This is my first security camera I have had, and I get a 20$ gift card for doing this review, but I will be honest as they didn't say I had to give it a certain rating or not. I paid 24$ for this camera, and honestly wasn't expecting much. I just wanted a little camera to monitor my pets while we are away from home, and it seems to work well for the task. So good infact I purchased two more. I never seen it explicitly mentioned, but I dont believe it is rated for outdoor use, and I am hesitant to put it outside. So I have two cameras pointed outside through windows, and one inside. This works very well in the day, but in the night the night vision makes a reflection on the window and I cant see anything. The night vision inside works really good. If there was a disable feature for this I think it would work ok because the outside is lighted, but I havent been able to find it yet. I can change between night and day mode, but there is still a glare. Box: Everything is in the box you need to get started. Mounting screws and plate, wire staples, fairly long usb cord and charger, short Ethernet cable. It must be plugged into an outlet or usb port to work. The only thing its missing is an sd card, but for this price, and that fact you can watch the camera live its understandable. Setup: Setup was fairly easy for me, but I am pretty tech savvy. That said its pretty simple. It has voice notifications for setup which is nice. You can set the connection up wireless through the app, but its easier to do it wired, even if you are ultimately going to be wireless. Sometimes the settings didn't seem to take, or the setup stalled out, but a power cycle seemed to fix the issue. Connection: I currently have two of these cameras set up as wifi and one wired. I have pretty fast internet and a good router so your mileage may vary, but they work pretty well. Occasionally the wifi ones will freeze up for a couple of seconds, but they generally work. Wired is probably the best route if possible, but not a deal breaker for me. Storage: You do not need an sd card to watch the feed live. If you want to have your feed backed up just get a sd card, and you can watch it on the free app via desktop or cell phone. When the card is full it automatically overwrites the older file. There is paid cloud storage if you so desire, but I didn't purchase that. Picture: It has a pretty wide field of view that I am extremely pleased with. While it is 1080p, it isn't like blue ray quality. Not sure why, but I would guess the video is compressed for size and streaming usability. Don't see any settings to change this. To me it looks more like 480p, but not a bad picture. There really isn't much lag between movement when you see it in real life vs the feed. Maybe like a couple ms of lag, but not bad. Like I said for a sub 30$ camera I think its great. I would guess your wifi will affect this. I do not believe there is support for 5.0 GHZ wifi only the 2.4GHZ band which I found strange, but it wasn't really an issue. It will not connect to a 5.0 ghz wifi so be aware of this during setup that you are connecting to the right wifi, or you will have issues. Features: You can flip the view for mounting it on the ceiling, it has night vision thats automatic and works pretty well, although when a portion of the picture was a dark room, and the rest was lighted, sometimes it would kick into night vision mode, and I fixed this by panning it abit away from the dark area. Which is another nice feature pan and zoom. The zoom is about as good a my galaxy S7 zoom, but with the medium resolution, dont expect miracles, but its pretty good. With the zoom I couldnt read my thermostat at about 10 feet away, but the numbers are pretty small. The pan works quite well and has a large range of motion. You can also hear audio, and speak through the camera which is a pretty cool feature I was not expecting. AP: The app mostly works well, but like I said there is some freezing when changing things during setup. It gets stuck at the time zone change every time. So I just power cycled it, it had saved my settings from prior, and I go into settings of the camera and change it there. Its nice to be able to watch your cameras from your phone or desktop and review your sd storage all for free. Very rarely the feed may freeze or be black for some reason, and I have to restart the ap, but like I said its not often. One feature I would like that is missing is watching all the feeds at once. It maybe possible to pull up multiple instances of the ap and do it that way, but its far from ideal. All in all, I am very impressed and pleased for what I got for what I paid. They will work nicely for me. The only things that I dont like is not being able to watch multiple feeds at once, and not seeing through the windows at night, but this may be able to be fixed with some googling, and really it wasn't designed for this anyway. So I would definitely recommend this camera, and do not regret the purchase at all. There is some quirks, and its not perfect, but its a great value. If have a ton of money to spend on a camera go ahead, but for my needs its everything I could want.
