Compro Technology of Taiwan is only selling its Cloud Network Camera (model TN50W) in one place in the United States: on Newegg.com for $119. While the TN50W lacks a lot of the fancy extras, such as night vision, its price is aggressive enough to make this home surveillance camera worth a look alongside favorites like the Dropcam HD and the Editors' Choice Logitech Alert 750n Indoor Master System.  

Design and Setup

The TN50W measures 4.3 by 2 by 3 inches (HWD) on its stand; the rectangular camera itself is just 3.1 inches high. It unscrews from the stand if you want to just set it somewhere. The stand comes with hardware to mount it to a wall or ceiling.

The enclosure feels a little cheap—it lacks the heft and solid build quality of devices like Dropcam HD in its metal stand or the Samsung SmartCam WiFi. But the TN50W packs in Ethernet and a USB port on top that accepts the included 802.11n Wi-Fi adapter, so the camera can go wired or wireless on a home network. The Wi-Fi adapter looks a little strange sticking out, and the blue activity light never dims so forget stealth operation, but at least wireless is an option. There's a microSD card slot in the side for some manual, onboard video recording. As with all such surveillance cams, it still needs constant AC power and has no battery option, so placement is limited.

Setup is where the TN50W shines, as Compro embraced the fact that the majority of customers will want to watch and configure the camera with their smartphones. Here's how it works: Plug the phone into your home router, use a smartphone attached to the same network to scan a QR Code in the manual to get the C4Home app (on iOS or Android), create an account, and then use that app to scan a QR Code on the back of the camera. The TN50W instantly becomes viewable. The C4Home app also lets you configure the camera for wireless mode.  You can also type in serial numbers for setup if you want.

The other setup option, which is more traditional, is to insert the included CD in a Windows PC on the network and run a wizard to find the camera and configure it. When done, the setup software provides a URL on your home network (such as http://192.168.1.125:80) to access the camera directly in the browser.

Features and Performance

The TN50W is pretty no-frills, as far as these devices go. The list of things it can't do compared with the competition is long. You can't remotely tilt or pan, physically or digitally. The only zoom is digital, and I could never get it to work. There's no online "DVR" service; recording can only happen manually and in MKV format. (However, no DVR service also means you don't pay extra monthly fees.) But the biggest omission compared with the competition is night vision—instead, the TN50W sports a LED in front to illuminate the dark a bit. Nothing says "you're being recorded" like a bright white light shining from a camera, making the red LEDs used for night vision seem invisible in comparison.

What Compro does right is provide a consistent stream of video—two, in fact. The TN50W supports a maximum of VGA resolution (640 by 480) on the first stream, and in the second it can switch to Motion-JPG (recommended for viewing on a cell phone browser). You can set the frame rate to a full-motion 30 frames per second if you have enough bandwidth.

Accessing the camera's video feed on a smartphone is a breeze using the aforementioned C4Home app. The app can list multiple Compro cameras, but only view one at a time. The only options when viewing are either take a snapshot, or hold a finger on the screen to speak, in which case the two-way audio plays back what you said over the camera's speaker. The app can send notifications of motion events and show you one to three captured slides for each event.

The desktop software gives you two options: Use C4Home.com to access the camera feed over the Internet, or use your local network address provided at setup to bring up the "IP Camera LiveView" in your browser (the camera has a built-in Web server to make this happen). The downside: Both options require Internet Explorer, because an ActiveX control is needed to view the stream. I had problems even with IE, as only the 32-bit version is supported. I got the LiveView to work in Firefox using the VLC plug-in, but users of Chrome and other browsers need not apply. For Mac OS X users, the box says specifically, "viewing only," which is a non-starter.

Whether you access the camera feed with C4Home or over the network, either way you get a full gamut of choices: view feeds from up to 16 cameras, record clips to your hard drive, use the two-way audio, turn on the illuminator LED, or go into setup to change camera settings. The camera also offers a dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) option for remote access to the camera feed, which Compro includes free, but it only works if you don't enable the C4Home service.

Conclusions

Considering its low price, the TN50W is a solid, easy-to-access, wired-or-wireless surveillance camera. If you need the security extras that generally cost more—night vision and recording services—look elsewhere, in particular to the Dropcam HD or Logitech Alert models. If you only need adequate video quality in a live stream, via phone or browser, with the occasional alert to movement, Compro's camera is an ideal choice.