A great value when you consider that 4MP pan&tilt cams start around $25, but quickly head up toward $70 and then, for those with Alexa, starting with Blink, at $120 and then up into the stratosphere, so yes, I'll do $35-40, please, though I might keep my eyes open for flash deals.
Straight out of the box, my first thoughts were "Huh, this seems very well packaged" (I've gotten some that were basically in a box with no packaging), this had foam protection and plastic covering most parts. I was right, the casing of the camera is thicker, even down to the little twist-on base, as compared to other brands I've tried of late, including Blink. The USB cable has to be twice as long as any I've received with any other camera. Nice attention to the little details and creating a feeling of generosity here. I confirmed 355 degrees rotation in the horizontal plane and about 120 degrees in vertical. That's pretty good, though I wish there was a bit more vertical travel (180 degrees?) so that I could use the mounting plate to put this on my bedroom wall and still capture video close to straight up and down, but this is good enough for most uses, such as security and cat cam.
The instructions could actually be understood EASILY! WooHoo! Somebody got this part right! So, I was able to set up my camera in just a few minutes without any hitches.
The resolution of the camera is very good, as is motion (some jitter at 4x, but I set mine to Auto (it shows you the bandwidth you are using at any moment as well as a color-coded dot to tell you how you wifi signal is). Once set up, you have to kind of just adventure around to see what you can do in settings. There were some plusses and minuses there.
Plus:
1. Nice to have the ability put a date/time stamp on the video, as well as a camera name if you want.
2. H.264 and H.265 support means that you can use one of the many generic video front-end apps available so that you can consolidate viewing with other cameras that also use standard formats (many do, not all though).
Minus:
1. The app: look at app store reviews. Woof! Lot of problems reported here. They seem responsive and my experience so far is just fine. I'll update the review if that changes.
2. Less rich settings around motion detection, night vision, duration of clips and notification reset. So, as far as I can tell, you can't tell the camera how long to wait before allowing another motion event and you can't set tracking and/or privacy zones. Night vision does not have levels, just on and off (this really matters if you have night lights, for instance). You can't tell the device how long to record if there is motion, or a person, or a sound. So, if you were planning to get this dialed in just so, you might be unable to. For me, I just set a schedule for motion detection of only Sundays at midnight to midnight, since I will only use this camera on-demand, not motion-activated (cat cam). I will only turn on motion detection when away so I capture lots of kitty deviltry to review every morning in my hotel room (usually laughing and cooing, much use of "cute"). I will get a TF card before I do that, I have no interest in saving my private video onto a server god-knows-where, sorry.
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