Foscam FI9821P Plug & Play 1.0 Megapixel 1280 x 720 Wireless/Wired Pan/tilt IP Camera with IR-Cut (White)

Despite being plug and play, installing the software was a bit tough for me but IFIHomes helped me out. From the research I did, Foscam is apparently easier to use through both PC and mobile phone than other cameras. The alarm system that triggers emails on sound and motion detection is a crucial part of the system. But the alarm system is suited more for security purposes than as a baby monitor. The pros of this particular camera is the recording facility to the SD card and the high quality of the video recording. However, sound quality is not as good as the video quality but I think that is normal for cameras.

Product is good.Needs port forwarding,ddns,UPNP settings right for good wifi connectivity with broadband. Customer care service is a bit slow but satisfactory

I have two fiscal same series but different version. Earlier version is fast and it is making streaming smooth. V2 is not that fast as it was in V1.

Ifihomes have given me the best support so far in ensuring the camera runs on laptop/desktop and mobile seamlesslySupport team looked into the modem setting to get issue fixed remotely and were able to resolve the setting conflicts and resolve the issues i was facinggreat support and service

The Foscam camera is awesome and very easy to use , Happy with the product and Seller IFI as they did expedited delivery for me.

the service was prompt​ and the camera quality is excellent

Installation completed. Excellent Support from IFHOMES

good product, easy to install and maintain

I bought 3 Foscam F19821P cameras, 3 separate orders from different vendors, but all fulfilled by Amazon. Two of them came with the same system/app firmware versions 1.5.2.11/2.21.1.143, the other one came with older system/app firmware which I upgraded to the latest from Foscam 1.52.13/2.21.2.5 (Foscam only make available 1 set of firmware for upgrade, you do not get to choose, nor can you go back to previous once upgraded).The basic quick setup is simple and you will get a video feed from the camera in no time. More work if you wanted alarm detection and all the associated features such as recording/take-snapshot/email. Even more work if you wanted to setup a FTP server to store the recording/snapshot rather than just storing them on a micro-SD card on the camera.Below are my findings:1. Out-of-the-box, the camera body seems solid - it is hard plastics after all. The power connector wiggles with the power cord plugged in and seems loose. This happens on all 3 cameras. I think this is a potential problem if you plug and unplug the power cord a lot - the connector just may break.2. Video quality. It's just OK, I expected better. Video of subjects in direct sunlight are washed out. Video of subjects in a room with natural light and pastel color theme are acceptable. Much better video quality in a room with natural light and darker color theme. IR night vision video quality of a room is very good. The IR cut feature is useless in my opinion - you are not supposed to see in the dark without IR. Distance is up to 20 feet, but any subject more than 10 feet from the camera is basicallyjust a blur,3. Sound quality. I only experiment with sound once. Seems to work,4. Time-of-day. I'm in California, so Pacific time zone and chose to sync with NTP server time.nist.gov. The camera proceeded to set the time 1 hour behind the actual time. Played with the daylight saving option and various sync options to no avail. Finally gaveup and just set the time zone to Mountain. So now the time displayed is at least correct,5. Alarm setting - start/end time. You can set the days of the week and the time of each selected day to monitor the alarm. I set all 3 to monitor between 9 am and 4 pm. In reality, the alarm monitor will not end, consistently, until 5 pm, not sure if this is caused by the same time-of-day problem, see 4 above. I will say though, all 3 cameras often, but not always, report the first motionalarm right at 9 am, go figures,6. Alarm types - motion/sound. Two of the cameras support motion and sound alarm detections. The other, the one I have to update the firmware, only supports motion detection and has an extra option "push to phone" but no way to specify the phone number. So how did a half-implemented feature get into a released firmware? And how did a release just drop an existing feature (sound detection in this case)?7. Alarm detection. Works well, too well actually. Swaying leaves and natural light changes will trigger motion alarm. Refrigerator kick on will trigger sound alarm. I set the monitor area to avoid swaying leaves, and changed the sensitivity setting from high to medium. I turned off the sound alarm for the camera in the kitchen since there is no way to eliminate the refrigerator sound. Even with all the tweaks, I'm still getting a lot of bogus alarms,8. Alarm detection - takes and emails snapshots. Works well. What I cannot figure out is how many snapshots the camera takes for each detected alarm. I set mine to detect every 5 seconds (highest frequency) and snapshot every 1 second when alarm detected. Swiping my hand over the camera to trigger a motion alarm, sometimes I get 4 snapshots, sometimes more,9. Alarm detection - recording. Not so well. Sometimes I got a bunch of snapshots and no recording. Or there may be 1 recording, or maybe 3 or 4. The more snapshots, the less chance of having any recording. The recording seems to start out in 1 file and finalized in another, not sure why. My setup is for recording to be stored on a FTP server, which is an old P4 XP, so this could be a bandwidth problem with my FTP server, but still, I expected some consistency. If anyone is using high end hardware for a FTP server, then please update me as to your experience,10. One more problem with the IR Cut feature. This feature allows you to specify from when to when to disable the IR. The factory default is 0 to 0, meaning no IR disable. Once you set an IR cut time, you can not set it back to the default of 0 to 0 - the firmware complaints that the end time must be greater than the start time.The cameras did what I wanted them for - to keep an eye on the house - did I close the garage door, etc. I have fun experimenting with the camera features and learned more about computer networking than I cared. I used IP Cam Viewer to view my camera feed on Android phone and tablet. One word of caution if you choose this internet way of viewing your camera feed - your modem's external IP address is dynamic, and will likely change if you reset the modem. I think the only way to solve this problem is to register a domain name.

This was bought to monitor our pet cat when away from the house. As such, it didn't need to be fancy or top quality but I was looking for reliability.The unit I acquired from Amazon must have been one that had been sitting on the shelf for a considerable time; the software was very out of date and required over an hour to bring it up to date. This process was not as straightforward as you might think either as it required multiple downloads of the software and each one had to be applied in turn. There was no 'latest' software that could be applied just the once.The browser plug-in (when running on Windows) has been replaced by a universal "exe" file which works just fine. The Android Foscam app for my mobile phone and tablet both connect reliably and provide a reasonable (but not great quality) picture. The panning does work well though once you get the knack of it and the infra-red lights can be either automatically or manually switched on.A better image is provided by the IP Cam Viewer Basic from the Android Play store. I suspect, however, that it uses considerably more bandwidth (data) to provide the better picture so this may be why the official Foscam app only provides a mediocre picture: small data requirements. When used in this country (depending on your phone contract) it's not such a big deal but when abroad the additional data could be significant in terms of price.Night time viewing is pretty good; it switches to black-and-white mode but the built-in LEDs provide a decent enough picture to spot a cat on a sofa some 15 feet away!One downside is that there is no indication on the camera that it is on; you could easily be spied on by whoever is running the app or browser.The plug-and-play bit sort of worked; it managed to set up the required connection on my mobile phone but I still needed to do all that port forwarding stuff for the browser to work outside of the house. The app worked without all this faffing about.All in all it's a nice camera. It looks good enough to leave standing about and it has a huge pan and tilt range. Tip: set the panning speed to slow to avoid zooming about all over the place. Talking of 'zoom' it has no optical zoom. The Foscam app only provides digital zoom which results in a badly pixellated image (just like when you over zoom a digital photo).Once you have it all set up and working you realise you could really do with another couple so you can cover the entire house - but not at this price! I'll wait until they either drop in price significantly or an offer comes along before I buy further ones.Support is provided from London when purchased from Amazon (or directly from Foscam) so be warned before you buy off an unauthorised auction site - where there have been reports of clones being sold too.All-in-all I'm pleased with it and it worked just great from Bermuda and New York - even to the point of being to speak to my daughter (and hear her responses) although you really need to use earphones otherwise you get feedback (howling) as the sound from the phone's speaker is fed back to the camera and so on.Yes I'm pleased with it, just a shame about the high current price!

[Edit: Since I posted this, Foscam commented in an attempt to show how much they care about their customers. They asked me to get in touch with them, which is funny because I totally mention in this very review that I already tried this and they shafted me. Wait...they wouldn't just be mass-commenting on every negative review to make it look like they actually care, could they? Gasp! Never! They also linked me to a page that supposedly would help me with my issue. A PAGE THAT WAS BROKEN. See the comments below for details and proof.]This product is easily one of the worst things I've ever spent money on. To make a long story short, it gave me problems straight out of the box (set up would not have been possible if I did not work in IT), half-worked for 4 months, and then gave out completely. It now only works if I reset the camera every few hours, which, besides being unnecessary, I can't do since I use it as a video monitor for my 7-month-old and I much prefer it when she's not screaming because daddy just woke her up so that he could keep his eye on her. Tried contacting their customer service to make use of the warranty they have with the product. Turns out they do not give out refunds for their poor-quality work, but they'd be more than happy to send me a replacement unit that will have the same issues (at least half the issue is with the really buggy software that you have to use with the camera that won't get fixed with a camera replacement).The long of it:Pulled it out of the box the day it showed up, glad that we'd be able to make sure our daughter wasn't going crazy at night whenever she started crying. Found a CD in there, along with some instructions on how to set your camera up "easily." They describe this camera as "Plug & Play". They *should* describe this camera as "Plug & Die Horrifically From The Stress Of Dealing With This Awful Camera". (Unless, of course, they have a very different definition of the word "Play" than I do. If that's the case, then I apologize.) The software that was supposed to automatically detect my camera didn't work, so I had no clue what the IP address for the camera was (which is step 1 in setting it up). Okay. That's annoying. Thankfully, I work in IT and I knew to pull up the DHCP server page on my router and just started plugging in the addresses that were actively in use until one worked. If this last sentence means nothing to you, good luck setting this thing up.After fighting through the incredibly poor UI in their setup software for an hour (an HOUR - I really do need to discuss the definition of "plug & play" with Foscam, apparently), I finally got it up and running. When I pulled it up to test it, the time on the screen was completely wrong. It wasn't a set amount of time off, either. Over the next several weeks, it turned out that it would just (seemingly) choose a random time to display and then do that. ("3:38 AM, I think", it would say to itself and then giggle as it displayed that time knowing full well that the sun was out.) I once looked at it and saw it displaying 12:10 AM as the time (again, wasn't even close; it was like 3:00 PM). When I looked again, it was saying it was 12:08 AM. Wut. I watched it for a bit as it counted up for a few minutes before hopping back to 12:08 AM and starting over. It apparently just gets stuck in a time loop now and again. Good luck using the "nifty" feature that allows you to tell your camera to start recording at a certain time. If it makes it to that time at all instead of just hopping back to 12:08 AM every few minutes, it'll most certainly be nowhere near the time you actually told it to start recording.At this point, I knew that I had made a terrible mistake. However, I had spent the money and so I sucked it up and decided I had to deal with it (also, I was out of forget-me-nows). Over the following 4 months, my wife and I put up with UIs that would frustrate Satan, a video feed that would randomly lock up without reason, and enough connection issues to make Time Warner Cable jealous (seriously, though, sometimes it just wouldn't connect and we'd be video-feed-less). Finally, last week, it died almost completely. I now have to reset the camera every single night by unplugging it and plugging it back in to get a connection to it at all. And the connection we finally do get dies during the night and leaves us looking at a frozen screen.I contacted Foscam today to get a refund on a clearly worthless product and they said I'd have to go through Amazon if I want a refund, which I'm pretty certain is not possible after 4 months of owning something [Edit: The return window ends within a month, something I'm sure Foscam is aware of.]. They would, however, be very happy to send me a replacement devil camera that will likely have all the same hardware issues and will definitely have all the same software issues, since you can't really replace software. I will never again purchase another Foscam product. I strongly urge you to not even buy this one. So, basically, what I'm saying is:Foscam. Not even once.

The camera disconnects from the network every 1 to 2 minutes, then reconnects after a minute or so and repeat for about an hour or so then it disconnects completely until I unplugged the power cord to reset it. Then the dropout patterns repeat again. When it is connected, it seems to work fine. I can see the video feed via my account on their myfoscam.com website, so I assume all my setups were done correctly. I bought this new model to replace the old model for its HD video feed, so the WiFi signal strength at the same spot has not changed. The older model FI8918W works fine at the same physical location without any disconnections. I wonder if this model has a poorly designed antenna or a defective radio or something.They provide a downloadable software tool called Equipment Search Tool. When the software is running, it shows all the Foscam equipment that are connected to the network. I can see my FI8918W connected and the FI9821P appearing and disappearing from the list. The observation is consistent with the symptom of the camera going offline frequently.I tried switching the channel in my WiFi router. It seems to work better. I need to observe a few more days to see if the problems return. I tried to switch between channel 1, 6, and 11 which are the non-overlapping channels for WiFi. They all works okay. I suspect that the symptoms I encountered earlier was due to channel switching by the router. It was set to auto channel selection earlier and probably the camera is incapable of keeping up with the channels. After manually selecting one fixed channel, the dropouts have not occurred yet. 24+ hrs stable connection seems a good sign.When I called their technical support, the automatic answering system put me on hold and updated me on my position in line for the next support agent. But when I got to position #1 after half an hour, their phone system just hung up on me. Apparently their phone system suffers connection problems too. I called again, and I was put back in line, this time the wait was 50 minutes before I could talk with someone.To run their software with your browser, they tell you to download some plugins for your browsers. These plugins only work on Safari and will not work on Firefox or Google Chrome. I never trust Internet Explorer, so didn't bother to find out if the plugins work there or not. When you view your camera via your account at myfoscom.com, the cloud services would run a plugin named fsCloudPlugin. You should also be able to connect to the IP Camera directly via the browser by entering its IP address and port #88, e.g. http://10.0.0.123:88 The browser window will spin forever with no response. When I looked at the activity monitor, I could see that a process named fsIPCamReg is not responding. At this time, I could get by via the cloud service. But local access via the browser is not working for me yet. I consider myself lucky that I got at least one of the setups working. Based on the other reviews here, other people are not as lucky.

Though it took a couple (dozen) tries to get the hang of it, all you have to do is push a button on the camera, push a button on your router, and that's all it takes to connect the camera to your wifi network. You have to do this again if the camera is ever unplugged though. I didn't have to call Foscam support so no one has asked me to write a review about how awesome and/or friendly they might be... I wouldn't know.The camera itself is a little bigger than I expected but it has a nice range of motion and is nearly silent when it moves. The clarity of the video is very good, even in the dark with the IR activated. You can save still frames to your cell phone and they are very sharp looking. While my phone is on my wifi network, the camera moves and responds instantly with no delay in the video. Through a cellular network, the video tends to freeze and pixelate. I intend to use this as a baby monitor so any time I'm actually using the camera will be on wifi though. Right now I use it to peek in on the dog. The time stamp on the display is always exactly 3 hours behind and I'm not sure how or if I can fix that.Getting the camera to work with the app took about the same amount of tries as it did to work with my router. Just download the free app and scan the QR code on the bottom of the camera. Then the app has you create a user name and password. Somehow I managed to do all this without reading most of the instructions (don't judge me, there's a lot to read!).In short, this is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for in a baby monitor. I won't know how well it serves its intended purpose until June, 2014 but it wasn't too expensive, fairly easy to set up without calling support/reading most of the manual, and the picture is great!