Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Forget the Nest Cam, Canary, Samsung SmartCam, Netgear Arlo, all those rectangular D-Link cams. This Amcrest, aka Foscam, camera is superior to all of them, although it does have its weaknesses, they can be overcome with some knowledge contained in this review. Background: I purchased the "Amcrest ProHD 1080P WiFi Wireless IP Security Camera - 1080P (1920TVL), IP2M-841 (Black)" from another retailer during the madness that is Black Friday. Some seedy characters moved into the apartment next door, and let's just say they have a lot of short term visitors (or customers) each day. Yes I have renter's insurance, but if these thugs decide to tour my apartment and collect souvenirs in my absence, having some evidence to the strong arm of the law will be oh so satisfying. I've had a couple of Amazon deliveries stolen from my porch in the past year, now I can embarrass porch pirates on the local news. Maybe I'll even get an interview. This camera is going to make me FAMOUS, people. Unboxing: Here's what you get: ProHD camera, AC power adapter, ethernet cable, a CD I didn't use, mediocre instructions, and a card informing you that you must register online in order to secure warranty coverage. Initial impressions: It kind of reminds me of an unblinking all-seeing mechanical eyeball. The near-IR illuminator lens being the iris.I kept expecting to hear HAL pipe up, " Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move." Creepy. Construction: The build seems solid and well executed. It's streamlined and smooth. Initial Configuration: I will agree with some of the other reviews here that the initial setup of this camera is not as simple as it should be; however, once configured this camera exceeded my expectations. Initial configuration is a bit of a pain. There is all this talk in the documentation of using a phone app and 2D barcode. High tech, right? It didn't work for me, at least not for setup. If you have the option, skip the configuration by mobile device approach. Plug this bad boy directly into your router. Then, from your router's user interface (probably accessible at http://192.168.1.1, if not, google it), view the list of attached devices. Look for the serial number of your Amcrest camera in the list, and copy its local network IP address. Open a browser, and type http://<Camera IP> This will bring you to the camera's user interface. You should be prompted to set a username and password. Pick something secure, but memorable, you'll need if to view your video stream. Once you're in, you'll see a feed pane which prompts you to install a camera viewer plugin. Note: In my experience Amcrest's Chrome viewer plugin did not function. The Firefox plugin worked perfectly. With the plugin installed, you should see a near real-time feed from your camera. Pan and tilt control buttons are accessible on the right of the page. Neat! Settings: The range of settings provided under the "Setup" menu is very broad. There are many image settings including: basic image characteristics (brightness, contrast, saturation, whitebalance with R and B sliders), IR illumination, noise reduction, resolution, video codec (including H.264), framerate, bitrate (CBR and VBR), etc. It's all there. Note: If your image looks noisy, adjust the noise reduction slider. I have mine set to 80. Network settings are also very thorough, including DDNS, UPnP, QoS, and more. Only 802.11b/g are supported. I have no reason to believe this interferes with performance, but you may need to turn those schemes back on if you were rocking 802.11ac only. Note: I would recommend setting a static IP in the camera's network settings, since it defaults to DHCP. Otherwise, the camera's IP may change with loss of power. Event handling options are configurable for audio and motion detection and recording. Storage settings include a scheduler, upload capabilities to an SD card, FTP server, and NAS. For me, the FTP upload capability sealed the deal on this cam. I love not having to pay some extra service fee for cloud hosting. Bravo, Amcrest! Of course there are typical administrative settings and information available as well. Overall, I was very pleased with the level of configurability of this device. I like having the freedom to optimize the output, rather than being forced into some inadequate preset. Video/Image quality: Image quality seems very good. It isn't perfect, but it was better than I expected. Increasing the noise reduction level in the camera settings menu from 50 to 80 helped immensely. Resolution: The resolution of the camera seems quite good. I haven't put it up against a 1951 resolution target, but I may yet. Pan/Tilt: Pan and tilt works. Pan is not a continuous 360+, but that is to be expected. Declination leaves something to be desired, but since the camera likely be placed on some obscuring surface it isn't a deal breaker. Elevation extends a few degrees beyond vertical, and would work well for an inverted ceiling-mounted installation. Oh, the camera slews fairly quietly too. Audio: Receive audio quality is adequate for a home setting. I suspect intelligibility of conversation in a commercial or busy area would be poor. I consider this to be a bonus feature, and it is appreciated. Transmitted audio is again adequate in a quiet or home setting. The camera's speaker is small, but surprisingly loud. It is comparable to my cell's speaker phone. Latency: Latency on my network has ranged from approximately 1-10 seconds using the mobile app. Of course this is dependent on network traffic, encoding settings, network quality, etc. Every now and then, the mobile app or camera seems to advance a buffer, and a discontinuity in playback is noticeable. In general, performance is satisfactory. Mobile App: Amcrest View Lite for Android is an acceptable remote viewing application. It appears to support connections to multiple cameras. It supports snapshots, recording, two way audio transmission, pan/tilt controls, and playback of recorded video. It did not work for the initial camera setup, as mentioned previously. Interoperability: I searched the web for information regarding compatibility of this unit with security monitoring software. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information out there yet, but I'm sure that situation will improve with time. iSpy is my monitoring software of choice, mostly because it is free. One of my biggest complaints is the apparent lack of documentation for using the camera with other software; however, the camera does come with ONVIF support. There is an http API available, which helped me get the camera up and running with iSpy. The details are beyond the scope of this review, but I'll leave this link to the main camera stream here. rtsp://<username>:<password>@<ip>:<port>/cam/realmonitor?channel=<channelNo>&subtype=<typeNo> It may help you get connected! <channelNo> starts from 1, and the main stream is <typeNo> 0. Conclusion: I've only been using this camera for a few days, but from my research, it seems superior to several significantly more expensive competitors. Build quality is impressive for the price. Picture quality is very good. User configurable settings are expansive. The mobile app, while not perfect, offers all of the functionality necessary to view and control the camera. The fact that it includes FTP upload, NAS, SD card, and monitoring software interoperability leaves the majority of others in the dust. With the added free 4 hours of Amcrest cloud storage, this device is a serious contender. If you make it through the initial configuration, you'll have a great setup!