XCAM2: Really Remote Viewing
-- Owen Linderholm, March 8, 2000
 
Digital video cameras for hooking up to PCs were once a novelty gimmick. But rapid price drops, videoconferencing and webcams changed all that. The X10 Xcam2 with XRAYVision is a neat combo most useful for security applications and as a webcam.

The camera itself is a small, flat, oval black box about two inches across with a simple cylindrical lens on an adjustable attached mount. The box also has a flat, square panel that can be rotated through many angles, and this is the giveaway as to the unusual feature of the Xcam2: It is a remote camera with a radio transceiver box to hook it up to the PC or a TV monitor. It can transmit images up to 100 feet using a 2.4GHz signal, although the distance goes down if the signal passes through many walls. The oval shaped base can be stood flat on any surface or be screw-mounted to the wall. The camera is also waterproof and can be mounted safely outdoors.

The transceiver part of the camera is a larger (four by six by two inch) box that has a larger, fully rotateable antenna. It also needs to be plugged in to electrical power and comes with a full complement of video and audio RCA jacks as well as a coax connector for hooking directly to a TV without PC involvement. You can set the transceiver so that the signal is received on channel 3 or 4 on a TV and you also get four settings on both the camera and transceiver for the actual signal.

The transceiver hooks up to the PC via an RCA to USB converter that is supplied. This ensures a high-speed connection for transmitting images to the PC.

Installation was simple. I installed the software and drivers and plugged the camera in. The control software is intuitive and functional and it was easy to change settings. The software is designed with two principal goals in mind. The first is security applications. The camera can be set to automatically capture a single frame every few seconds on the PC and store a log of captured images. You can control how often it does this and the software can even be set to switch between several cameras that are all within range. The software also includes motion detection and can simply capture on motion detection.

The second application is for using the Xcam2 as a webcam. You can rapidly set it up so that captured images are available over the web and can be integrated into web pages. The camera captures and transmits audio as well as video, taking it potentially a step beyond existing simple webcam-type cameras and making it even more useful for security.

Image quality wasn't great in our test, but that can partly be attributed to a weak signal. You can capture up to 640 by 480 pixel images (with interpolation) and save images as JPEG files which are pointed to from an HTML page.

The bottom line is that this camera is most useful for exactly the purposes for which it was designed. It is a great security tool for looking at and recording incidents and it is also a great webcam that can be set up anywhere near a PC, even outdoors. At $129, it isn't cheap, but it certainly is convenient. However, if you are looking for better image quality or the ability to videoconference, the Xcam2 is not a good choice.