D-Link
DVC-1000 i2Eye Video Phone
by Zack Bryce, Tech Lab Mgr.
May 12th, 2003
If you’re old enough, you first saw them in Buster Crab’s movie matinee Flash Gordon series, or later on TV’s "The Jetsons" and even at Disney’s Epcot Center, since the 60’s. Videophones have been predicted for the consumer public, for the last 50 years at least. AT&T offered it in a somewhat familiar telephone format, although the screen was uselessly small. There have been a lot of companies that have tried videophone products, and all have faded into garage sale oblivion.
 AT&T thought this would work with consumers |
What were the main reasons? Well the most obvious was the slow telephone line transmission rates, then screen size and lastly price. They were all horribly expensive for the quality you received. |
The one area that did take off, but only in the last dozen years, is teleconferencing; primarily the domain of big corporations because the hardware is expensive. Some were via conventional telephone connections, some were via Internet telephony. Many home video telephones require a computer; i2Eye does not, just a broadband connection and a television set.
Having dabbled quite successfully with Ethernet and Wireless IEEE 802.11b Security and Surveillance color cameras, D-Link debuted the new DCV-1000 “i2Eye™” VideoPhone for broadband at CES 2003 in Las Vegas. It was instantly one of the “buzz” tech items at the show and a finalist for a Best of CES Award.
i2Eye has a huge advantage over other consumer and even corporate level video conferencing units,
i2Eye
has Sorenson Media compression. If you’re a Mac user or content
producer that uses Apple QuickTime or Macromedia Flash, you know about
Sorenson Media and their stunning video compression software. In a nutshell,
it allows TV broadcast quality video streaming to be compressed into the
smallest possible file for transmission in real-time over the confined
bandwidth of broadband Internet without quality loss at up to 30 fps.
"....if you’ve
paying for broadband, use it for free calls too!"
This is the significant
factor that makes i2Eye a standout compared to other videophones and teleconferencing
units. And like the high-end corporate units, the i2Eye adheres to the
ITU H.323 industry standard, which assures that it will be compatible
to any other compliant unit, so you won’t be buying a proprietary
standards unit.
You’d think that the TV and radio “advertised” low local and long distance telephone rates would deal a deathblow to Internet telephony. Well, it hasn’t because in actuality, telephone rates for local and long distance are higher than ever. The highest when factoring in the 20 year cost-of-living factors since 1983. Hey, if you’ve paying for broadband, use it for free calls too!
Seeing i2Eye
in Business -
After initially
experimenting with the two i2Eye units on our Tech Lab, we decided one
of the best ways to put the unit to a test would be to let potential users
set it up and use it with no help from our engineers.
Since a large proportion of our readers are IT managers or owners of small to medium business, we asked a local company near our office we’ve worked with before to be our first business reviewer. They have two offices, one an executive office and the other a engineering facility, located nearly 20 miles apart by freeway in San Diego County. Sometimes bi-weekly product meetings that took 30 to 40 minutes of travel time were a huge hassle. They gladly accepted the challenge.
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