Bulbs & Fittings Ideas

The audio is next to useless, unfortunately, and has constant clicking artifacts, which I assume is the WiFi signal interfering with the poorly designed audio circuitry.

To do any motion detection or clip recording--that is, to do anything very useful with this camera--requires a monthly subscription. Furthermore, the motion detection is very poorly engineered, and can't do regions of interest, and I have yet to find a setting which doesn't just trigger dozens of useless movie clips every day just because wind moved a tree.

The iOS app is horribly engineered. It constantly hangs, can't record video at anything other than a few frames per second, often produces video that has errors so that the iPhone can't play it back, and forces you to watch a few second animation of Belkin's stupid logo every single bloody time you start it up.

Perhaps worst of all: there is no way to operate this camera purely over a LAN. Even if you don't want to use the cloud features, this camera will be in constant communication with Belkin's servers to "punch a hole" in your firewall and allow external communication to the device. If they wanted to, anybody at the company Belkin outsources the web application to could view your camera, any time it's powered up. More importantly, anybody that hacked their servers could do so, too. Lord knows what they could do from the camera, since it's basically a small computer in its own right. A good hacker could probably reverse engineer the firmware and reprogram the camera to attack your network from inside your firewall. Basically, this camera is a computer on your local network behind your firewall that a company you shouldn't trust now has permanent access to. I'm not really happy about that. You should be able to turn off the ability for the camera to be reachable by the world beyond your firewall, but that's not possible. As such, this is about the least secure camera you can buy. Is it worse than a drop cam in terms of security? I don't think so, but I wouldn't recommend one of those either. I would recommend a camera that allows you to operate entirely within your LAN, such as a FOSCAM.

I've been really disappointed with Belkin's products recently. They seem to be trying to make money off subscriptions, but are forgetting to deliver a quality product off of which to to base them. I don't appreciate being forced into a subscription just to do things that shouldn't require the cloud. As an option, fine, but this product is useless without the cloud, paid or otherwise. What happens when Belkin decides to write off this product, as they did with their terrible baby monitors? How long will they continue to support the servers for this? Without their servers, this device is just a door stop.

Customer Video Review Length:: 7:54 Mins

Let's clear something right away. This Belkin Netcam HD+ does what the product states it will do. While we always have plenty of suggestions for improvements, I didn't find any areas where it did not function as stated and designed. This is an indoor camera only and I would not even leave it in direct sunlight all day. You will also need to register an account with Belkin. You do not have to subscribe to any of their services, such as the cloud recording, but the account is required. This camera is made to connect to their servers. If you are on your iPad or mobile device and connected to view the camera you will see you do not go to the Internet in their status and are LAN connected. But the initial opening of the application does go out to the Internet to find what camera are online.

As we show in the video, the setup is as simple as plugging in the camera to a power outlet, flip of a switch on the back to configuration mode (up) and connect to the camera directly via wifi. Configure all the settings you desire (connection info for your wifi and more) and save. Flip the switch into camera mode and your iPad or mobile device back to the normal network and you will see it get online.

They designed the camera with the wide angle to save costs on a motor to move the camera head. I appreciated the 720p ability and really would not need a full 1080p camera for everyday home usage. The ability to save snapshots to my local device while watching was nice, and the audio works well for listening in rooms and close. The microphone volume for you to speak with them is not loud so keep that in mind. we also test the night vision capabilities in the video and that worked very well. If this camera is always in a dark place you could have it set to always be in that mode or leave the default for automatic.

The application was easy to use, but I wish you could rotate the screen portrait so I could have multiple cameras viewed at once. Like a stacked grid. A great way to have multiple cameras viewable. The web interface was fine but a bit dated. Updates there would be very welcome if I wanted to use this while at work and couldn't have my iPad or phone on the network.

Mounting screws are provided, but are very basic. The camera is light so they should hold but I went ahead and did a better mount for the camera. I do wish that you could detach the camera fully from the stand to place it somewhere a bit more hidden. The stand did have good swivel range to place it at most every angle.

The camera also allows you to share the stream and feed with others. This is great for house sitters, grandparents and others. A great way to share who can see the camera without full configuration control of it. Keep that in option in mind when choosing a camera. If you have the cloud recording services you can go back and view events that were recorded later. They will need to build a better export system if you ever needed clips for the authorities.

The recent firmware update gave better integration with the Wemo system so make sure you apply that. Watch the video for more of our review.

Customer Video Review Length:: 0:07 Mins

The camera was easy to set up and easy to mount. The only mounting options are up or down. To give the user more flexibility in mounting, It would be helpful to be able to mount the camera sideways as well, but at this time it's not an option unless you can tolerate watching the video at a 90 degree angle. A simple software and/or firmware update would fix this so I hope Belkin will consider this option for a future update.

Although the camera is designed to use indoors, I've been trying to use the camera to monitor my front porch through a window. However, as you can see in the attached video, the IR night vision will not work through glass. Also, regardless of how I adjust the sensitivity, the slightest sense of motion triggers a recording and email alert. This may be fine for indoors, but if you're trying to monitor an area outside all it takes is for the wind to blow a tree or flag and the motion detector sets off. I'll continue to use it this way, but I"m hoping for a software and/or firmware update that will address the sensitivity issue.

I've also been taking advantage of the 30 day free trial of the Cloud+ Premium Services. This subscription allows you to record and store your videos in the cloud, so you can review them later. You can also receive notifications on your smartphone or tablet when the camera's motion sensor is triggered. The notifications include a video link, so you can quickly watch the clip. It would be nice if Belkin also included to option to save the clips to your own PC, but the only way to do that now is to download them from Cloud+.