FI8918W FOSCAM wifi wireless indoor IP Camera, 2-way audio, night version up to 8 meters, mobile vi

First-Quality:

I think the picture quality of this camera is awesome. We have been using it for about 3 months now. The picture is clear enough where we can see by looking at the monitor if our daughter is breathing while she's sleeping. We can also see if her eyes are open, or if she spit up. The night vision is incredible, just as clear as with daylight. Before my daughter was born we used this camera as a security camera and it was perfect for that as well. We plan on purchasing one or two more to use as security cameras.

The biggest con of this camera, at least with ours, has been audio. We have never gotten clear audio from either our PC or our iPhones. We have an AngelCare Movement & Sound Monitor and we use that for audio to monitor our daughter.

Second-Configuration:

I did not find this camera nearly as hard to configure as it seems some others have. I found the instructions to be satisfactory. I would say I've had some experience with computers, but never with network configuration or installing anything like this.

The DNS service the instructions tell you to use is no longer free. You can find free sources, but it's not built into their software the way DynDNS is. So, I just paid the $20 for a year of service from DynDNS and followed the instructions and it worked.

I then paid $4.99 for the Foscam Surveillance Pro app on the iPhone. The app rocks. I can take screenshots or video, pan/tilt the camera, and there's a talk button as well so I can use the 2-way talk from my iPhone.

In total it cost me about $110 and about 20 minutes to get this camera working. The average video baby monitor costs between $150 $300 these days and are not viewable from your computer at work or on your smart phone. The downside to this would be that it will only work as long as your internet is working. Comcast screwed up royally over and over again when we moved and it took about 10 days for us to have internet, and therefore, no monitor during that time.

Overall, if you're not computer illiterate, and you don't mind paying the $20 a year for DynDNS's services (or taking the time to figure out how to use a free service similar to it), I would recommend this camera for you.

If you only plan on using this camera locally via WiFi (no web access) then you don't even need to worry about DynDNS or similar service. My husband and I will be buying more of these low-priced, high-quality cameras!

UPDATE: It's now October 31st (happy halloween) and we've been using this camera for several months now. With our set-up I still have no complaints. In fact, the reason I'm back here is because we're ordering another one to put in another room in our house.

It may be complicated to set-up in the beginning, but once it's ready, you're rewarded with clear picture, amazing night vision and the convenience of using this on my smart phone.

I did bump it down from 5 stars to 4 stars because the audio feature is not really usable, although we've used it before if our other monitor is not within reach. There's a lag and lots of static. Still, I plan on ordering at least 2 more!

I had an old DLink IP cam from years ago. I gave that away so I was looking for a new one. Nothing really stood out on the Amazon site for wireless IP cameras well, there were, but they were out of my price range. For me, I just needed to test the waters as far as wireless IP cameras were and the price swayed me to get this one. The camera is pretty good in the dark, it works pretty well till about maybe 10 feet after that, it's like looking into a black hole. The color during daylight is off, but otherwise, images look good. Well worth it.

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This camera is great as a baby camera or indoor security camera. It has a lot features including wifi/wired access via http, ftp, msn, etc. The night vision is very clear. The documentation was sometimes hard to decipher. Be sure to update the firmware!

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A pain to set up the wireless and port forwarding, but a pleasure to have and use it when all said and done.

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The reviews for this camera were great, overall, so I bought one to use as a baby monitor. I consider myself in the middle when it comes to technical savvy. This camera is not for the faint of heart of those that get confused by DHCP, IP, ActiveX downloads, death loops of error messages and so on.

I was thrilled to find that the instructions were all contained on a 4x4, 20 page booklet....not a whole lot to do. I like to have electronic copies of manuals so I hit their website and found that the actual installation and manual is 48 pages of dense text on letter sized paper...that was my first tip off that the install wasn't going to be easy.

I tried the install on two different Windows 7 machines; one of which was brand new and, therefore, as pristine as a machine could get. The software installed just fine in about 10 seconds each time. I rebooted as prompted. I launched the IP Camera app, saw my camera listed as Annymous with the IP address, double clicked it (horrificly amateur user interface on that app by the way) and was taken to what looked like a control panel of sorts.

There were virtual dials and knobs and controls to move the camera around. Where one would normally see the image from the camera, I had a nice large black box with a smaller white box in the upper left hand corner which contained a red X...basically I needed to download and install an Active X control. I was prompted to do this on both machines, I selected Install, gave the install app permission to install, and got some weird message saying that Windows had found a problem with the file. My only option was OK so I clicked it and I was once again asked if I wanted to install. Death loop. The only way to end it was to hit No several times.

This sounded like a Windows problem so I tried it on the other PC with the exact same results. At that point, I was convinced that it was an install program issue, was indicative of how the product would function, and put the whole thing back in the box.

Even the instructions are ambiguous. Here are a few samples:

"If you use Windows7 and could not find the icon on desktop after installing the IP camera tool, please check if the path of the camera software is correct. For example, if it was pointing to C:\Windows\System32\IPCamera.exe.

Then fix this by pointing the shortcut to the correct path C:\Windows\SysWOW64\IPCamera.exe. The shortcut should work without any problems." What? Why not update your install program?

"Please don't upgrade the firmware freely. Sometimes, your camera may be damaged if configured wrong during the upgrade. If your camera works well with the current firmware, we recommend not upgrading." What is the purpose of a firmware update then? Do they magically know to only include fixes that are causing every malfunction?

"If you could not view living video after running the activeX. Only a red cross in the center of the video or just a black screen. Please change another port number to try. Don't use port 80.Use port 85, 8005 or 8100 to try." What is living video? Who taught this person grammar and sentence structure? Who let them write end-user technical reference material?

I am sure this is a good camera...for the married-to-your-computer type of person who thinks it is great to spend hours tweaking and configuring things knowing that you'll get to repeat it all in case of failure or new routers or whatever. Not for me...I value my time far too much to waste another minute trying to tweak and fix my network, or decipher the first grade writing in the manual.