the original drop cam took the home monitoring Market by storm and the drop
cam Pro claims to be even better maybe it's as amazing as they say maybe it's
designed to pre on people with more money than sents maybe the truth lies
somewhere in between watch on to find
out the Jazz mini phone and tablet stand from coolermaster is now available in a
variety of cool colors from these great retailers click now to learn more the
unboxing experience for consumer-friendly products from Smart Brands is always good and was actually
kind of fun in this case because other than hearing ads on the radio I did no
research on the drop cam Pro before buying one to do this review the camera
comes pre-installed in a simple aluminum Mount there's a quick start guide that
I'll be using to test their 60-second setup claim there are some screws and a
wall mount that the bass clips into and then I was a bit surprised to find out
that it's powered by a long thick micro
USB cable on a wall wart instead of something thinner easier to find
sensible places to plug in and more durable let's go back to the camera
though at the front there's an all glass 130° wideangle lens not good for a
cinematic look but definitely useful if you want to monitor a large area since
there's no support for pan and tilt and behind that lens is a new high
sensitivity thir in sensor that's about two times the surface area of the older
HD model making it better for load light situations you can't see them now but
around the lens are some unexceptional IR LEDs that it uses for night mode and
then at the bottom we find the micro USB plug for power or setup if you decide to
use a PC finally internally we find a speaker as well as a little microphone
port for two-way voice a dualband wireless end setup and Bluetooth low
energy for setting up with a smartphone or tablet if you choose to go that route
now on to setup but first story time now I'd heard of drop cam but I never really
cared about it because I've been burned by subpar our consumer grade network
cameras so many times that I was just over them as a category all the ones
that you're looking at now I was given for free and still never bothered to use
because they were just too useless and horrible and it was always the same
issues complicated setup flaky apps
rubbish image quality and worst of all feature lists that were so short it was
almost like the manufacturer was intentionally nerfing the product to
avoid cannibalizing the sales of a higher-end offering in spite of the fact
that many of these companies didn't even have higher-end offerings anyway the
thing that made me say maybe there's something to this was the fact that Nest
owned by Google acquired them and then I knew I had to review it when I saw their
claims of 60c setup did they really find
the Holy Grail of networking product development was it that easy to deploy
the answer is actually yeah um it takes a lot longer than a minute and their own
website seems to have been updated to reflect that even if Amazon's hasn't but
for PC setup you plug it in with a USB cable and follow the onscreen prompts
and for smartphone setup you pair it via Bluetooth install the app and follow the
onscreen prompts the guide they guide you through creating a Dropcam account
connecting to your Wi-Fi network and placing the drop cam within Wi-Fi range
somewhere that it'll monitor something useful so not the inside of your petery
drawer then once it's configured the Simplicity keeps on coming using a
browser on a PC or the app you can monitor the camera live you can zoom you
have two-way voice communication with people or pets on the other side albeit
with a significant delay and you can
categorize repetitive events so that drop cam will either notify you when a
certain important thing happens let's say whenever the front door opens or
ignore it when uninteresting things happen let's say when the cat jumps up
onto the bookshelf this is cool because these events also enable you to much
more quickly scrub through save footage in the PVR uh sorry CV ER feature where
it marks them on a timeline so finding out when little s came home last night
is super easy too bad this functionality is let down by a couple of small
problems so first it's still Beta And there are some Kinks to work out basic
stuff's okay but the more complicated uh classifying things on its own yeah is a
little bit rough right now and second CVR stands for cloud video recorder a
subscription based service that you need to pay for monthly in order to do
anything other than monitor the drop cam live yeah after your pathetic 14-day
trial of CVR to make the let's face it
not that special plastic camera that you already paid $200 for useful for
anything other than live streaming you need to pay $100 a year for your first
drop cam and $50 a year for each subsequent one and that's if you only
want the last 7 Days of Saved footage 30 days costs triple there is no Hardware
reason that drop cam can't store footage on a drive or a PC on the same network
which would save bandwidth from your monthly data cap and improve the quality
of your internet use experience since constantly uploading 720p video will
affect your network speed especially if you start adding more than one camera
and while I'm aware of the feature that turns off video recording when you're at
home that's kind of ridiculous to me I mean what if a couple robbers team up
for the classic you make sure they stay in the garden while I empty out the
house strategy I guess I don't need footage of that when it comes time to
report it police right no so in conclusion while drop cam solves some of
my original complaints about network cameras yeah those ones it really is
amazingly easy to use I mean here look I'll log into it right now you can go
from not being logged in to being logged in and live monitoring your camera or
reviewing your DVR CVR excuse me in that
much time zoom in zoom out it's really
easy to use sadly it's yet another device
designed to deliver as little functionality as it can unless you're
willing to Fork out what I really think is an unreasonable amount of money for
the subscription but honestly I don't blame drop cam for any of this for over
a span of let's say 3 years charging each customer $500 to maintain 7 Days of
recorded video from a camera that isn't weather resistant is powered by USB for
some inexplicable reason and becomes nothing more than a fancy baby monitor
the instant that they stop paying for the subscription drop cam saw customers
paying 30 to 50 bucks a month for much less useful home alarm systems they
delivered a better product saw amazing success and got bought out good for them
no the one that I blame is the other consumer networking and video
surveillance companies who had years to get their act together and deliver
something that works half decently and couldn't manage to do it so now we have
this it works I just think it's too expensive speaking of things that work
half decently and aren't too expensive and let you watch videos Hulu Plus that
was wow that was a terrible segue anyway the plus part of Hulu Plus is key
compared to regular Hulu this gives you access to all current season episodes of
a bunch of network TV shows on your own schedule and lets you stream videos on
pretty much any device you already own like your iPad or Roku Hulu Plus gives
you access to more obscure stuff like Korean dramas kids shows and Criterion
movies so you can be watching an anime like sort out online then switch over to
the latest episodes of a network TV show like bones all within the same service
you'll also get access to Originals that you can't get anywhere else like The
Awesomes created by Seth Myers and Mike Shoemaker an animated comedy about a
misfit group of superheroes all 10 episodes of season 1 are available now
and season 2 premieres on August the 4th so guys be sure to check out Hulu Plus
using my link huluplus.com Linus to get a free twoe trial it costs only $7.99 a
month once you're done with the two-e trial and if you use the link in the video description again that's H
plus.com Linus you get that extra week free since they actually give you a onee
trial for free no matter who you are even if you sign up without a code but
two weeks is better than one week right yay unless it's community service for
that time that you anyway I what was I talking about uh thanks for watching the
video guys like if you liked dislike if you disliked leave a comment tell me am
I being unreasonable is is $10 a month
totally fine and making you pay more with each one I mean is it just a matter
of well lus it's that much better than everything else so you know that's why
I'd love to hear from you guys do you have a drop cam what do you think of it
let's just leave it at that there's a support us Link in the video description
where you guys can buy a t-shirt give us a monthly contribution or change your Amazon bookmarks to one that gives us a
little Kickback whenever you buy I don't know drop cams or whatever else is
you're buying on Amazon and I think that's pretty much it as always don't
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already