Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First, as a previous reviewer said, the equipment is great. The cameras give a sharp, clear image with very good color. Setup is fast and easy. And even the app is easy to use and mostly intuitive. However, most of the features that are advertised are mediocre at best. The worst thing is that there is significant lag time from when an event occurs and when you can actually see it, even when connected to the same network as the hub. On live view (which can take a minute or more to get to connect), there is a lag of 10-30 seconds. This can make positioning the cameras a much more drawn-out process than one would like. But worse, it makes the two-way audio feature worthless. By the time you see that someone is there to speak to, they're probably already gone, and that's in live mode when you're home. Even worse is the lag associated with notifications. The lag between an event being recorded and receiving a notification isn't too bad, about 5 seconds. But then when you go to see what the notification is about, you have to wait for the recording to download. It can be a few minutes before it even shows up in your library. Again, this means that you are not viewing events in anything like real time, and aren't going to be able to react quickly enough to affect what is going on. If you wanted to use the 2-way audio to warn someone off, it would be completely useless when you're not home (which is when you'd most want to use it), because you won't even know anyone is there for probably 5 minutes, and then you still have to wait for live view to activate as well. By that time they've probably already broken in or done whatever else they came there to do. Another problem is that the system isn't constantly recording like wired video systems do, so that saved videos actually capture a few seconds of activity before a recording is triggered. This means the recordings often miss significant and important portions of the action. The recordings themselves can either be set to a fixed time, or for as long as there is motion. But this is also problematic. What if the action lasts longer than 2 minutes (the longest timed setting)? On the other hand, the 'as long as there's motion' setting cuts off literally the moment the camera no longer detects motion, so, again, you potentially miss important portions of the action at the end as well as the beginning. They really need to have at least 10 seconds of recording before a triggering event, and 10 seconds after motion is no longer detected to make sure that important information isn't lost. The lag also often means that the video itself has gaps. Often There's no video at all, just a single still image (a video with 0 seconds length). Motion detection is also not good. The cameras are extremely sensitive and can pick up the slightest movement of almost anything. This isn't a bad thing, except that it means you'll need to set sensitivity down well below max to avoid constant false triggers. But the adjustment for this is awful. We have a few neighborhood cats that come through the yard with a fair bit of frequency, and also birds that visit a feeder in the back of the house. But trying to set the sensitivity down low enough so that it doesn't constantly trigger on these animals, but still doesn't miss a person, is essentially impossible. You'd think there'd be a fair difference between an 8lbs cat and a 180lbs. mailman that the system would be able to detect. You'd be wrong. Along those lines, the system does actually label the videos according to the type of motion that triggered it, and it is very good about accurately differentiating between people, animals, and vehicles. However, there is no feature to have it ignore animals, for example. You can have it not send a notification based on the type of trigger, but it will still save a recording, which drains your batteries. Edit: for whatever reason, after the first two days the system also stopped correctly identifying 'person' and 'animal', and now just labels everything generically as 'motion'. Nighttime recording is generally good, with one major exception. I have one camera that watches the gate on the side of my house. There really isn't anywhere to mount the camera where it can watch this gate effectively except to the side of the house itself. And this means that the side of the house takes up about 1/5 of the frame, along the right side of the image. No big deal, since the remaining area sees what I need to see. However, at night, whether using the IR lights or the white light, that portion of the house is so brightly lit by the camera's lights that it completely washes out the rest of the image. There's no way to narrow the field of view (there is a setting that claims to do this, but it doesn't actually crop the image) so that the camera ignores that area. In short, if you want high-resolution images that show that someone was on your property at a particular time, this system will do that fairly well (the images are great, when it actually records - which it frequently doesn't even with people walking right through the field of view). However, if you want a good record of what they were doing, or even more so, you want to be able to watch them doing it in real time, this is not the system for you, as it simply, as their service works right now, doesn't do this well, or in some cases, at all. And forget the two-way audio, as it's worthless. UPDATE: So, having had these up for a few weeks now, I can add to this review. I've bumped it down to one star from two. First, none of the issues above have been resolved. The delay varies dramatically from one instance to another, but it is always excessive to the point of making the 2-way audio feature worthless. Not to mention that the sound out of the cameras is pathetic, so it isn't like it would be of any use even without the delay. It's been impossible to set the motion detection so that it records the things you want and not those you don't. Even set at 100%, it virtually never picks up people approaching my front door, even though I mounted the camera such that they have to walk horizontally across the field of view (which is supposedly the type of motion it detects best) for a distance of almost 30 feet, passing within 5 feet of the camera to reach it. If it records them at all (it doesn't always), it almost always only catches them at the door, or even walking away. Oddly though it still often picks up cats, birds, and small plants 20 feet away blowing in the wind, so much so that I get over 100 notifications a day and the battery dies in about a week. And that's with the battery management set to the lowest video quality to achieve the best battery life. It's so ridiculously bad that I only catch any video at all (usually just a couple of seconds as he walks away) of the mailman about every third day even though he could almost reach out and touch the camera, but I'll have a dozen 60 second videos every day of a cat grooming itself 20 feet away. There are two recording modes that I mentioned: record on motion and timed mode. I was getting such poor results with record on motion (I would get a fraction of a second of someone walking out of the frame, or the recording would start when they were halfway through the frame and then stop recording while they were still in it and moving) that I switched to timed mode, where you can set the length of the recording anywhere from 0 seconds to 2 minutes. Supposedly once motion is detected, the camera will automatically record for the set amount of time. No surprise, it doesn't. The results I get are better than before, but the video is never the length I set it for. It's usually significantly shorter, but sometimes twice as long. And I still usually only get people walking away after they've already reached my door, done something (ring the bell, drop a package, etc.), and turned around to leave. I usually only get the back of their head, not their faces. Another feature that doesn't work is hot zones. First, they are not recording hot zones, but just notification hot zones. I was hoping at first that by using them I might trick the cameras into being better at recording what I wanted, but it has no effect on that. Oh well, that isn't what it was designed to do. But it doesn't do what it is supposed to either. Since you can't turn off notifications (you can choose between a text-like alert or an email, but you have to choose one, the other, or both), I tried to use a hot zone to reduce notifications from a camera that I was getting far too many false notifications from (sometimes one every second or two for a whole minute). So I set a hot zone only in the smallest area I could, up in a corner of the frame where there is absolutely no motion. It didn't help one bit. I still go just as many notifications as ever, and when you look at the recorded video, you can see that the motion that triggered it (if there was any) was nowhere near the hot zone. In short, this technology is nowhere near being ready for the consumer market yet. While the set-up is far more difficult, a wired system that costs 1/4 as much will give you far better results, though the video quality on such cheap systems is nowhere near as good. But video that either doesn't cover what you need to see, or comes in so late you can't respond in time to make a difference is virtually worthless, no matter how good the image quality.