(Pack of 2) AOQEE 2K 2.4Ghz Solar Security Camera

UPDATE: 3 days past return window one camera has died. It stays on network just long enough to get it setup the drops network. ORIGINAL POST I’ve been reluctant to get solar cameras as I have heard nothing but bad about them. But these cameras works great! They are worth the purchase price even without a cloud based service plan (but you get a lot of extra features with a plan). I check all alerts every morning. I purchased a kit of 4 cameras. The setup was a breeze, I did it manually as I could not get the first one to see the bar code. Manual is faster for me anyways. I used some old 4gb and 8gb SD memory cards I had lying around so I used them. I try to avoid monthly service fees. When I first received them as I set each one up I put it on a charger even though none were below 86% battery power left. I went ahead and updated all cameras to latest firmware. Not fully trusting solar power I decided to test them after fully charging all of them by plugging them in, in case I needed to return them. I turned one camera off and placed it back in the box. I placed 2 cameras (turned on) in my office so I could see how the batteries would hold up without sunlight. I mounted one outside in the sun. I played with the all different settings for 3 days on all cameras, testing the motion alerts and reviewing videos. At the end of 3 days of torture test, overall I’m extremely pleased, enough so that I mounted all the cameras outside. Im keeping them. I continued using/testing the cameras for about 2 weeks before placing review. Just to make sure everything was ok. I later tested multiple SD cards up to 64gb. SD card size and speed does NOT seem to make an any difference. Now for the good and the bad. THE GOOD The batteries performed better than I expected. After close to 72 hours the 2 cameras hidden from light but working, recording video and even using the bright lights for motion detection, the batteries in both cameras never dropped below 88%! So cloudy days won’t be a problem for these cameras. The camera I turned off during testing was still at 100% when turned back on. On the camera mounted outdoors the battery never dropped below 99%. So solar using batteries shouldn’t be a problem. Great relief as I have had problems getting power to cameras before. The quality of video recording is very good, see video of neighbors cat entering/entering my yard. The flash from dark to well-lit is when the camera's white lights turn on. Controllable in software. Had a bad storm come through a few days ago. 40mph winds and 3 inches of rain for hours. ALL cameras held up just great. No water issues that I can see. THE BAD (somewhat) Overall the hardware ( the cameras themselves) are fine, however the software could use a little tweaking. I do like the “grouping” feature where I can watch all 4 at once (see pict). All weaknesses appear to be fault of software and/or settings that we can’t change. Video recording sometimes starts too late. Sometimes you never see the actual motion that triggered the alert, saving an extra second or 2 at the start would solve that but it’s not user selectable. :-(  Most times this isn’t an issue if the motion continues in the video, but sometimes the object has moved outside of area recording too fast to be seen very well, especially when using far detection. Far detection works ( for me upto 80 feet away or more. However I feel it is unnecessary as you would not be able to distinguish any identifiable features of any person or object. I feel the default setting of max 10 seconds for recording is sufficient most times but a little too short in some cases. 15 seconds would be ideal but you can’t change that when using SD memory cards. You have to purchase a service plan to extend that. I have other cameras also using Wansview software that record up to 20 seconds without a service plan and record the actual beginning of detection. So that is definitely a software setting. OVERALL Maybe it should be 4 3/4 stars as I would like an extra second at the start of recordings. Of course as you can tell I’m really picky.