Compro TN600W review

Compro’s TN600W looks like a bargain: it offers PTZ functions, motion detection, 802.11n wireless and night vision for a reasonable price. The camera can record to a microSD card, and the internal microphone and speaker allow it to support two-way audio.

The lens has a bank of six IR emitters on each side for night vision. It has only a 10x digital zoom but pan and tilt ranges are good, with 100-degree vertical and 340-degree horizontal coverage.

Compro has a sharp focus on cloud monitoring, with the C4Home service. Users with iOS or Android mobiles scan the supplied QR code to get the app, then scan a second, unique QR code to pair with the camera. We had no problems getting the iOS app, and had cloud access to the camera in seconds.

The app can then be used as the heart of all operations. You can access camera settings, set up a C4Home dedicated Dropbox cloud store and, if you want to scare a thief, jab the bell icon and have the camera sound an alarm. You can also resize the view using pinch and zoom; for pan and tilt operations, just swipe the image.

Wireless connection to a Netgear WNR3500 AP was simple: with the bundled wireless adapter plugged in, the camera showed all available networks, plus signal strength. Three areas of motion detection are supported; pan and tilt can be controlled by pointing and clicking in the live view; and multiple lens positions can be saved as presets and used by a patrol mode.

What holds back this camera is its tiny 1/7in CMOS sensor, which has a top resolution of only 640 x 480. This in itself isn’t a killer, but its limited light-gathering abilities have a huge impact on image quality. The slightly fuzzy view makes the 10x digital zoom almost useless, bright sunlight isn’t handled well at all, and the iPad view is best described as murky.

The TN600W packs a lot of surveillance features in for the money and Compro’s C4Home service is great, but the below-par image quality means we can’t recommend it.