Dropcam - Pro Wireless High-Definition Video Monitoring Camera - Black

DropCam's are dead solid simple cameras to setup and install. They are what the name says. I was so excited with my first one, I went and bought 3 more! I had been putting off getting security cameras and bought the first one because we were suspicious of things disappearing from our bathroom (suspecting housekeeper or teenage kid - it was the kid!) Here's the good: Easy to setup. Great picture. Intuitive software and alerting makes it easy to find events and activity. Now the bad: You pay extra for cloud based recording of your camera. For me 4 cams = $20 a month! They use a lot of bandwidth. I have a capped program with my provider (300 GB per month) and then pay extra so I monitor bandwidth by device. When I was recording a HD pic 24/7, each camera was using around 15-20 GB per month. Times 4 that was 60-80 GB on a 300GB plan. Now, you can turn HD recording off and limit when it records but be aware. Net is if you want one of two cameras to capture an event or tell when your kids get home from school, they're awesome! If yo want a multi-camera security solution with historical recording, there are much better options for the money (both up front and recurring money). (Attached bandwidth image shows distribution. Red and orange pie chart pieces represent one of my dropcams. You can see they win for upload and total bandwidth.)

This is my second DropCam Pro that I own now and I'll be buying more. Needless to say, the set up for these are super easy. I'm more than confident that my mom, unassisted, could set this up without frustration or support. Requires only a single power cable (micro-usb, provided) and wireless internet connection to allow control and upload of video streams. The quality of the video recorded is greater than all others I've reviewed. The ability to quickly, easily view not only live video, but recorded video on both your smart device and PC browser qualifies this as a fantastic alternative to traditional alarm/security cameras and monitoring services. Although there is a recommend recording subscription to which you can enroll and save either a week or a months worth of recordings, it's not required. Depending on your usage scenario, it may not ever be! Though it is rather cheap ($10/mo for a week) and I enjoy being able to go back to an earlier part of the day to see what trouble my cats have made! Overall, great camera. I'll be adding more to my home and office.

I'm pleased with my Dropcam Pro because it's a cross-platform and an affordable video security surveillance solution for our family home. Initially, I placed it at our (2nd floor) bedroom side window and we were able to monitor the front side of our house property. Later, we decided to install it on the front entrance door (back side of the front door) and pointed the Dropcam Pro through the door peep hole (window). This gave us two monitoring security services. 1. The ability to monitor the front property of our house. 2. The ability to monitor our main house entrance. This was an excellent solution for my family because when our front doorbell rings we can easily and quickly identify our visitor by using their app (Dropcam: WIndows/iOS/Mac OS X/Android). We installed the Dropcam app in our family laptops, tablets and mobile phones. Save time. Easy setup. Solid camera. HD/720p is fine. Made and supported by Google/NEST.

Dropcam Pro has is very well built and has solid camera lens, but the problem I have with is that after the initial 14 day trial, the minimum subscription price for a 7 day cloud recording is $99 per year. Dropcam doesn't give you an option to record locally, which ruins it for me. I returned it and got the Samsung Smartcam HD Pro, and the quality is just as good as the dropcam, and without the subscription fee. The samsung one allows me to record it on a micro sd card and bypass the hefty fee dropcam force down on me.

I purchased this camera expecting average results, but was pleasantly surprised. The video quality is excellent and the recording service is well worth the price. You can check up on the camera remotely and zoom in on a certain area and the sound quality is excellent!. I would love to have an outdoor version. Great product!

I recently purchased a Dropcam - Pro with no real purpose in mind beyond wanting to remotely view my home. Setup is very simple. I chose to do it on my desktop although I could have done it from my Android phone (HTC-One). After setting up an account, I placed it in our family room. The Dropcam - Pro has a great viewing angle so the lack of pan and tilt aren't really an issue. Nighttime viewing is also surprisingly good. There is a built in microphone and speaker. Despite a little lag, I can easily hold a conversation with my kids from my office at work. The Dropcam - Pro has numerous options. You can set alerts for motion and/or sound, set zones within the camera viewing area, setup specific times to record, setup recording based on your location, etc. So far the location recording has worked flawlessly. The Dropcam starts and stops when I'm halfway outside my neighborhood. I have an Android phone and the app works very well. I also placed the Dropcam in my front window. It worked well there despite having to get creative in finding a way to make it stay put. The only negative thing I can say is that when the cam is in a window at night, it reflects the image off the glass rather than what's outside. At any rate the Dropcam - Pro is a small but technology packed camera that for some could be a great alternative over a complex hardwired system.

OK so i bought this cam, on the first day i bought it, it did it job. i needed something to keep people from abusing my elderly 83 year old family member. we had hired a nice young lady, and she was using pills, that turned into heroin use, so at 20$ an hour wasnt good enough, we noticed someone was taking out 900$ a week. so we found out and fired her. after that, she started coming the hours normal care takers would leave for the night. so this camera was great because it recorded to the cloud on their site, it points out times that have action or noise, so no need to scan useless parts and waste valuable time. it does a 5min, 1hr and 24 hr grid that looks a lot like this --------|--||||---||-----||----- (straight grey lines being the times where movement is caught.) so you know exactly where to go. better yet, once you go there, you can choose via sliding bar, or by typing 3:22AM-413AM then save it to your account then export to your HDD (1hr of video being about 50-80MB) so its very easy to grab out the part or parts you need and show them to police or whomever you need to. free cloud with 30 recording trial, so it will save up to 30 days. night vision is not so great but these could easily be used outside if you want to spend that much, problem is just a non removable usb cable that plugs into a usb wall adapter, so running wire would be tough, but took less than 30 min to set up 3 of them inside the house, and they are hidden very well. pros: great to keep workers honest and accountable. and possible to keep you from being liable if they try to fake injury, steal, or simply dont care for your loved one like they should. is awesome for baby monitor or nanny cam two way talk is awesome feature sound is incredible! GREAT field of view! very wide angel cloud recording easy video export and DL small easy to hide very pleasing to the eye so hiding isnt a must unlesss you have a theif even if stolen, you STILL have your video online. nice app for android and ios alerts on sound and movement to app good settings options. list could go on forever. cons: night vision isnt great even though it would last, not a viable option to keep outside hard to hook up stealth outside, has to be sitting upright. alerts get annoying. if someone farts ill get a loud noise alert NO LOCAL VIEWING! you must view all video live or not over your network(browser or app) this is a HUGE bandwidth hog. especially if you get alerts on your phone and check in!

I bought Dropcam Pro version around 02/14/2015 from BestBuy and after 15 days trial I decided to keep it. * Camera Setup instruction was pretty easy to follow, but it definitely took me longer than 60 seconds to complete the setup - more like 10-15 minutes which also include figuring out where to place my camera and adjust camera viewing angle... (I believe there was an automatic firmware upgrade done to my Dropcam Pro camera when I first connect to my wifi network which went pretty smoothly as well for me.) * I'm pleased with quality of video, although I'm not sure it's really 1080p quality - perhaps more like 720p. However, it's good enough for me to play around with zoom-in/out features and still able to see face of the person showing up in front of my camera pretty clearly... The night (infrared) video quality is pretty decent also. It's good enough for me to see black and white almost HD quality whatever is placed in front of my camera in near total darkness. * This camera comes with free trial 14 days CVR (Cloud Video Recording). This means after 15 days, this camera is just a regular webcam which you can only view real-time video, i.e. not able to save/review any past footages without CVR. Therefore, I also ended up spent $99/year subscription anyway to be able to view any footage from 6-7 days ago with option of your own 3 hours capability to save permanently any customized footage you want... It's a little expensive CVR subscription, but my neighborhood has a lot of traffice with many solicitors. So for what I need, this CVR makes sense for me to review and to save any footages I want on CVR any solicitors' faces who knocked on my front door even though I may be out of town for a week... * One CVR feature I like is you can also setup zones for motion detections and send alert notifications to your smartphone and/or tablets. This is also a great feature in my opinion to filter out only what I need to see or only it's only alerting my smartphone and/or tablets when motions were detected on my customized zones. Pros: Good HD quality video camera and very easy to setup. Cons: The camera is already expensive, but even more expensive when you add CVR subscription. It appears you'll need both camera and CVR subscription, otherwise, the camera is just a good HD webcam with nothing else on it...