Zmodo 720p HD Wi-Fi IP Camera with Audio

This thing is pretty useless compared to the nest, samsung or foscam. This cameras main features are 2.4G wifi, IR leds with an IR filter for night vision, an SD slot for local recording, a micro usb port for power, a quick setup, and a website service with app to provide push notifications. I'll start with the positives. The camera has a metal body that feels very nice. It pushes in to a plastic stand that is a bit cheap feeling but functions fine. I suppose if you are creative you can mount this thing pretty much anywhere, as long as you can easily power cycle it, more on that later. The setup with the zsight app worked the first time and very smoothly. The camera records to a micro SD card for local recording and the MeShare site offers cloud services for a fee. Through the MeShare app you get push notifications for detected sound, motion, or both. There is also a speaker on the camera that lets you use it as a 2-way radio, however the speaker was low even with the volume tuned to max in the config. Video quality is decent for a cheap 720p camera. Colors seemed washed out and the image appeared slightly out of focus. The lens is a wide angle but not enough to capture an entire room while being mounted in the corner. A 100 degree lens or higher would be a nice option. The night vision was usable but again very fuzzy. The sound however was very noisy. This camera suffers from a background hiss that is present even in a dead quiet room. I tried different USB power sources(a plus with having a standard micro usb for power), thinking it might help but it didn't make any difference. I was able to power this with a battery backup for a cell phone so that is very useful for traveling. On to the cons: While the camera does record locally, the files are not in a readily usable format. To view the recordings I had to use software that is available on their website for a different model camera. I never investigated how to convert the files to something useful due to another issue mentioned below. After successfully using the zsight app to register and start the camera it's usefulness was short lived as I couldn't get it to work with the camera when it was on a different network than the camera like mobile network or on the same network but on a different wifi band, 5Ghz vs. 2.4Ghz. Luckily there is another service that uses these cameras and I was able to get it to work fairly reliably with MeShare.com and app. One of the main reasons I went with this camera was for the push notifications with the app. Luckily the meshare app also supported push notifications, since the zight app was a failure, however they weren't very consistent. It seemed like the app would loss connectivity to the server frequently and wouldn't reconnect without the app being opened. I tested this at home with the camera facing my busy street and sure enough, after a couple hours of steady notifications it stopped. I verified the camera was still online by viewing the feed though the web interface. So I opened the app back up and notifications started again. Not worth the trouble. If you need push, get the nest cam. Another annoying thing came with a firmware "upgrade." With the firmware out of the box the date stamp worked, however after I upgraded the firmware, hoping to fix a lock up issue described below, the date stamp never showed up again even though it was selected to be displayed in the config. This cam has been sitting for a month so maybe they have a fix for it but they didn't when I was still trying to get this to work. In the end this camera only lasted a month in it's intended position before it started to over heat and lock up. Once it did that it would go into a boot loop where it rebooted every couple minutes, flipping the IR filter each time until you removed power from it. The IR filter switch was loud enough to wake my 2 year son up, it was being used as a baby monitor. After that happened another 2 times we had enough and I moved it to another location but when it started to over heat again I unplugged it and it has sat ever since. Basically an expensive paper weight now. After buying this, I thought I'd saved 100 dollars by not buying the nest cam, instead I wasted 100 and ended up with the damn nest anyway. Not worth the hassle.