I picked up one of these tiny Trek Ai-Ball wireless cameras from local electronics chain Jaycar yesterday afternoon, while visiting friends in Canberra. This impulse buy followed a heads-up from one of my Twitter friends, Jon. While I was there, I also purchased one of the cradle and adaptor accessory kits to go with it. The camera and accessory kit were AUD99.95 and AUD29.95 each, respectively.
The Trek Ai-Ball and accessories can also be purchased directly from Singapore-based Trek directly. See link here and here. Buying directly saves you ~30%, however you forfeit any support from a local retailer or distributor. Support that, as I learned, was quite valuable.
UPDATE: Complete flickr gallery for this post is here.
It was very clear to me that this was a new product for Jaycar. The young salesperson I dealt with on Saturday had next to no idea about what the product did and what was in the box. For example:
Me: “Does it include a rechargeable battery?”
Him: “I’m pretty sure it does… I sold one to another guy earlier.”
Me: “Can we just check? I don’t want to get home and find out that I need batteries for it, you know?”
Him: “Yeah, no worries” [opens box]
Me: “Ahh – that’s a CR2 lithium battery. Not rechargeable”.”
Him: “Oh yeah.”
Me: “It say’s I’ll get approximately one and a half hours per battery. Do you have any CR2 batteries in stock?”
Him: “I don’t think so, but let me check.” [walks over to battery section] “Here you go!”
Me: “No, that’s a CR123.”
Him: “Oh yeah.” [putting it back on the rack]
Me: “Here they are!” [pickups up an Energizer CR2 on a card] “$23?!…I think I’ll just get the unit for now. Sorry.”
Got back to my mate’s house and excitedly unboxed the loot. This is the wash-up of what I learned and experienced.
Out of box
From the packing through to the manual, instructions and camera itself screams “built to a price”. I’m sure the high gloss black plastic housing is functional, but it looks cheap and nasty. And that chintzy braided gold keychain/clip accessory? I was lost for words. My mate laughed his head off. Hey, at least they included a good quality brand-name battery.
First impression of the camera unit itself – wow, it’s VERY small. Of course there are “spycams” (et all) that are smaller but they are NOT packing a web server, DHCP server, wireless router et al:
- VGA (0.3MP) video (claimed 2MP stills?!)
- 802.11b/g wifi networking (with WEP 64/128, WPA, WPA2)
- microphone
- internal antenna
- 30mm diameter and 35mm long
- 100g
The good
It just works. Simply insert the battery and switch it on. Within ~20 seconds a new (unsecure) wireless network becomes visible to nearby devices. We had an iPhone, three notebooks and an Android tablet connected to it simultaneously and it didn’t (appear to) drop a single frame.
Flick the switch down a notch and the device goes into admin/config mode. Simple, but effective, interface to set up and maintain passwords, wireless security and other preferences.
The audio quality is surprisingly good. The tiny internal microphone is very sensitive and, notwithstanding the artefacts from compression, the audio playback was quite acceptable for most applications.
It’s small. Again, I can’t overstate how powerful this little unit is for its size.
The bad
I wasn’t expecting NASA-grade imagery from a VGA (640 x 480) camera but nothing could prepare me for the craptardedness (trust me, it’s a word….or should be) of the video which it pumped out. The fixed-focus lens appeared to be trying to lock onto low-flying satellites and nothing in the room looked even vaguely sharp. Colour reproduction was hit and miss, heavily weighted towards the latter. The noisy, washed-out footage was not enhanced by tweaking contrast, brightness etc.
Sadly, Trek has skimped on sensor and optics quality to bring this to market for the current asking price. They shouldn’t have. I’d be prepared to pay USD100+ for one (or more!) of these *if* they could address the appalling image quality. They’ve ruined an otherwise stellar gadget by cutting corners on one of the most important elements.
The claimed 20 metres range for the wifi was not obtained. We could get 10-15 metres maximum – and that was only after switching off every other RF-emitting device in the house which worked in the 2.4GHz range… including the microwave oven and cordless phone 
Clearly, this was NOT going to cut the mustard as a real time first-person video source for my radio control cars and aircraft.
A quick note on Jaycar
I thought that the initial salesperson might have been a bit eager to simply make the sale and get me out the door. However, it was like a completely different store when I returned today to seek a refund on the items.
The three staff today were genuinely attentive and asked lots of questions about my experience with the product. They acknowledged that it was a new product, and one of them made a series of notes for a monthly report of some description which they submit to head office regarding returns activity.
As a consumer affairs professional, I was impressed by the no-fuss, empathetic, and empowered customer service delivery.
Oh, Jaycar, feel free to add some/any/all of the thoughts here to that monthly report. Would love to see a version two of this device with some obvious tweaks to the optics and radio. And PLEASE continue sourcing innovative products for the Aussie market.
Yep – that would be my local jaycar. Its stock is half random electronic gizmos and half components for making bigger things. I think their staff might be divided the same way – some know about soldering, others about the gadgets – but I always seem to get the wrong sort for whatever I’m buying.
Still – they are often well priced (dual monitor stand for $60) and they are one of the few retail places around where you can still buy components for your own electrical projects.
Nice! Also one of the larger Jaycar stores I’ve seen – amazing stock levels.
You have posted a great resource.
This is a very detail review. I am wondering whether you can use your iPhone to access the video at office while you leave your camera at home.
Thank you
No, the camera creates its own wifi network which is not accessible (without significant configuration effort) remotely from the internet.
You can use this camera as a remote. I log into my home network via VPN so that the home network is local to me. Even if that wasn’t the case, and assuming your router allows it, you can map port 80 to point to the camera’s ip address. I open my phone browser and type https://192.168.2.1 or whatever address you configured it to, and click Javascript. Displays fine on my Android phone.
I bought an Ai-Ball 2 days ago. It is absolute, unadulterated rubbish. Perhaps that’s a little strong but it just doesn’t work properly on my home network unless I use my laptop with wireless. Even then it is hit and miss and it’s behavior is flakey. If only I had waited to check a (your) review. The video has gross lag even over a 56 mbs connection. The image quality is ordinary at best. I cannot believe that TREK wants $2.99 for a PC setup wizard. I don’t have credit cards so it is hard for me to purchase some things over the net. Even if I did I would be reluctant to expose my card details to purchase for such a trivial amount. On every device I have purchased over 20 years a configuration program is included with the product as part of the package. It’s akin to buying a car without wheels!
I have a netgear dual mode router, that is, it connects the LAN via RJ45 cable or wireless. It is as common as dogs balls and comes with Bigpond cable internet package. I was able to insert the Ai-Ball into the Router wireless device list but only after trolling for the MAC address of the Ai-Ball with my HTC multimedia phone. The instructions that come with the Ai-Ball are hard to read as the print is so small. I need my magnifyer to read them! The instructions assume that I am setting up the Ai-Ball on a PC with a wireless network card. I didn’t understand that this meant a PC with an actual wireless device and not a PC connected to a wireless capable network or a network with a wireless router. It seems that the $2.99 “wizard” takes care of that. However, the advertising blurb implies that it is ready (and easy) to connect to a PC or any media device such as an Iphone straight out of the box.
Have to pay extra for a cradle and power supplies is also crap. All these things should be bundled including any “wizards” that enable it to achieve it’s advertised claims. I could go on and on but I won’t bore you. I’m so pissed off about this manufacturer. Hopefully JayCar can exert some pressure on Trek to change the product and package. I’ve emailed TREK and JayCar. I’m returning the camera this morning.
Bob Moore
Nice review. I was trying to buy one today, but they’ve sold out in the 3 stores I checked. Now I might be glad they did. The review would have been better with some sample pictures from the camera and maybe even a video to go along with it on youtube. Now I’ll want to see a demo in the shop before I decide.