Enter stage right the Linksys  WVC54G-UK wireless internet video camera, this little chap can be mounted on a wall or on its own stand and positioned to cover the desired area, then using its inbuilt 802.11g  transmitter or cabled 10/100 baseT send pictures back to a wireless hub or master PC where images can be locally recorded. The WVC54G also boasts an onboard web server so that you can use the camera without any central PC and access the camera directly from the web assuming you know the IP address.

The stylish little unit looks like its been mounted on a heat sink, with a largish aerial for the 54g connection and adjustable camera pivot and an LCD screen for the basic configuration of the camera and wireless settings. The MPEG4 encoded images while only VGA resolution are clear and crisp and the frame rate is more than acceptable for most purposes, setup is not too bad and the instructions are concise and fairly comprehensive although you'll need knowledge of how to setup your wireless router to translate the port used by the WVC54G-UK to an address accessed via the web.

The supplied record and review software is basic yet functional, however most of the key features are contained within the unit itself, the security mode was of most interest to us, it detects motion (or change) in the video image and will jump into record mode while alerting you via email and possibly even attaching a short video clip to the email.

We managed to et the Linksys WVC54G-UK up and running in about 30 minutes, of which a large proportion of time was spent configuring our office Alcatel router to port forward, once running we could log onto the camera when all other network PC's were switched off and after entering a password the video stream was delivered through internet explorer. Security is taken care of by use of 128bit WEP encryption on the wireless link and then a user account / password authentication for logging onto the web server. The email alert seemed to work well although we never managed to get it to attach the video file, but in compensation we found it was possible to burn the time and some user defined text over the image.

Compared to the semi professional webcam's with inbuilt web servers the Linksys is not state of the art, its more akin to a home webcam with a 54g wireless card and a inbuilt web server, but then that's just what we had been looking for. Priced at £135 the WVC54G-UK is very competitive and has a somewhat unique position under the starting point of the cabled semi pro cameras, there are limitations like only being able to view one camera at a time within internet explorer and we have to say a poor quality microphone, but at this price its very good value.

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