Samsung SNH-P6410BN SmartCam HD Pro 1080p Full-HD Wi-Fi Camera

I've read most of the reviews and questions-and-answers before buying this SmartCam, and now I've been using it for over a week and feel that I owe it to you guys (and all the new visitors) to write up my own experiences. In one sentence, this is the best surveillance camera in its price class if you want network-connected monitoring and recording. If you don't need network connectivity, look for a simpler and more robust system.You should not believe the hype, especially the pictures, that are used to sell SmartCam. No surveillance camera with a wide angle immovable lens the size of a pinhead is going to produce the gorgeous flawless and flat images that you see in the promotional pages at Samsung or here or elsewhere. These lenses hugely increase the area they cover at the expense of the clarity and detail in the image. If you use a good quality consumer camcorder to film someone 20 feet away, you'll see the frost on his beard. With this camera, and any other in its class, you'll be lucky if you can tell whether he is laughing or scowling. At 30 feet you may recognize the face of someone you know, but as court or police evidence the image will be useless. I am not knocking SmartCam, I am telling you not to trust the hype. When you see your child at the other end of the room via SmartCam monitoring, you may not know that she's crying, or that the babysitter is angry.Another thing to take with a grain of salt is the claims that it's very easy to set up and learn. Nothing on a home LAN is easy to configure, and this is no exception. If you're extremely lucky, everything may just work, and you'll see an image. Even so, you'll have to experiment and scratch your head, and find the manual online (there's none in the box) and read other people's posts before you learn to do everything the description says can be done with SmartCam. I am a professional programmer, I replace my own hard drives, and I've gone through half a dozen routers before I found one that I like, so I do have experience. It took four days and a call to Samsung techsupport before I said to myself that I know how to use this baby.It doesn't help that some of the things can be done only if you use a desktop browser with a special Samsung plug-in; some of the things you can do with an iPad app; and some of the things you can do with an Android app. These are not the same things, and they are not done the same way. The desktop browser may tell you that your motions sensitivity setting is 2, but the Android app calls that setting 553. And if you are really nerdy and learn how to connect directly to the cam from your desktop browser (bypassing the Samsung Web site), you'll be even more puzzled.Now if you're ready to deal with all that, here are the great things about SmartCam SNH-P6410BN. It takes the best quality video in its class. It is accessible over LAN and over the Web. There is a plugin for connecting to it with all major desktop browsers, Mac or Windows, and apps to connect to it from iOS and Android tablet or phone. You can record video on a micro SD card--hours of it on a little thing smaller than your thumbnail. You can play back this video on your desktop with Windows Media Player or Mac OSX player. If you know how to edit video, you can cut and paste clips together. You can set SmartCam to record continuously and to overwrite the older recordings when the card is full. You can set it to record only when motion is detected, in which case it will record short clips only when something is happening in front of it. It performs great in low light: with only a 10-watt LED bulb over my porch, I see clearly what's going on in the 40 feet by 40 feet area in front of the house. At night the motion sensors were triggered by moth because I had the cam close to the light, but when I moved it away, the false alarms became almost non-existent. You can define the area that the motion sensors are watching, and so the tree branches that are moving in the wind on the periphery or above your patio will not trigger a recording. You can have still images of these detected-motion events uploaded automatically to your picasaweb dot com page, and then review them very quickly from anywhere on the Web. This is much faster than doing the same through samsungsmartcam dot com. That's how I saw that a package was delivered to my porch: I was at the book store, connectd to my Google Plus account, scanning through the photographs on picasaweb, and I saw a still image of a man approaching my front door; there was a time stamp (to a second). I then went to samsungsmartcam dot com, logged in, clicked a few buttons and watched the video of the delivery process. I heard the thump of the box on the porch.Again, note that not all of this is possible with an iOS or Android device. Mostly you'll want to use a desktop browser with a plugin. Tablet apps are useful for little other than live monitoring while you are within your wifi router range. Even this is not always a smooth process: you will see the connection drop every now and then, for no apparent reason (and this with my gigabit LAN, well tuned and tested). I've been kicked out of the Samsung Web site, too, and forced to log in multiple times; I faced inexplicably missing controls on the Web page, and the like. Because the video and audio data from SmartCam goes to the Samsung Web site, and when you want to monitor the live video or to watch the recorded video, that video and audio data has to travel to your browser. When you watch most video clips on the Web, the data travels from the site's powerful server down to your computer; in this case, the trip is doubled: up from SmartCam, then immediately down to your browser. Your little SmartCam and your relatively slow home wifi network are responsible for sending that data to Samsung before Smasung can send it to you.I had to call techsupport to figure out why certain things were not working as they were supposed to, because nothing is obvious or well documented. There's an obscurely labeled check box that is not explained at all, and if you don't check it--and you might not, just because you don't really know what it does--then certain functions will appear not to work. Such things, and the lack of consistency across the various ways of accessing the cam video, make me think that this is work-in-progress. If Samsung doesn't abandon this model and really completes all programming, testing, and documentation, this will be the best product on the market for under $200.Here are the things I wanted to do and could not. Because my cam is mounted on the external wall (in an enclosure that I rigged up), it is awkward to have to get to the micro card every time I want to watch the video in my Windows Media Player. The cam is on the LAN, so you would expect to be able to open and copy a file from its SD card like you access any other computer's drive on the network. No way, period. You have to turn off the camera, pull the card out, bring it to your computer, copy the files, return the card to SmartCam, turn it back on, and make sure it has booted up properly and is feeding the video again. Luckily, you don't have to re-do any of the settings: when power returns, there's a delay of maybe 30 seconds, and then everything is working as before. So most of the time you watch the recorded video through a desktop browser (can't do this with an app). And in the browser, the timeline that's about 600 pixels long covers almost 24 hours. So dragging the playhead to an exact spot you want to watch takes a lot of hand-to-eye coordination. The programmers did the best they could to help (you see the current time displayed in a box as you drag the playhead), but still, I waste some time watching the portions that I don't need to watch. And there's nothing more tedious than reviewing surveillance video where nothing is happening. I wish I could click on a still image for a triggered event and have the playhead automatically move to that time point. Not possible. I also wish for a desktop application that would control the camera and give me access to the video. Because controlling a device on your LAN via a plugin in the browser is like running under water. But that application hasn't been written. Finally, I wanted to try and have video from SmartCam automatically uploaded to my YouTube account, as stated in some (not all) of the documentation. Couldn't do that. One probably shouldn't even try that because continuously uploading HD video will clog your home LAN. But I wanted to see if that was possible. When connecting with the iOS or desktop machine, I couldn't even find this option. It exists only in the Android app, but doesn't seem to do anything.I've seen a few people state, in the question-and-answer pages, that certain pro quality network recorders can, if you really tinker with them, record video from SmartCam. Those systems cost thousands of dollars, and if you own one of them, you probably won't be reading this because there are large-lens, movable-lens, zoomable-lens surveillance cameras that record real quality video as part of those enterprise-wide systems, with cables going through the walls, motorized anchors, and so on.I hope this is helpful. Buy SmartCam if you want all these features and are ready to tinker. Don't buy it if what you want is a small portion of its features, because with that rich set of features comes the complexity of learning and management, and the loss of a degree of reliability.

We bought this as a way to check in on our baby when we're further away than our 2.4 GHz baby monitor will allow. The other camera we were considering is the DropCam. We went with the Samsung because it seems to provide more options for direct connection rather than relaying through the vendor's website.I found setup to be pretty straightforward, and the quality of the video to be very good. The camera seems to have very good low-light capability, even without using the IR night-vision.I find the iOS application to be straightforward to use on my iPhone or iPad. I also find the web-based application (which does involve signing in to Samsung's website) to be straightforward.I am getting a number of dropped connections whether I'm viewing the camera via my iPhone or Samsung's application. There is a lot of very negative feedback in the iTunes app store about the most recent version of the Samsung SmartCam app being more prone to dropped connections than previous versions. Hopefully Samsung will get this sorted out.The dropped connections make this impractical for us to use as a night-time baby monitor. Our baby sleeps in her own room, and we rely on the monitor to relay her crying to our bedroom if she wakes up in the middle of the night. If my iPhone has dropped its connection to the SmartCam in the middle of the night, I may not hear her. That's a deal-breaker for us, which is why I don't currently see the SmartCam as a replacement for our 2.4 GHz monitor for night-time use.I was particularly concerned about being able to connect to the camera on a local WiFi network without requiring that a lot of data be relayed over the internet. We will probably use this monitor at a resort that has decent WiFi but an overloaded internet connection. I think this should work pretty well.For one thing, it appears that the video data transfer between the camera and my Samsung monitoring application is flowing completely within the local network. Both the camera and the monitoring application do periodically talk to Samsung to maintain the connection. However, as an experiment, I tried disconnecting my home network from the internet while viewing the SmartCam live video feed on my iOS device. The live video continued for several minutes before it finally complained about a lost connection.It is also possible to connect to the SmartCam directly with a laptop web browser if I know its local ip address. I'm able to determine its local ip address using a simple network scanning app on my iPhone. Be warned, though, that this requires that a plug-in be installed in the web browser. I was able to get this working with Firefox, but not with Internet Explorer, nor with Safari on my iOS devices.I am also able to connect to the SmartCam directly using an app like IP Cam Viewer Pro on an iOS device. The frame rate is very low, however - it's more like stop-action than a live video feed.Setting the SmartCam up to connect to someone else's WiFi network after I'd already configured it for our home WiFi seems to present a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. I haven't figured out how to use WiFi Direct configuration to do this with my iPhone - Perhaps it requires that I reset the SmartCam to factory defaults so that it offers WiFi Direct configuration again? The best workaround I've come up with so far is to set up the wired network interface on the SmartCam to a static IP address, hook it up to my laptop through a portable network hub, and use the local web interface on the SmartCam to access its WiFi configuration page. This seems like a lot of work for the average user!We don't plan on using the SD-based video recording & playback feature, although it does look useful. The motion/sound alert feature together with SD-based recording & playback seem more useful in a security application than baby monitoring. I can also imagine that the frequent dropped connections are less of an issue in that application.Overall, I think it's a handy gadget that should do what we need it to. If Samsung were able to solve the dropped connection problems, I think they'd have a clear winner.

Read a lot of reviews before purchasing, and I'm not disappointed. Easy to set up. Works great with iPhone 6. Never had any problems with recording or viewing images or videos. Very happy with this product.

I got this to use as a baby monitor (in conjunction with a audio only monitor) since i wasn't willing to fork out $200 on a baby video monitor and have little functionality after the fact. The camera quality is amazing for my purposes, I've been testing it in a room 10.5' by 36' and I can see the whole room with this in the corner. The night vision works great, I've tested it in the middle of the night, pitch black, and I can see a lot of detail. The app works for what I need it to, the two-way communication works pretty good although I don't see myself having much use for it. You can set the camera to record events that record onto the micro SD card that you can then access via the app, this works seamlessly.My only gripe is with the app stability while it's running in the background. Even with push notifications off (which you want, unless you want to be notified any time the wind blows) The app still seems to be doing a lot in the background, causing other apps to malfunction (such as games and whatnot) while it's running. To get around this I force close the app every time I'm finished with it.

La caméra marche surement très bien mais l'application SmartCam ne marche pas du tout pour la gérer. Du coup il est impossible de s'en servir.Le fournisseur reconnait un bug. Impossible de recevoir des emails d'alerte. La notice est trop légère sur ce point. Pour l'aide, c'est soit la FAQ muette sur ce point, soit un numéro de téléphone aux USA.L'application ne marche pas non plus sur PC (à moins de prendre une vieille version d'IE, ne marche pas avec firefox malgré les dires du fournisseur).

Es la tercera que compro y va excelente. Rápida, buena definición, gran angular, estética muy buena y relación calidad precio excelente

Best camera I have ever set up! Intuitive and easy. I have set this up at our cabin so that I could look at it when there is no one there, in another country! If you are thinking about a Netgear camera or one of those Japanese models like Escam, spend a little bit more and save yourself a million hassles. The image is clear, even at night and the camera will alert you if there is a movement.Definitely would buy another one.