REVIEW – Endoscopes are tools that let you peer into hidden spaces – down into pipes, through holes, around corners, and such. Today, we’re looking at one from Oiiwak, specifically a new 5MP version that promises high-resolution images and video.
What is it?
An endoscope is a camera mounted on a cable. This allows you to insert the camera into small spaces otherwise inaccessible by a traditional camera. Surgeons use endoscopes inserted into very small incisions to be able to see inside the body without having to actually cut a patient open. This is not a surgical endoscope! This is designed to peer inside drains, engine cylinders, gun barrels, etcetera.
What’s in the box?
- Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera, cable, and control unit
- USB-A to micro-USB charging cable
- Attachments – hook, magnet, 90-degree right-angle mirror
- Manual
- Support card
Hardware specs
- Dimensions: 3.5″ x 1.75″ x 0.75″
- Water resistance: IP67 – totally protected against dust, protected against the effects of temporary immersion between 15cm and 1m for 30 minutes
- Camera width: 8.5mm (sort of)
- Camera resolution: 5MP, 1944P/1080P/720P, 30fps
- Connection: Wi-fi
- Illuminations: six LEDs, dimmable
- Probe length: 11.5 feet, semi-rigid
- Battery life/charge: 1800mAh lithium battery, 3-4 hour runtime, 4-hour recharge
- Tools: hook, magnet, 90-degree mirror – all-metal screw-on connections
Design and features
Let’s start with the Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera cable. The cable itself is semi-rigid. The plus is that it can be bent into a shape and it will hold it. That’s great if you want to look in a vent over your head. The minus is that it makes it much more difficult to push down through a drain trap. At 11.5 feet long, this camera does give you a really long reach.
The Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera itself is surrounded by six dimmable LEDs. They provide plenty of light to illuminate dark spaces.
The tip of the camera unscrews to allow attachments to…well…attach.
This is the hook attachment. You can see the all-metal threads inside the top of the tool.
This is the magnet tool. The top has a small magnet on it that will allow you to retrieve any small ferromagnetic item you may have dropped down the sink or into your car’s engine.
The final attachment is a 90-degree mirror for those times you want to peek around a corner deep inside something.
The Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera cable is attached to the top of the control unit. On the right side of the control unit, we find the power switch toward the bottom and the LED dimmer wheel near the top. Let me address the power switch. Have you ever had a device where the power switch feels sloppy and you have to fiddle with it to get it perfectly into the one position where it turns on the power? If you have, then you understand this power switch. Flipping it from off to on doesn’t turn on the unit. You have to partially move it, then fiddle back and forth until the power light turns on. It’s awful.
The micro-USB (can anyone say “USB-C”?) charging port resides along the bottom of the unit.
The front features control buttons and LED indicators. The top button takes a photo. This duplicates functionality in the app. The lower rocker digitally zooms in and out. Below that, we see the two LED indicators.
When you actually get the power switch into a position that turns on the unit, the bottom LED glows orange. After a short while – less than a minute, typically, but not always, the top LED glows blue. When this happens, the unit is broadcasting its own wi-fi network. I say not always as sometimes, it took quite a while for the LED to turn blue. Then, I wondered whether it was just taking a while for the wi-fi to start up for some reason, or, did I have the power switch in a bad location and then I’d fiddle with it again.
Setup
First up, download the Scope View app. It doesn’t require setting up an account, so that’s nice.
To use the endoscope, you first turn it on and then wait for the blue wi-fi LED to turn on. Once it does, probably after fiddling with the power switch, connect your phone to its wi-fi network. The password, 12345678, is printed right on the back of the unit.
In the app, you can change the network name and password, you can do that in the setup options of the app, but the manual advises against it.
You can also change the Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera’s resolution, but it doesn’t remember the settings. Every time you use the camera, if you want a resolution above 1280×720, you have to change it. Boo.
Performance
First, I grabbed a 9mm handgun. Let’s take a look down the barrel. Well, that was the plan. But the 8.5mm camera is encased in a housing that is slightly larger than 9mm as it would not fit in the barrel. OK – let’s grab a .45. OK – that worked. The images and video looked pretty good. Let’s go to the gallery on my phone and upload them so I can include them in the review. I wanted to show you the high-resolution images and video from this camera. But I can’t. Why? Nothing gets saved to my phone. Well, that’s technically not true. Zero-byte image and video files get saved.
This is what I saw in my phone’s gallery.
Yup – that’s a broken image icon. The same was true for video files. Hmm… OK, let’s check out the file details.
Wow – the image is a zero-byte file. What about the video?
Yup – same thing. What’s odd is that I can go into the app and see images and videos.
Let’s engage the company’s support. Well, that’s another issue. There is no website – at least not that I could find. The only thing included with the documentation is an email address at 163.com. I went to 163.com. Here’s what I saw, after running it through Google Translate from simplified Chinese to English.
It appears to be a Chinese version of a landing homepage – sort of a Yahoo! or AOL. Since that was my only option, I sent an email and didn’t expect much. I was surprised when I received a reply the next day. We went back and forth for the next five days on why I was getting zero-byte files on my Samsung S20 Ultra. Here’s the final resolution.
We have tested many times on our Huawei and Apple phones, it works proper. Maybe our APP does not cover all models of mobile phones, we will find more models of mobile phones to test in our next version product.
They then offered $10 as compensation for the reduced functionality. Super.
I decided to take a look down my bathroom sink since it occasionally drains slowly.
Nope – the probe was too big to fit down the sink. Doh!
How about the kitchen sink?
Of course, it fits in the disposal. Since I can’t show you the actual images, here are a couple of screenshots.
The blurriness is because I captured it from a video file while it was playing back in the app. The actual images are good as is the video.
The app supports flipping the image and taking videos and snapshots.
What I like
- Good image quality
- Long camera cable
- Portable size
What I’d change
- You can’t do anything with the images and video on a Samsung S20 Ultra
- Put in a power switch that works correctly
- The camera is too big to fit into a lot of sinks and gun barrels 9mm and smaller
- Remember camera resolution settings in the app
- Support is questionable
Final thoughts
I wanted to like the Oiiwak 5MP wi-fi wireless endoscopic camera, but sadly, I do not. Unless you have one of the Apple or Huawei phones, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to save images to your device. True, you can still view the files in the app, but if you want to share them with someone to help diagnose a situation, you’re out of luck. Couple all that with the lack of a website, uncertain support, the inability to save camera settings, the large camera housing, and a power switch that came right out of the discount bin and you have a product of limited value. If you really need an endoscope for critical use, I’d look elsewhere.
Price: $57.99
Where to buy: Amazon
Source: The sample of this product was provided by Oiiwak.
