multi-Language Interface
• 1 Year Warranty

Specifications:

• Image Compression - JPEG (3 levels), MPEG
• Quality Video Resolution - 640 x 480, 320 x 240 (default), 192 x 144
• Frame Rate - Max. 30 frames/sec (640 x 480, 320 x 240 or 192 x 144)
• Authentication - User ID/password
• IPv4/v6 - IPv4/v6 Dual Stack
• View Snapshot and Control from Compatible Cell Phones
• Zoom - 10x digital zoom (by area)
• Input - Built-in Microphone
• Network Connection - Ethernet (10Base-T/100Base-TX)