When it comes to home surveillance, nanny cams, pet cams, or just a way to watch over your home there; there isn’t really any way of doing that in a cool way that I can recall. Until now at least. Believe me I’ve looked. Back in the day I wanted a way to set up a home surveillance, but couldn’t find one that was either cool looking or wasn’t overly complex to set up, yet alone being inexpensive to do. So after awhile I pretty much gave up on it. That was until I came across the Dropcam HD.
The Dropcam is both inexpensive to own, easy to set up, and all very cool in the process! The Dropcam HD goes for about $149 and you can order it from www.dropcam.com. Once you have it set up is really easy, we’ll walk through that now.
Setup
Setup for the Dropcam HD was super easy. Once you have it out of the box, connect the camera to your PC or Mac via a USB cable. You will need to create an account, and then follow the directions. The whole process took about maybe a minute, where you put in the wireless network settings for your home network.
Once this is done, you disconnect it from the computer and plug it in to the power adapter, and that is it really. Once it powers up it connects to the wireless network and the camera is now live.
Experience & Features
Once you are up and going, you can position the camera just about anywhere. It comes with a 10 foot cable, so chances are you should be able to reach an outlet just about anywhere you might want to place the camera. As I mentioned the Dropcam HD will run you about $149, and watching live view is basically free, no monthly fee for it. This will allow you to watch from Dropcam.com, or from an application available on iOS and Android. They also offer a DVR feature that you can add for $9.95 a month for 7 day recording or $29.95 a month for 30 days or recording. This will let you rewind what your Dropcam sees or set up motion detection alerts and look back to see what triggered it.
While the Dropcam is great for the cost and ease of set up, there are a few minor negatives. First being it can run quite hot at times, so be careful when handling. Also I’ve notice everyone once in the blue, the connection will get weird, so I have to end up disconnecting the power and reconnecting it to get it working again. And last over time, the infrared sensors in the camera may go bad, making night vision a little hard to see.
Beyond a few negatives that you may or may not experience the Dropcam HD is a great work to monitor the home that is both cost effective and easy to set up. I highly suggest it for home surveillance or as a pet of nanny cam!