A few of years ago I’ve bought my first IP camera. These devices have come considerably down in cost, and now you can pretty much cover your entire house with decent surveillance equipment for just a few hundred dollars. However, managing these devices is still tricky, and I would not recommend it to people who are a bit more technically challenged.

The trickiest thing about the IP cameras is the setup. It usually involves understanding the ins and outs of computer networking, most of which is considerably more complex than other configuration tasks that we do on a regular basis. However, Foscam has managed to simplify this process with this camera as much as possible, and this was by far the easiest IP camera to work with that I have ever come across. You just scan the QR code that is associated with this camera, and a few steps later you are all ready to go. There were still a few kinks during the setup process, but overall I am really happy with this aspect of this IP camera.
One of the things that I really like about this camera is that it’s software is compatible with all major web browsers, and hence it’s (at least in principle) accessible on any device from anywhere. For the full functionality you still best off if you use Internet Explorer on a Windows computer. This includes the two-way audio and the video recording. I am predominantly a Mac user, and this is a bit of a setback for me. Fortunately, though, I still have an old Windows machine lying around, which I use exactly for these sorts of situations. Foscam also provides a well designed mobile app, and I was able to use it with my iPhone.

This is a static IP camera, so it does not support pan and tilt. It is ideally suited for situations where you don’t have to focus on the different part of the scene that you are observing. The extra wide angle camera helps with the ability to see a very wide field of view, but the drawback with this feature is that you will have to deal with a lot of spherical distortion.

The resolution and the picture quality are pretty good for the basic surveillance purposes. However, the picture can be a bit blurry, especially in the low light and compared to what we are accustomed now from our basic mobile devices.

This is one of the first indoor monitoring video camera with 720p video that I have tested. The picture quality is noticeably better than my old VGA cameras. I can see many more details in the room that I am monitoring. But keep in mind that if you are recording your surveillance video you will also need a lot more room on your hard drive to accommodate the higher resolution.

One of the interesting distinct features of this camera is that it allows you to record video on a small micro sd card. The micro sd cards have really gone up in capacity over the last few years, and you can record several days worth of video recording (or even weeks) on a single sd card – depending on the refresh rate and the resolution that you use. Foscam also provides you with the paid option of recording the video feed in their cloud, but so far I have not had the opportunity to test this. In principle this would be a great option for those who need to access their surveillance footage remotely and don’t want to deal with setting up their own remote server recording.
The reason that I am giving this product five stars despite its few small shortcomings is that it’s still the best IP camera with this functionality that I’ve tested. I currently own and use a Motorola baby monitor camera, a D-Link camera, and a Foscam camera. They all have pan and tilt, two-way audio, remote access, night vision and basic VGA resolution. D-Link and Motorola have tried making the camera setup more intuitive and streamlined for the average user, but have instead made a mess of things to the point that under certain configurations you can’t even use their products. Neither one of those cameras is very flexible and reliable when working with a wide-variety of web browsers.

This is not quite the perfect home surveillance camera, but in terms of its price and compared to most of its competitors, I think that HooToo camera is the best option for most regular users.

**** Product provided for review purposes. ****