Reviews

I got this camera so I could see what my dog does when I'm not home and it was totally worth the price. Mostly, my dog doesn't do as much as I thought she would, but when the housesitter has dog friends over and I got to see them all running through the house while I was out of the country, it was priceless! I've learned that I can set the cameras up in different locations to watch other things that are going on in my house when I'm not there and that has been just as entertaining to me. It was so easy to set up, once I decided where the cameras should be placed the first time, and just as easy to use. I love that I can sign on to my account from anywhere, even from a for sale netbook at a Verizon Store in another city, and get connected to home in seconds. If you need a new techie toy because you have all the others, don't hesitate to purchase this one. You can even send the videos to other people or save them to see again. This is a lot of fun and worth the price!

The product arrived open, it was obviously used. The serial # was already assigned so useless to register. The name on the invoice was also wrong as well as the amount. Everything was complitelly wrong!! Be careful you wont get what you bought!! I am waiting for my refund!!

When the product works, it's fine. But that's when it works. When there's a failure, the helpful Vue customer service people have the answer to restart the system. That's fine, but we got it to be used hundreds of miles away. So that's not really a fix for us. And since it is so far away, we can't box up the system and return it. Currently it has been out for two weeks. If you plan to get a system that you'll be near the property to restart the system when it fails, you'll be fine. When it is working, I like it. But if you're too far away, you need to take a pass or have a backup plan to get it working when it goes out.

I like to keep my reviews short and get to the point. This product is not worth the $220 I paid (on goldbox sale) and certainly not $300. Its very very tempermental with broadcasting the images through the web. Many times I have had my cameras unable to load on the webpage, and had to call my wife at home to have her hard reset the box (unplug). Also the image quality is very poor, especially in low light conditions. The camera are jumpy and not smooth through the internet either. How do I know this? I have several times had skype running with its webcam on, and will look at my Vue cams of the same area at same time....and there is a HUGE difference in quality. The skype webcam from a computer running the same internet connection is smooth and detailed, which the vue cams are like watching a convience store hold up footage. Whats the point if you can't get high speed video quality??? I saw other reviews mention the same issue before I bought this, but I am disappointed I did not listen. Listen to this review and save your money. I even waited 2 months now hoping the product would improve, and the company issued an update, but that did little to change any of the problems I mentioned. Do not waste your money just because, like I did, you think it may be cheaper than some other options.

My wife gave me the Vue system for Christmas. Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we returned home from a camping trip and discovered our house was vandalized and several items stolen from the garage. Unfortunately this was not the first time we have returned home from a camping trip to find things missing. I had looked into installing a security system before but they were either too expensive or too difficult to install. The installation of the vue system was extremely simple. I plugged in the two wires (power and network), inserted the two batteries, turned on the cameras and in less than five mintues the system was up and running and I was able to view my cameras. This is by far the easiest installation of any computer/electronic device I have ever installed. The battery operated cameras mean no wires so I can place them anywhere in the house, even high up on the wall in the garage where I do not have a convenient power source. The size and color of the cameras allows them to blend in easily with the surrounding. I have had the system setup now for several weeks and we have gone on a couple of camping trips since the install. While on the road I was easily able to connect to my system and check on the house and garage. I was a little concerned about the battery life of the cameras after reading a few reviews, but I can say for me this has not been an issue. While away from the house I would check on the cameras several times a day for probably a minute at a time and the batteries are still going strong. This system has given me piece of mind while we are away, which allows for a more relaxing time. I will be buying more cameras for my system so I can monitor even more locations around the house Suggestions - A motion activated camera that could start recording and send an alert to my phone would be very welcome. I would like to place a camera or two outside so an outdoor camera might be good too. Thanks for a great product that meets my needs and was easy to install and operate.

Reviews

You'd think that a security camera would get Internet security right. This one doesn't even try. The camera doesn't support SSL/TLS connections. This means that, every time you log in to the camera across the Internet, your password is going across in the clear, and anyone sufficiently interested can then use that password to log into your camera in your home and watch what you're doing or record their own copy. Furthermore, even without logging in, your communication with the camera is open for the world to see. This a huge oversight that has no excuse; it's like installing new locks in a house and leaving the key under the doormat. If you try to set up email alerts to notify you of certain actions (e.g. motion detection), you'll find that the camera does not support secure SMTP servers. In other words, every time the camera sends email, it will be sending your email password in the clear, so that interested parties could later log into your email account and do whatever they want. The product uses a proprietary Internet Explorer ActiveX control, which forces you to use IE instead of a more secure and standards-compliant browser like Firefox. But that's not bad enough. The ActiveX control apparently has no understanding and support of Vista NTFS permissions. This means that in Vista if you try to record to certain directories on the hard drive, it fails with a cryptic error message---even if the user has administrator rights. The only apparent way to get around this is to run Internet Explorer as Administrator (a special Vista super-user that has more rights than even a user with normal administrator rights), which is a bad idea in general and reflects the outdatedness of the implementation. There is no way to tell the camera to start recording to the local hard drive when some action occurs. Sure, you can have the camera record to a "network hard drive", if you can figure out how to set one of those up. Or you can have the camera record to a USB drive hooked up to the camera, which someone can easily steal along with the camera. Or you can manually record to the local hard drive. But you can't simply leave your browser window open and have the camera only start recording to the local hard drive when there is some activity. This would be a great little camera if someone with actual security experience had been in charge of its firmware. There is no excuse for these huge lapses in design, ruining what could easily have been a great product.

This little thing has saved us many a sleepless night. My wife had purchased a small dedicated baby monitor for use in the nursery, and you could barely see anything with it. This thing provides a very sharp display. I'd been shopping for one of these for some time. I finally decided on this model because for the most part, those who have any knowledge of computers thought it was great. Those that don't have a good understanding of computers and how to set up IP's and get into the routers should probably get a wired camera. Pros: Low light works great. Daylight has some color issues, but I didn't get it to take 10mp pictures to develop. while the colors may not be great, the contrast and sharpness is definitely there. We haven't tried to use the speaker that hooks up to the camera, maybe when our little one is older and we move this by the front door! The provided software works as advertised, not great but not horrible. I've used it create audible alerts based on motion detection and I've recorded my child's movements throughout the night, saving to a NAS. Cons: it wasn't cheaper. I would like it to have a larger range of focus. It has frozen up on me twice. The unit gets pretty warm. Sound tends to lag picture. Thoughts: if you want a monitor that will give you a crisp view of what's going on with your kid, and you want to be able to record it and view it from any computer in the house, then this is for you! Enjoy.

Kind of a pain to set up, not for networking novices. But after it's set up it works great in general. Had some problems after a year or so with it intermittently not working wirelessly but it got dropped a few times too. Overall its the best option available.

Great product, good quality. Does things others don't for half the price. Suprised at how quiet this thing is when moving. Night vision is impressive. Being used as a high tech baby monitor ;-)

Finally one that works. The web cam was extremely easy to setup and it worked well. The video is excellent and the accompanying software is good. I tried another web cam by Linksys and compared to this it was junk. I sent it back. Only difficulty so far is getting the email notification to work. Support is excellent. I would recommend you sign up for free DDNS with [...]. Overall I would definitely recommend this product.