Classroom

Product Review: AverVision W30

The W30 is a versatile wireless device that delivers high performance on many different types of documents.

Wayne Rash is a longtime technology journalist who has directed product testing centers. He is President of Wayne Rash & Associates, an analysis and editorial services firm located near Washington, D.C. He can be reached at wrash@mindspring.com. You can also follow him on Twitter as @wrash.

Document cameras are amazingly useful classroom tools. These devices let teachers project the images of a wide variety of items using the classroom video projector without first creating slides or photographs.

Teachers rarely have more than a few minutes for setup before class begins. For those who roam from classroom to classroom to take advantage of a document camera, it must be quickly deployed, easy to use and highly flexible. Most important, the document camera cannot be constrained to the few feet of cable between it and the projector.

The AverVision W30 solves all of these issues for teachers. It's a wireless device, which means there's a base station that connects to a monitor or projector. And the camera itself houses a rechargeable battery and can be located anywhere within 45 feet of the base station. Teachers can position the camera for reading documents, small objects or even for use with a microscope.

End-User Advantages

The W30 is easy to use. Once it's set up, all that's required is to turn it on. A fully charged camera will operate for eight hours. Because the camera is wireless and very portable, it can be used anywhere in the classroom. The unit's 30-characters-per-second frame rate supports motion-intensive applications, such as science experiments or student presentations.

One handy feature is that the device also works as a webcam, attaching to a computer through a USB port. Motion applications will work better and display little latency by choosing the "Motion" selection from the base station's menu. The menu uses icons that are reasonably intuitive; these appear on the display (monitor or projector) that the user has attached to the camera.

Aver's A+ Interactive software package, which comes bundled with the W30, adds to the functionality of the camera by supporting image capture, video capture and onscreen annotation of images. The W30 also can use USB or SD memory modules for saving images.

Why It Works for IT

The AverVision W30 requires little from the IT department. Setup is automatic once the base station and camera are plugged in and the camera is charged. When both devices are turned on, they automatically negotiate a connection via Wi-Fi, selecting a Wi-Fi channel that is least likely to cause interference. It's worth noting that the Wi-Fi channel selected is not always one of the three standard 2.4-gigahertz channels. Testing for this review was conducted in a Wi-Fi environment in which all available 2.4GHz channels were already taken. As a result, the device selected nonstandard Channel 3.

While the use of nonstandard channels may cause interference under some circumstances, such problems were not noted during operational testing. Tests conducted with a Fluke AirCheck wireless network tester reported interference on Channel 1, but the W30 did not interfere with any devices on that channel. Users can try to get the device to choose a new channel by pressing the "Reconnect" button located on the base station. This will cause the base station to renegotiate the channel selection, but it does not guarantee that it will choose a different channel. Odds are, teachers won't have to deal with conflicting Wi-Fi networks, but the IT staff should be aware of the channel issue and be prepared to manage it properly.

Disadvantages

The AverVision W30 does not include an HDMI port, which means that using a modern high-definition display may require an adapter for the DVI port. While such adapters are available, they don't always work with all displays.