Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Ok so I want to start by saying I did not receive this camera for free in return for a review. I want to make that clear bc I read other reviews stating the good reviews must’ve came from paid promotions. THAT BEING SAID, when I purchased it in June it was $70 after tax not $89.99+tax that it is now. Ok so some background. We bought this for our daughters room as a BACKUP. Therefore, i wasn’t looking around for anything super expensive. I didn’t even really look at the features of this camera when I purchased it. What happened is we have the Owlet sock 3 and owlet cam. The sock is incredible and the camera was good. Biggest thing is it wasn’t practical to have to use our phone as the monitor nor was it practical to carry around our tablet so that’s how i found the hello baby camera and made purchased it based on star rating (I didn’t bother reading reviews) and the price. Review time: as I mentioned I bought this as a backup so I wasn’t interested in smart features as I had all of that on my owlet. I purchased this based on price. First impressions: monitor was smaller than I expected BUT my fault for not fully reading size description and it was cheap after all. Ok so I was actually really impressed by some of the features it had: room temperature, one way or two way voice, and most of all camera movement control from the monitor was super cool! (My owlet cam was stationary so this was neat) Camera can go up down left and right. I do wish it could move down further BUT I understand that any further down and I’d be staring at the plastic base. Not to mention that it does appear it is meant to be mounted on the wall or crib. Given that I had my owlet mounted above the crib, I simply put this camera on a book shelf that overlooks my daughters crib. Zoom function is pretty neat, I do wish there were more than just 2 zoom options though but again for the price I can’t complain and realistically the feature, atleast for me, isn’t a necessity. Now this is where I see a lot of negative reviews, the connection. Ok so I went about a month getting super frustrated with the Monitor feed turning off as if it’s losing connection, and then reconnecting a seconds or minutes later. I was watching the bars on the corner of the screen and saw them drop then disconnect randomly start up again….so I assumed (as I didn’t read the manual in full) that I was losing signal. The point of this camera was to be a back camera so I didn’t have to have my phone out constantly it was quite frustrating!!!! ….and then…I realized it’s bc I had the VOX setting on which is a sleep mode where it still provides audio but turns off screen to save battery….once I turned this off my screen stayed on and hasn’t lost connection like I thought it was. I don’t live in a 5000sq ft house or anything but we live in a 2400sq ft house and I can be in my room which is across the hall, or I can take it downstairs to living room kitchen etc and haven’t had connection issues. It’s been 6-7 months and it’s still working fine. My daughter has grabbed it and slammed it against the ground, thrown it across the room and still works. It holds a charge well when not used or when in VOX mode or just audio mode. When the screen is on it lasts about 6hrs. We use it during the day for naps and then at night we use it but leave it plugged in next to the bed on the nightstand. Ok so final thoughts. It works great and does what it’s supposed to. It’s obviously not a “smart” monitor but it has the most important and necessary functions and they work well. So would i buy this again? At the price point I paid? Ya absolutely and I would’ve bought the a second camera. Would I buy it for $89.99+tax? I mean maybe, but I’m not really sure what else is out there at that price point. Did this product go up bc of inflation and supply chain issues and so did the other products then maybe if this is still considered a cheap price for monitors now a day. Or did this price go up bc of greed since it was selling well while the other monitors stayed at their price points? If that’s the case then probably not as when I was looking there were some monitors with multiple cameras, larger screens, and known brands around the $100 mark. So do your research and compare what’s out there around this price.