WiLife LukWerks Starter Kit

Pros: Ease of set up, video quality

Cons: Camera is way too big, platinum extra's cost $79 a year, no platinum demo software, depending on your home, may not work for you

Summary: My house has a lot of windows, more than most homes have, but because of the size of the WiLife cam, I still couldn't find a convenient way to place it on the inside, so it looks out.

Wilife offers a platinum software service that could have resolved my placement problems. The platinum software lets you pan and scan and tilt and zoom the camera from your desktop (and to be fair, you can manually move the lens, too) but WiLife doesn't offer a demo of the platinum ware, and according to the company, if you buy the software (at a steep $79.99 a year!!!) and it doesn't solve your placement problems, there are no refunds.

A timed, limited use, one day demo would be nice.

Having spent $270 for my kit, the prospect of handing them another $79.99 for nothing didn't make me happy. Neither did the $270 price for that matter.

But let's look at what WiLife is really asking you to spend.

If you want to monitor four sides of your home, and adjust each camera from your desktop, you're spending over $1000 for the first year only, and another $79.99 a year every year after.

If you don't have an open wall socket, or a power strip with an open socket within a few feet of your PC, you're out of luck. If you don't have an open wall socket near where you intend to place the WiLife cam, you're also out of luck.

Of course, you can always visit the WiLife store and buy some extension cables, or you can pick up a longer ethernet cable for less, (the cam to wall socket adaptor uses a standard ethernet cable) but then you're running a cable over a door or a window sill, or through a wall, and that kind of defeats the whole point of the WiLife system to begin with.

Out of the box, it takes about five minutes to realize that WiLife is more interested in your money than they are anything else.

The included WiLife command center is promising, but needs revisions before it lives up to that promise, and as far as the idea of it all goes, WiLife is a great idea. It just suffers from the same security cam problems they all have. Cables that are too short, and costs that are too high.

When the cam is smaller, and the included cables are longer, and you can test their platinum services, then I'll be interested again.

I'm returning mine today. I'd rather suffer the hassles of X-10 cams than I would be a WiLife customer -- at least for now.