When I started this review, I wasn't sure what to expect from a low-cost Internet camera. In general, I found the image quality of the HNC290G, at least at the highest resolution mode, to be pretty good. I was also pleased to be able to access my camera across the Internet using the TZO dynamic DNS and I thought it also did well in low-light conditions.

But where the camera failed miserably was in reliability. When the camera worked, it did a pretty good job. But if I go to the effort of installing a surveillance camera, I need to have confidence that it will always work as designed. And in this respect, the device did poorly. In fairness to Hawking, the HNC290G is not advertised as a surveillance camera. But the problems I found would frustrate its use for other applications, too.

Between the occasional inability to log in, the motion detection failures, the garbled images and the other issues I uncovered, Hawking has a lot of bugs to fix. Hopefully, all of these problems can be addressed in firmware. But until then, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend the HNC290G as anything other than a toy, and a buggy one at that.

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