PT7137 demonstrated impressive low-light performance at 1.5 Lux and delivers secure wireless connection with WEP and WPA encryption. "We are impressed with how well the camera handled very low light levels and general movement at 30fps on maximum resolution was reasonably smooth." said Dave Mitchell, author of TrustedReviews, "We also found the internal microphone worked ell as it didnt introduce the customary one second lag often found with IP cameras."

Offering a wide field of view that covers 350 degrees horizontally and 125 degrees vertically, PT7137 is comparable with other rival products in the same price range. In sum, PT7137 is ideal for users seeking to gain pan/tilt and wireless capabilities with limited budget.

Design is very unusual as the camera lens is mounted in a golf-ball sized housing at the end of a swan neck of plastic. The lens mounting provides vertical movement for tilt operations and the whole assembly rotates about its base to provide panning movement. It may look odd but this design provides good coverage with a horizontal range of 350 degrees whilst vertical movement covers 125 degrees, putting it on a par with similar products from Axis and Panasonic.

At this price you dont get any optical zoom and the camera only offers a 4x digital zoom which delivers a substantially inferior image quality. The camera uses a standard 1/4in RGB CMOS sensor and it can handle low light levels right down to 1.5 lux. It supports MPEG-4 compression, offers four different resolutions and can deliver a maximum speed of 30fps up to the top resolution of 640 x 480. Motion detection is on the menu and theres also an internal microphone allowing you to hear whats going on in the area under view. No audio output sockets are provided so this is a one-way trip only. Unlike Axis cameras, the PT7137 doesnt offer an I/O connector block so cant operate external security devices.

Vivoteks wizard utility makes light work of installation as it searches the network and displays discovered cameras automatically. Obviously, you need to start with a wired connection to the camera but from the wizard you can modify network parameters, secure administrative access, set up the wireless access point and also upgrade the cameras firmware. Wireless access can be secured as the integral access point supports WEP and WPA encryption and it can operate in Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure modes.

The web interface is nicely designed and opens with a live view along with sets of camera controls alongside. The keypad can be used to control pan and tilt functions or you can simply point and click in the viewing area to move the lens. Sets of predefined pan and tilt positions can be created and each one accessed quickly from the home page. The pan function sends the lens through a complete horizontal sweep or it can patrol across selected positions. For manual operations, the pan and tilt speeds can be adjusted as can the speeds for pan sweeps and patrols.