Well, I'm thinking that it's just me and O'Sullivan who are the only people to have been suckers enough to actually pay for this. Everyone else in the world seems to have received a free one through Amazon Vine.The battery life in the monitor and camera is appalling. Both need to be constantly plugged in.
The range is ok but not great. Certainly, not as far as claimed.
Picture quality is good enough to see the kid but the photo thing is a pointless gimmick.
The biggest and by far the most annoying thing is the Skype feature. It shuts down constantly which is irritating but far worse is that it literally cripples the home network & internet speed. Now, I have good enough internet speed at home (around the 10MB mark). Normally we can have 2 tv's watching Netlfix/Hulu someone happily browsing the internet and also someone on Skype, all at the same time with no complaints. Plug this piece of junk into the network and say goodbye to broadband speeds and go back to an era sometime before dial-up.
Do not waste your money on the extra box for skype just get the regular monitor and camera. Get the cheapest one you can find as they're all a bit rubbish... "Viners" seem to get the best bang for their buck and if I got this free I'd be happy, too. At $200+, not so happy!
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The package comes with everything you need to set up the camera. 3 power cords (one for the camera, one for the gateway, and one for the handheld unit), network cable, camera, screws to mount the camera, and 1GB micro SD card.Setup was reasonably easy and took about 30 minutes. Since you'll be using Skype to call into the camera system, you'll have to register 2 Skype accounts, one for your personal (that you call from) and one for the gateway system that operates the camera (that you'll call to). You'll also need to install the Skype software on the PC that is connected to the network that runs the camera system. I had some difficulty understanding how to get the 2 accounts going on my iPhone, but the instructions were good enough that I was able to figure it out.
Once it was up and running, I used the Skype app on my iPhone to view the camera. It connects about 65% of the time, but the video image takes up to 30 second to display once the connection is made. Several times it would connect, but the video image failed to load and then disconnected. Other times it would drop the call all together. I also had issues with calls ending at random times once they connect, sometimes lasting for a few minutes then dropping, other times just a few seconds. I found this to be very annoying and made the device quite frustrating. This was all done over my internal WiFi network at home, so I would have anticipated that the connection reliability would have been the best possible.
Image quality is so-so (quite a bit of pixelation, but good enough to see what's going on) . The camera doesn't much care for fast movements and seems to be running about 3-4 frames per second. Night vision works pretty well even in very low light, but again the image quality is what suffers here. If there is just a little movement in the frame, then the pixelation cleans up quite a bit, but as soon as there is movement, it can lose the clarity of the picture and become pixelated once again.
The handheld monitor that comes with kit works better than the Skype app on the iPhone, but picture quality is still lacking a bit. Color is very monotone and not bright. The pictures on the box are VERY misleading! The actual picture quality is nowhere near the pictures shown on the box (which of course why it reads 'pictures simulated' underneath them!).
I think it would work reasonably well for watching a baby when using the handheld monitor, since there wouldn't be a lot of movement in the field of view. Trying to watch children playing where there is a lot of movement would be more difficult. Why you would ever want to try to capture a movie or image is beyond me because the quality is so poor it's not really worth watching.
As a security monitor, it's lacking features that make it a good solution for that. There is no motion detection capability, and no video recording triggered by motion. You can record video using the handheld monitor which gets stored on the micro SD card. But the video recording is manually triggered and not triggered by a motion event. And there is no ability to record video using Skype, so if you're away from home and looking in through a smartphone or external computer, there is no way to see what happened, only the live feed. So unless you want to just dial up the camera to make sure your house is secure, it won't alert you if someone breaks in. For the price, I think this is significant lacking feature of the camera. Even it there is no capability to record video, I think motion detection is a feature that really should have been included. Maybe using Skype limits this functionality?
Overall, given the quality, amount of dropped calls, and limited functionality, I would have a hard time recommending this as a purchase. I thought streaming image quality in this day and age would be a lot better than what this camera system has to offer.
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The correct add-on camera for the Skype edition of the Lorex Baby Cam is "Lorex Wireless Accessory Camera LW2031AC1", I purchased the LW2003AC1 thinking they would work with the Skype edition, but they do not. Please use the LW2031AC1 model add-on camera.Want Lorex LW2031 LIVE connect Wireless Video Monitor with Skype Discount?
I'll list pros and cons, but I ultimately replaced this with the MotorolaPros:
*connects to Skype. I liked this for when my baby was sleeping, I could be outside and listen to the monitor through the earphones of my iphone. The monitor itself didn't have enough range, and I couldn't plug in the headphones. I love being able to use my phone as another screen
*family members can watch her too, but not when your monitor is on. (My dad lives out of state and would log in and watch her before we woke up)
*The monitor is small and easy to use.
Cons:
*you have the choice of skype or the monitor, not both, so you end up kicking each other off if someone is logged in to the skype and you want to look at the monitor
*The video quality is poor, and frequently cuts in and out, like the screen is refreshing itself or something
*The camera doesn't move. If your baby does, they will be out of the picture pretty easily. The thing I like the most about the Motorola is that the camera will move to follow the child
*I frequently had to reset the router when the connection was lost
*With the router plugged in, it slows down your other internet devices
Overall, I don't feel that having the Skype connection made up for the other faults of this monitor. It was a fancy, fun thing to have, but it did not provide me with enough of the practical, day-to-day use features that the Motorola did. I still use this monitor when we travel because it is small, compact, does the job, and we don't have to un-mount the Motorola. I wouldn't purchase this again unless it was a really good deal, and I bought this on a Lightning deal. For me personally, I find this to fit in the quality and usefullness of the $60-80 monitors.
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