D-Link DCS-8526LH security camera review

Ever wondered what your pets get up to once you’ve left for work? I’d wondered for ages just what my two greyhounds did when they had the place to themselves. Recently, I got a chance to finally find out thanks to D-Link’s new Wi-Fi home security camera, the DCS-8526LH.

It turns out that this camera is a bit of a smarty. I say this because it is packed with enough onboard processing power to tell people from objects. It can also detect the sound of breaking glass, alerting you via the D-Link phone app when a video of a person or audio of burglary is captured.

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All that may sound gimmicky, but the upside is that every single frame of video need not get sent to a data centre. This handily also means that your broadband data allowance takes less of a hammering, and valuable data centre processing resources are not wasted.

It also makes for faster and more accurate alert notifications. Let’s face it, false positives from wireless cameras are about as much fun as being kicked in the nuts after the 700th false-positive alert notification pops up on your phone.

Remote access to the camera is dead easy thanks to D-Link’s mobile app (Android/IOS). With it, I could tilt and pan the camera by swiping my phone’s screen, view its video in full-screen mode and pinch to zoom for more detail. Hitting a small Mic icon allowed me to talk, transforming the camera into an intercom. (Both greyhounds looked more than a little baffled by it).

The pan/tilt capabilities provide a 360-degree field of view so I could check out the entire room. It can also automatically pan and tilt to track any people it spots in its field of view. I must admit that I found this feature un-nerving as the camera tilted and moved without me controlling it. I’d forgotten that I’d enabled the auto-tracking setting, and thought I’d fallen victim to shady hackers – D’OH!

On the video front, the DCS-8526LH does a decent job. It delivers Full HD 1080p video. While its night vision impressed (thanks to built-in infrared LEDs, which can illuminate up to 5 metres), night vision is rendered in monochrome. Daylight colours were however accurate and looked crisp. Everything also streamed stutter-free from my broadband connection to my phone.

Footage can be saved to a microSD card, or if you want to pay a monthly fee, footage can be stored remotely on a D-Link cloud service. Because the DCS-8526LH supports ONVIF protocols, you can also (with a little mucking about) get it to record footage to a network-connected hard-drive. That’s an excellent option for those who already have a network drive and don’t fancy coughing up monthly cloud subscriptions. An important caveat is that it is also less secure. If the burglars you wanted the camera to record steal your networked hard drive, you lose any video footage that could help the cops identify them.

For a low fuss and easy to set up means of keeping an eye on things at home when you’re away, the DCS-8526LH is hard to beat. Excellent usability, great smarts and good quality video make it a real contender.

So, what did my greyhounds get up to when I was out? Instead of Sudoku, poetry, or quantum physics whitepapers, it turns out they pretty much spent the entire day asleep. It’s a hound’s life, right?

www.dlink.co.nz