SmallNetBuilder

Video Quality

On the lower compression settings, I thought the video quality was excellent. I streamed video to viewers both on the Internet and on my local area network and had no problems viewing 30 frames per second (fps) at 640 X 480 on the local network. But while sitting at Starbucks and using a TMobile Wi-Fi connection, the frame rate appeared to be around 20 fps.

As I mentioned earlier, the 211A's built-in software lets you record only still frames, but you can set the camera to upload a JPG stream to a server and then manually process the JPGs to make a movie. A much easier way to go, however is to purchase a third-party program that can make a movie on the fly.

Figures 14 through 17 demonstrate picture quality at different compression settings (all the pictures can be enlarged to full-size by clicking on them). You can see that the quality remains very good up to 50% compression, but drops dramatically at higher compressions. I judge the results to be unacceptable at 80% to 100% compression.

Figure 14: Test Capture at 10% compression with Text Overlay
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Figure 15: Test Capture at 25% Compression
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Figure 16: Test Capture at 50% Compression
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Figure 17: Test Capture at 100% Compression
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You may want to compare the quality against desktop webcams tested in this previous article, or the Actiontec Network Camera.