Every
parent who's ever wondered, "What happens with my kid when the lights go
out?" has two options: Stake out the child's room Navy SEAL-style, or
install a video baby monitor to keep watch when your eyes can't be there in
person. A mounted camera
can beam live video
from your child's room to a handheld viewer or to your smartphone — or to both.
After
a month of testing six products, our choice for the best baby monitor is the iBaby Monitor M6T, now available for around $160.
iBaby's monitor, which taps into a smartphone to help you check in on your
child at night, boasts an impressive array of features, including 360-degree
pans and crisp images, even in night mode. This all comes at an attractive
price.
Our
runner-up, the Motorola MBP853 Connect, costs about the same and gives you
the option of picking up video streams
from either your phone or a dedicated handheld viewer.
Do
You Need a Kid-Centric Video Monitor?
In
an age in which home-security cameras
are getting ever smarter and packing in more features, you may wonder why you'd
even need to consider a dedicated video monitor. Why not repurpose an existing
home security
camera, the thinking goes, and set that up in my child's room instead?
To
put that approach to the test, we also evaluated the
Nest Cam as a baby monitor
alongside our other models. As our runner-up among
wireless home security cameras, the Nest Cam gives us a good
opportunity to see how a general camera compares to a model created
specifically to monitor kids.
The
Nest boasts some impressive hardware specs, such as true 1080p/30fps video and
a 3-megapixel camera sensor. Setting up the Nest Cam specifically to look in on
a 2-year-old at night, we found the video quality on Nest's camera to be
sharper and more detailed than on any baby video monitor we tested. Also
significantly, some of the Nest Cam's features overlap with those that most
parents will want to consider in a video baby monitor.
The
Nest Cam includes push-to-talk features as well as alerts triggered by motion
or sounds. And when your child is past the age when you need a nighttime
monitor, you can repurpose the Nest Cam to check in on other parts of your home
— something that's difficult to do with a monitor designed specifically to
watch over infants.
That
said, when we tested the Nest Cam solely as a baby monitor, we learned that
despite its strengths as a home security camera,
it's not created specifically for parents. You can't take still photos or
record custom video clips out of the box (although the latter can be done with
a pricey annual subscription). Plus, there's no way to trigger kid-friendly
music to soothe your crying child, and the camera's sound quality is average at
best.
MORE: Best Smart Home Tech
There
are important benefits to owning the units that are created directly for
parents. Push-to-talk capabilities will usually be integrated, as well as the
ability to record and share still images and video clips (even if some monitors
require a subscription to do so). Baby video monitors will also usually have
built-in music files that you can play to soothe your child. Just the ability
to pan and tilt the camera — the Nest has a fixed 130-degree wide-angle
perspective — means you can follow your kids wherever they scamper.
The
Nest Cam was engineered for general security monitoring; it excels at that, and
a new version, the Nest Cam IQ, provides an even sharper picture and more on-board
intelligence. (At $299, it's also nealry double the price of our top-rated
dedicated baby monitor.) But we believe dedicated video baby monitors offer
enough unique functionality that parents will appreciate over a more general wireless home-security
camera.
How
We Tested
In
addition the Nest Cam, we tested five baby video monitors: the iBaby Monitor
M6T, the Levana Keera PTZ Baby Video Monitor, the Motorola MBP853 Connect, the
Philips Avent Digital Baby Monitor and the Vtech VM343. Three baby monitors
(Levana, Philips and VTech) relied solely on 2.4-GHz radio frequency (RF)
antennas; iBaby, like the Nest Cam relied solely on Wi-Fi, while Motorola's
device used either Wi-Fi or RF. When setting up the baby monitors, we spaced
them apart from each other 1 foot or more to avoid potential signal
interference.
We
evaluated each monitor on the following criteria:
Range: I situated each
monitor at an elevated position in my child's room and approximately 7 to 8
feet from the head of my son's bed. The four units with handheld viewers were
tested from 12, 20 and 35 feet away through one wall in a 35-year-old apartment
complex; we connected both the Nest Cam and iBaby M6T to my Wi-Fi network.
Display: I evaluated the
screen quality on both the handheld viewers and the video-streaming smartphone
apps. Wi-Fi signal strength and download speeds (~10-13 Mbps) were always more
than acceptable for HD-quality video. I also made observations in differences
of quality between full-color daytime vision and black-and-white night vision,
which all units featured.
Audio: I checked whether the
monitors offered push-to-talk features to speak with my child remotely and how
clear the sound was on the other end. I also considered if there were other
audio features, such as pre-programmed lullabies.
Battery Life: The four devices that
had handheld viewers came with removable, rechargeable batteries. I ran down
each of these units several times by keeping video continuously streaming and
turning off sleep and power-saving modes.
Features: I tested all built-in
features such as pan and zoom, motion and sound detection, temperature and
humidity sensors, and sleep timers. I also took note of how easy the interfaces
were on both handheld viewers and streaming apps.
Setup: Ease of setup and
installation factored heavily into our ratings, including whether an account
needed to be created and if there were any extra subscription fees necessary.
Each unit had cords protruding out of its back, so design wasn't much of a
factor in my choice, though parents should take care to keep dangling cords and
wires away from their children's reach when setting up a monitor.
Reference:
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/best-baby-monitors,review-3296.html
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