Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Thanks to an overwhelming number of exceptional reviews here, I purchased & setup these cameras and was compelled to share my experience and documentation to educate consumers instead of misleading them. Note, I returned them to Best Buy within the first 30 days because they are not worth the time, trouble or money. First night I purchased was during the NFL divisional championship games. Setup is remarkably simple, and the product does appear to be well built from looks and feel...but wait. I installed one in my driveway, and it rained that night. When the camera gets water on it (even while facing downward) and if any lighting is close the camera, there is a TERRIBLE blooming effect where you cannot see what you are trying to record. I took a second video after the rain stopped so you can see the difference. Second majorly disturbing issue was a total white washed image on a malfunctioned camera. Contacting Netgear Support was painfully agonizing. On top of having to create an account for myArlo.com & a second if you want to join the community.arlo.com forums, you need a third account on my.netgear.com. Its insane. Anyway to even reach support you have to have the product registered, and then create a ticket with details, then they finally supply a support # to call, which wasn't even for ARLO support (was for routers), was transferred to another number after waiting 15 minutes to speak to someone that couldn’t help me, held 20 more minutes only to explain my issue and steps I already took to resolve and was offered a replacement of a 2 week old camera. No thanks. If 1 of 4 are a total failure in the 1st two weeks, there is little to expect that will suggest they will last long enough to quantify a $649.99 purchase price. Other recurring issues that I experienced where when trying to make changes, like renaming cameras, changing the motion sensitivity, etc where the web page would freeze and I would get a message stating “ Your changes did not apply”. I also had a random “timezone_error” and often on my home 300/20 MBps connection, I would get “Your camera is offline”. Oh, and as far as support you only get 90 days from purchase date of phone support if you don't subscribe to an additional plan other than the included basic; which BY THE WAY, only includes 7 days of cloud recording and a whopping 1G of cloud storage. The quality of video and compression is disappointing as well. Premier is $9.99 a month for 30 days w/ 10G cloud storage and Elite is 60 days & 100G cloud storage. Those both include unlimited support. Some other things to know before you buy these if you think they might work well for you: The cameras ONLY record on motion detection, or if you are monitoring and hit manual record. There is no constant recording feature. The rechargeable batteries did last a pretty decent amount of time...lowest any got in the two weeks I had them was 58%. If you do think of buying a spare battery to have a hot swap ready to go, you will ALSO need a charger if you don’t want to take a camera offline; as there is no way to charge them without a camera shell/charger. $120 to have that “luxury” folks... The modes are pretty simple to setup, but don’t offer any real granular settings or way to automatically switch between modes when your dwelling is occupied or unoccupied. There is not a way I discovered to have certain cameras off, like 5pm - 11pm M-F when walking around the house, and then to all on from 11pm - 7am, off for an hour while getting ready for work, and then back on from 8am - 5pm. You have to create your own modes for each type of function and manually switch between them if you don’t want to be bombarded with emails or push notifications; depending how you set them up. You have no direct connection to monitor your cameras video, even on your local network. If your internet is down, so is your ability to view your cameras. The cameras record/stream through the base station, to your router, up to the netgear servers in California, and then back down to your router and on the device you like to view them on. If not on your LAN, then through your mobile carrier. The base station is very light, and MUST be plugged into your router to function. That was the only part of this kit that seemed from the outside like it was built really cheap. Made in Vietnam by the way. The base station does not have any USB 3.0 ports and the ethernet jack is only 10/100. Yup, in 2017 that’s still all you need if only processing low quality, ultra compressed video recordings. You cannot be logged in to the website making mode or camera changes and on your mobile device simultaneously with the same account, even on the same local network. You will need to “Grant Access” create a second account for yourself to do such a simple task. The community.arlo.com is pretty helpful, I spent about 5-10 hours posting and researching in discussion threads; trying VERY hard to love this purchase and make the best out of it, but it was not for me. There are many supporters of the product that are knowledgeable there. In conclusion - this Netgear product is unreliable and seems like consumers willing to lay out hard earned cash are guinea pig beta-testers. Enormous potential, but too many shortcomings to even try to keep this.