Eyespy247 PTZ camera

EyeSpy247 is, as the name suggests, a surveillance system.

It comes in two parts: a camera, which connects through your home network to the internet, and a website that allows you to manage the camera and view recorded footage.

A basic camera costs £110, but we tested the EyeSpy247PTZ model at £190. This can move to look up, down, left and right, and includes night vision. Buying a camera gets you 512MB of storage space on the website for photos and videos.

After creating an account on the site, the next step is to set up the camera. This involves plugging it into a network cable and running the software supplied on CD, but after that you’ll need to log into the camera’s own web interface to register it.

Here’s where things get interesting. If your router supports a system called UPnP, you can simply enter your account name and password then click a button to make the camera take care of connecting to the internet. The company tells us that BT Home Hub, Sky and Netgear DG834 routers should all work this way – we tried it with a Home Hub and it worked perfectly, but on a different Netgear model we had to set it up ourselves.

If your router, like ours, doesn’t play along then you’ll have to set it up manually. This isn’t too difficult, and instructions are provided, but it does involve registering with another service and carefully filling in several forms.

Having done this, we were able to add the camera to our EyeSpy247 account in just a few seconds using the online form. With this done you’ll be able to log into the website at any time and take control of the camera to see what’s going on.

You can also set up motion detection, so the camera will watch out for movement and upload a sequence of photos if it spots anyone. This works well, particularly as this camera has both a passive infra-red sensor to spot movement in the dark and a set of bright lights that flash on to illuminate the scene when taking pictures.

There’s a lot to like about the EyeSpy247 service: the camera is high quality and works very well, and the website is convenient and easy to use – we particularly liked the option to download a file with all the photos that had been taken.

Even if your router doesn’t work with the fully automatic setup, it’s easier to set up than the DIY alternatives.