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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Good solar-powered camera, needs subscription

  • Top 500 Contributor
  • Tech Insider Network Member

  I live out in the country and thought I'd try this camera to watch my barn and maybe some other areas that are out of range of my home Wifi. We do have pretty solid cellular coverage, so the camera has worked very well. The first V150 that I got wouldn't connect to the cellular networks (it can do either Verizon or AT&T), but after a couple chat sessions with their tech support they sent me a replacement that works just fine. It takes about 5 minutes to boot up and establish its link, then it's ready to start capturing photos. Once you download their app and you create an account, then you scan a QR code in the camera battery compartment to link it to the app and you're ready to start viewing photos and configuring the settings. It comes with a 7-day unlimited photos plan, so definitely test it out in your location to see about how many photos are triggered per day. After the trial, you'll have to decide which plan you want to pay for in order to keep using the camera. You do always have to option of not paying for a plan and just pulling the photos off the onboard microSD card occasionally, but then you just have a really expensive trail cam at that point. Since I liked how it worked, after my trial was up I opted for the 1-yr unlimited plan which is about $18/mo. I could probably have gone with one of the 500 or 1000 photos per month plans, but I didn't want to have to worry about it. If some critter decides to wander around in the sensor zone for a while, it can rack up photos pretty quickly. The onboard AI for picking out people or vehicles seemed to work pretty well. If you are only interested in those two things, then that may cut way down on the number of photos that are triggered. If you're able to position the camera 1) facing south and 2) not in shade for most of the day, then the solar panel does seem to keep the battery topped off at 100% which is nice. The downside is that really limits the places you can position the camera. So you might think about that ahead of time for your application. You can also always fall back to just manually charging the battery, but that's a bit of a pain. I'll attach a few pictures that I captured in the last week. In them you can see how the night vision compares to the daytime view. The coyote photo is an example of an HD download and the other two are the normal resolution (I don't know if uploading to the review will keep the same resolution, though). The specs list motion detection up to 90' with an 80' range of the infrared camera at night. For the motion detection, I'd say that's about the maximum you'll get. I put the camera about 75 feet from where the horses walk through a gate, and sometimes it detected them and sometimes it didn't (depending on where they walked). I've found one annoyance with the app, and that's the apparent inability to easily save the pictures to your phone. I'm on Android and unless I'm overlooking something, the only way I could get them was to hit the share icon, then upload the pictures to Google photos. Then, I had to search within Google photos for "vosker" to find them. I'm still not sure where it tucked them away. Anyway, it's possible to do, but wasn't easy for me. Oh, and one final note. It does monitor the temperature and stamp that on the photos that are taken. I personally don't have much value for that, but in full sunlight the temperature isn't even close to accurate. At night or when it's cloudy it was fine.

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  Posted 4 years ago by FlyingC

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Great hardware not so great plan structure!

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  The Vosker V150 Solar Powered 4G LTE Cellular Outdoor Security Camera is a very well-made and robust feeling camera. Not only that it takes nice pictures day or night and in fairly rapid succession. I was concerned at first that it did not have video but I have it pointed at our vehicles in our driveway and the garage area and found that it does a fine job of watching everything and would take several pictures of me approaching and departing my truck. The Vosker app works well in allowing you to view pictures remotely and get notifications but only if you pay for the subscription which includes LTE from AT&T. I had a trial and was able to view pictures in the app until the trial ended then they disappeared. For the price of this thing it should have WI-FI and video. My homes Mesh WI-FI system reaches far out into our yard and beyond and the LTE/Subscription plans seem a bit pricey and limiting to me. Especially when I already have wireless security cameras that do not require a subscription and I can still view them from anywhere on my phone. I do have one security camera that started out free and then they tried to make me pay to use it and I would not because it cost to much. Then later I checked back and they had revised there strategy and would let you use it for free or they offered some very reasonable paid plans so I paid for a one year plan for the extra options because the price was right. There are way to many wireless and wired security cameras with built-in storage for companies to be charging expensive plans. I love the Vosker V150 and would love the V200 with video even more but they need to have WI-FI as an option and more reasonable plans and even a free option using WI-FI and then a lot more people would by them. If you have to have a camera in a remote area that has no WI-FI and you need to be able to remotely view the pictures in the app then this may be a good choice for you. However, to me the plans do not make sense. I understand the 7 day, 15 day and 30 day parts of the plans but the part about 500 photos, 1000 photos or unlimited photos does not seem logical nor does limiting the number HD photos to 10, 20 or 40. Why would you limit the number of HD photos? I do see you can pick which photos you want in HD in the app so that helps. However, I believe the plan and pricing strategy needs to be seriously overhauled. I have another security camera that went through this issue and they finally came out with a very intelligent way to accommodate all of their user base. I am not sure how often I will be climbing up the ladder to retrieve the info off the SD Card but it is not something I want to do all of the time because I am to busy. I would advise the team at Vosker to really look at what their competition is doing and come up with more clever idea with their plans. Also, make a version with WI-FI and both photo and video capabilities with the option to use LTE for those that need it and you will have a big hit!

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  Posted 4 years ago by Androidaholic

• Rated 2 out of 5 stars

  Lackluster support and product quality

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 250 Contributor

  Talk about perfect timing. I just purchased a wooded plot and was looking to get a trail cam to see what goes on there and then this was offered up to me to review; sweet! TL;DR for my frequent readers and details below. Pros: Mounting kit Design / look Solar Recharging Cons: First camera had a faulty cellular modem Support - lots of mixed messaging and disputable facts High cost / month (or annually) for the data plans You lose access to your existing photos via the App when the trial expires Meh: Can’t charge the battery with it in the camera Tough to get SD card out of camera if it’s mounted Since I knew this camera was coming, I went to Vosker’s site and signed up for an account - but I never did get the App because - I didn’t need to at the time. After the camera arrived and 7 hours of charging the battery itself, not in the camera, I saw a green light and I was ready to play. At that point, I loaded up the App - but there were problems (see pic); I was able to login to the website without issue. Using that password on the App continued to fail, so I tried to find out how to contact support, but that’s not an option in the App (ouch) before you’re logged in. Going to Vosker’s site gave me an 888# so I called that and after a few minutes, was told that there was “an outage currently with the App” and to “try again in a few hours.” I did that - but no luck. Then I tried the next day; no luck there either. So, 36 hours into a product review & I couldn't even activate the camera. A day later, I’m told that I can’t pre-create an account, so I have to use a different email address and create a new account. While frustrating, that did allow me to get in & scan the QR code in the battery compartment to activate the camera. Throughout this whole ordeal, I had been putting the camera outside to acquire a signal but the camera never showed up in the App. Eventually, I popped the micro SD card out and saw that it was taking pictures and that there were scaled down versions of the images in the “outgoing” directory - but nothing ever went. Days and days later, support case after support case and phone call after phone call, the camera was deemed faulty & needed to be replaced. A new support person then said, sure, I can fix your account problem - and merged my accounts so I was using the first one moving forward. Fast-forward 10 business days and a new version arrived. In checking out the differences between the V150 versions, what jumped out to me, is that now it has the SIM direction marked (just like that of the microSD card). A full 7 hours of charging again and activation was successful this time and the camera went right outside where it’d get no movement (so I hoped) before I could get to my plot to install it again. It activated without issue this time and God help me try to get a return label to send the first one back - something this simple shouldn’t be this complex. Photos are decent, but nothing to write home about. A 7-day trial of photo notifications was fine, but a pretty crummy thing is that when it expires, you lose access to what you actually got during the free trial; they took away what they gave you for free. Terrible. Want to look at those photos you got for 7 days? Nope! Head on over to the camera, take it off the rig, pull the card & download the photos. So, do I recommend it? Nope. I mean, at $100+ a year for the lowest plan it’s plausible that it’d be worth it, but not for me at this time. For the issues I had and the tech support provided - I’d say look elsewhere.

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  Posted 4 years ago by nhtechie