LOFTEK® Nexus 543 Outdoor Wireless/wired Waterproof Ip Camera 4mm Lens 36 Infrared Leds with Night Vision. Silver

I am giving this camera five stars because its performance is by far the best of the three relatively low-price surveillance cameras I've tried recently. It has a few peripheral flaws that I cannot bring myself to deduct stars for because they are fairly easily resolved.PROS:The image is probably as good as it gets for a cheapish VGA-resolution camera (640 x 480 pixels). The infrared optics and electronics required for nighttime imaging do not seem to detract at all from the color fidelity of the daylight image, which is excellent. Unlike an even cheaper IR camera I tried, greens are not gray, grays are not green, and blacks are not red. All colors are as they should be.The monochrome nighttime image quality is also the best I've found so far, much clearer and MUCH better detail than on the cheaper IR camera, even though its resolution was supposedly the same.The 36 IR LEDs give bright, even illumination over the entire viewing area and up to at least 30 feet (which is as far as I care about), with no noticeable concentration of light in the center as the 11 LEDS on the cheaper camera did.After initial setup with an Ethernet cable to the router (which is mandatory), I have used wireless connection exclusively with flawless results, in several different locations up to 80 feet from the router, inside and outside, with several interior and exterior walls and now even a massive triple-flue brick chimney in between.The case of the camera is very impressively hefty and rugged. I don't doubt that it is as weatherproof as the manufacturer claims. The IP66 rating is indeed impressive. It means that NO solid particles can enter the camera body. Period. There is no dust fine enough to get through the seals. It also means that no jet of water at any pressure from any direction can enter the camera enclosure. It might be susceptible to liquids only if completely submerged.Which leads me to the flaws:CONSAlthough the camera enclosure is impressively weatherproof, the electrical interface is not weatherproof at all, and it is permanently fixed to the camera through a singly hefty cable about a foot long. That cable ends in a receptacle for the Ethernet cable, which has two thinner cables about five inches long branching out the back, one to a connector for the power supply and the other to a small push-button reset switch. So any installation that takes advantage of the camera's ruggedness is going to have to provide separate and equal protection for those very vulnerable electronic connections, UNLESS you can bring the cable directly indoors within a foot of the camera. I can't do that, so I'm having to rig up another enclosure for them that will be mounted next to the camera. A little better attention to the design of the electronic interface would have made the camera's IP66 rating more easily exploited.The mounting bracket is one of the worst I have ever had the misfortune to wrestle with. I'm too angry at it right now to say much more, except that getting it adjusted and stable is a nightmare.The included software - as other reviewers have noted - is lame, as is most of the documentation (which completely ignores the mounting issues I just described). Clearly the manufacturer invested all its development budget in the camera itself, which at least was a wise choice. The camera really is so good that I still refuse to deduct even one star for these deficiencies.COMMENTSAfter a couple of hours' research, I followed another reviewer's lead and got Blue Iris software to control the camera. It is fantastic, and it's well worth the cost of $30 (support for one camera only) or $50 (up to 64 cameras). It makes setting up flawless motion detection, viewing video clips, zooming, panning (only in SW with this camera, but also in hardware with appropriate cameras), etc., a breeze. It has built-in support for this camera, and the only thing I haven't been able to do yet with it is adjust brightness and contrast, for which I had to use the included IPCamera Soft software. I did not have Blue Iris yet when I set up the camera's network interface through the Ethernet cable, so you may have to use the included software bundle to do that too. But that part is well enough documented and easy enough that it's okay.Finally: the color. Maybe color names have different meanings in China, but I never in a million years would have described this camera as "silver gray." It is a lovely lilac color, a definite, unmistakeable LILAC, without any hint of gray, although it IS a sort of silvery lilac. It is a beautiful color, but macho types will not be showing it off to their beer buddies.

I was able to start up the camera with a direct wired connection to my Macbook. The issue was the initial IP address which I found using the application NMAP. The documentation might have mentioned it, but hey, I read documentation after I fail to figure it out. I did have to read the documentation to get the initial userid and password.The interface worked well on my Mac with Firefox. I was able to change the admin user, the viewing user and set passwords. Also adjust the resolution of the image and played with some of the other settings which were fine on the default.I activated wireless and used the built in scan tool to identify my SSID and make the connection. I did not mess with using DHCP because I prefer a fixed IP since I am going to share it over the WAN.The connection to my "IP Cam Viewer" app on both Android and Iphone was clean and easy to set up. (NOTE: I used the app I already had rather than any apps loaded on the CD. Search you store for "IP Cam Viewer".)I also have a script running in Cron that captures an image from various cameras every 5 minutes. Used the string "wget -O - --user=[USER] --password=[password] http://IP:port/snapshot.cgi?camera=0 > image.jpg" to gather images from this camera. Very similar to my Foscam camera.I noticed that the colors are MUCH better than Foscam. Haven't mounted it permanently outside, so can't speak to the IR capabilities. Right now, the IR won't see through the window which is normal for IR.I will not repeat the other reviewers who discussed the mount, the power lead, or the focus. I was lucky on the mount and the focus. The power lead is short, but not much shorter than the Foscam really.The price is right and the image was very clear. This is no 760P camera though.

I bought my first Loftek Nexus 543 surveillance camera a year ago, you can tell by the slight purple tinge or as one reviewer wrote lilac colored exterior. This camera hands down is great, especially for the cost -- and it still works great today. Recently I bought two more Nexus 543 cameras only to be really disappointed. One camera has a focus issue, everything is fuzzy and night-time viewing is all but useless. The other new camera has to be rebooted several times to get rid of a ghastly negative image that it resorts to intermittently. It is bright pink and green -- rebooting the camera seems to be the only way to fix it when it happens - I may create a routine to reboot it everyday just as a precaution. Besides the obvious loss of quality, these new cameras are indeed silver in color.We all know that over the lifespan of a product that companies do rework and downgrade components to save on manufacturing cost. The quality of this camera has suffered due to that. My old Nexus 543 has better image day and night over the two new Nexus 543s I just bought. The mounting hardware on the new cameras is inferior to the mounting assembly that came with my old Nexus 543 which I still use, even though I have moved it countless times.In short, don't buy the new Nexus 543 camera, if you can find an old "Lilac" colored one, invest in that -- it will probably last forever.