Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Had this camera system for less than a month and it already prevented us from being robbed while vacation! The motion alerts are frequently due to shadows shifting or bugs, but within 4 days of installing a camera over our front door the notification was real. Tuesday, 11:20pm. 400 miles from home. Motion alert on my phone. Front door camera. Random sketchy guy scoping out our house while we are on vacation, looking in windows from front porch. He sees the cameras and (after ringing the doorbell for show) takes off with his accomplice. All of this caught on video, sent to police and neighbors within hours of the incident. I can't recommend these cameras enough. In fact, my in-laws and several neighbors have bought them since this happened. Here's how they work. Others have detailed the setup process, so I won't go over that again. But once installed, the 1TB hard drive stores video for up to a month (mine has been installed for 23 days and has not filled up). You can access this remotely through the pretty decent Zmodo app. ALSO, you can select a region for each camera's motion detection feature. If motion is detected within the area you selected, your phone gets pinged and you can view a series of 5 compressed still images recorded over a period of 5 seconds (easy on your data plan). These are stored in the cloud, so you can still get to them if some really crafty thief steals your Zmodo hard drive! The motion alerts occur a maximum of once per camera every 5 minutes. So there is a chance you will miss something here in that 5-minute period. BUT, if you go back to review the video (in the app), all motion is highlighted so you can skip to the highlights. The motion alerts are stored for 24 hours but can be saved to your "gallery" in the app, or just screenshot it. Also, video can easily be recorded to your phone. In my android, saved files show up in a "Photos" folder in my gallery. They are a nice size, small enough to email short clips, say, to the police after you are almost robbed. The alerts come in all throughout the day, some from clouds covering the sun (shadows disappear), others from actual human actions. After a few weeks I have learned to tell the difference without having to go to the app. If I get 5-6 notifications within a couple of seconds, it's a cloud. If they are staggered by 2-3 seconds it may be someone walking around the back yard. 2 at a time, may be a car pulling in the driveway. You get the idea. Video quality varies depending on setup. Cameras pointed out at my open backyard are mostly hazy at night, but for nearby objects video is great. Daytime video quality is fantastic. Resolution is 720p, which is the sweet spot in my opinion. Any lower and picture quality suffers. Any higher and your network and internet connection will likely struggle to keep up. As it is, my network is showing signs of being overloaded so I plan to purchase an additional wireless access point. I have an ASUS AC68U, a quality router. You may want to account for this in the cost of ownership. That and getting them wired. Mine are temporarily wired using extension cords but I'll probably need an electrician to wire them more permanently. A couple of features I wish they would add would be the ability to jump to the video for motion alerts instead of having to scroll to it. Scrolling the video can be tedious. In addition, it would be nice if 1) the motion detection area didn't have to be a rectangle and 2) you could tweak the sensitivity. Thanks for reading!