After playing some time with my DCS-2132L and finally installed it into the right place at my holiday house I have some observations that might be useful for people using this same camera:
Generally the wireless performance with D-Link IP cameras seems to be rather poor as stated also elsewhere in this forum. I have tested both 2132L and 930L and they both seem to have this same issue. The reason for this is probably that most of the D-Link entry level cloud cameras do not support an external antenna. The recently introduced DCS-2332L outdoor camera is an exception to this, but its price level is very prohititive especially if you don't need the outdoor capabilities of the camera. This is really a big issue to me and I would propose that D-Link considers at least a connector for an optional antenna for their future models. In my holiday house I solved the problem by purchasing an additional ASUS RT-N12-C1 wireless router and use it in repeater mode to extend the wireless range. Actually I installed the repeater very close to the camera and use Ethernet cable for interconnection, meaning that the wireless capabilities of 2132L are not used at all in this case. Now the signal strength at my main router is just excellent even though the house is made of stone and the camera is located in attic with a 30cm thick concrete floor between it and the living room where the main router is located.
Another observation that I made just recently is that you can actually get the signal strength (RSSI) information from the camera even though that information is so well hidden that you may not notice it when casually browsing the camera menus. The RSSI information is in deed available when you go the the Setup/Wireless Setup menu and select the correct SSID from the Site Survey pulldown menu. What confused me in the beginning was that the RSSI info is not available unless you explicitly select the SSID from the list.
Then one final observation regarding the myDlink operation. When I played with the camera I noticed several times that the live video feed via myDlink stops working if you make some some changes to the camera settings. The camera control pages open still correctly and you can have access to the camera via the Advanced Settings tab, but the live video feed doesn't reappear unless you remove the camera from the myDlink account and completely reinstall it. After making some experiments I noticed that the myDlink live video connectivity is lost if you make changes to the video/audio setup (especially the image resolution and compression method) after the installation. I'm not sure if other people have same kind of experiences, but to me this seems a bug in the myDlink service.
Generally I'm now quite happy with the camera despite of the these few issues and anomalities e.g. with FTP operation that I have described elsewhere in this forum. I hope that at least some of the issues will be fixed with future FW releases (currently I use release 1.00.06 since there hasn't been an update available in D-Link support pages).
Missed one thing: There seems to be also some problems (bug) with the camera automatic exposure control. When using the automatic mode the picture gets very easily over exposured, i.e. when there is much white snow in the picture area or the weather is otherwise bright the light areas get very heavily "burnt". The solution to this problem that worked for me is to use customized exposure settings (Setup/Image Setup/Exposure Mode -> Customize1) and define shutter speed between 1/10000 and 1/25.
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Topic: DCS-2132L - Observations and hints (Read 4294 times)