We’re a watched society. A few nights ago, I caught Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act on DVD, and the plot was sustained by showing the police work involved in tracking down particular cars seen by surveillance cameras planted all over London. (Of course, Jane Tennison’s team kept waving videotapes around, which was rather boggling. One would have thought the London police department would have finally discovered DVDs by the time the series was filmed in 2006.)

There’s something both creepy and cool about the mix of IP cameras you can buy and install these days. No longer do you have to sit on your porch to monitor that the neighborhood kids are stealing apples and having fruit wars in your front yard. Now you can place a digital eyeball there and sit in a back room watching it real time or simply capture it on a hard disk for later filing of criminal charges.

The most highly rated IP security camera on Pricegrabber comes from Toshiba. As its product description points out, the camera captures “live, high-resolution video that is viewable anywhere in the world through a standard web browser.” That’s right. You can be quaffing a grappa in a Milanese cyber-café while checking out what your teenagers are really up to while you’re out of town. (The grappa is bound to help their case!)

A couple of customers weigh in on the Toshiba model. According to one reviewer, the IKWB15a has a limited zoom and setting it up on your network is complicated. He or she notes that it only records JPEG images, rather than video. That means, if you set up the camera to record images on motion detect, “you could have thousands of images you have to go through.”

But Lionhearted, the second reviewer, points out the other value of an IP camera — it can be used for webcamming along with surveillance. He or she uses it at a remote mountain site (and even posts a couple of photos to show just how remote). According to Lionhearted, “We wanted a camera that had features for surveillance like motion detection, yet also had good color image quality for public benefit — AND we didn’t want to spend a fortune… After exhaustive searching we bought this camera and have no regrets.”

When I had a second home, I always wondered what was going on there when I wasn’t around. Should I ever have a second home again, I could install a few of these things, crank up my browser and look for myself.

Posted on April 30th, 2008 by dian