Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The hardware is pretty dang good for the price. 1920x1080 good "security camera" quality picture and decent infrared LED illumination for night. Decent mounting system although not very flexible pan or tilt when mounting on a wall, works best either upside down or just sitting on a flat surface. Power cord is just about 2 meters, so not really long enough for most mounting applications but fine if you are setting it on a shelf or something. This is a cool concept, but the software is where it lets you down... hard. Setup was ridiculously easy, in fact, suspiciously easy. Download the app, turn on the camera, app displays a QR code on your smartphone and you place it in front of the camera, connect it to your WiFi, and it does the rest. Negative to this is you must have an internet connection to access it (even when your smartphone is on the same WiFi) and you can't use it in any third party DVR solutions. You are stuck using their app. And while the apps user interface is ok, it is not at all reliable. When you start actually trying to use the features of the app you begin to see why this is so cheap. The biggest issues I've had is the motion detection is unreliable and very inconsistent. Even on the lowest sensitivity setting it will detect a fly that is flying around in front of the lens as an alert and record it, yet half the time when I walk in front of it, it doesn't record an alert. Even more frustrating is when it does actually detect an "alert", it only records for about 12 seconds and then stops before the motion stops. So for instance if you are walking around in front of the camera for 20 seconds, it records a few seconds prior to your being in view of the camera, then another 8-10 seconds, then stops while your still moving around in front of it. This can make it completely useless for any sort of security applications where you may not see the face of an intruder until they get closer to the camera. There are also several instances where it doesn’t detect /record motion at all, particularly when it had recently detected one. So this is certainly not at all reliable for actual security use. If you do want to use it for security, I wouldn't rely on the alerts at all. Install a microSD card and you can then go back through the video to find something. If you are lucky, it will have saved an alert recording and you'll at least have a point in time to go to. However this won't do you any good if the camera gets stolen, which is an easy task considering its easy (non permanent) installation method. Some other small but annoying problems are whenever you hit the landing page in the app that shows a preview of your cameras, it doesn't show a live feed of all cameras, or even auto refresh (heck, even 30 second auto refreshes would be useful). So every time you go to the app it is still an old, stale image. You have to go view the cam in order to get a new preview, and half the time it doesn't even update it so you have to do this multiple times. I did do a firmware update on the cameras, as they were out of date when I got them... but clearly there still needs to be more work on these. Anyway, if you want these just to maybe keep an eye on your pets, or just make sure "did I remember to close the bedroom door?" type of things then it should be just fine for that. But as of right now, the software is not ready for any serious task. Which is a shame because the cameras are quite excellent for the cost, and if the software actually worked well this could be a solid five star buy. And considering all these “selling features" are supposed to work, yet don't, is why I only rate it two stars. Honestly since the usability of these things pretty much relies on the software they are really more of a one star camera, but for the price and the image quality that helps make up for the software shortcomings. All in all it is a cool idea, cool hardware, but the software needs a lot of polishing. I think (and hope) over time it will improve and become a reliable product, but at this point in time it is not. UPDATE 5/25/18 after several software and firmware updates things are still the same. Really no improvements at all except bug fixes. The software and the alert functionality is so useless it is a huge shame because this really has the potential to be a great product. UPDATE 12/28/18 after a recent app update things are worse now. The playback timeline feature that allows you to view all the recordings on the SD card doesn’t work anymore. You can no longer see everything, now you must select a timeframe which every time I try it just says “update failed”. So this is now more useless that it was before. There have been several firmware updates for the cameras and things still haven’t improved. Interestingly enough the devs have put in a disclaimer you must agree too, which basically says not to rely on this camera for any security or “life threatening” situations. Just covering their butts, admitting the software is terrible. Such a shame...