Review on TETHYS Wireless Security Camera 1080P Indoor with Alexa Integration: Pan/Tilt WiFi Smart IP Camera Dome Surveillance System with Night Vision, Motion Detection, 2-Way Audio, Cloud Storage – Ideal for Home, Business & Baby Monitoring by Chris Nako

This is my first security camera that I have and I get a $20 gift certificate for this review. but I'll be honest as they didn't say whether I should give it a specific rating or not. I paid $24 for this camera and honestly wasn't expecting much. I just needed a small camera to keep an eye on my pets while we're away from home and it seems to be doing its job well. So good I bought two more. I've never seen it explicitly mentioned, but I don't think it's intended for outdoor use and I'm hesitant to put it outside. So I have two cameras facing out through the windows and one facing in. This works very well during the day, but at night the night vision is reflected in the window and I can't see anything. The night vision inside works very well. If there was a disable function for this I think it would work fine as it's lit outside but I haven't been able to find it yet. I can switch between night and day mode but the glare is still there. Box: The box contains everything you need to get started. Mounting screws and plate, cable clamps, fairly long USB cable and charger, short ethernet cable. It must be plugged into a power outlet or USB port to function. Only SD cards are missing, but given the price and the fact that you can watch the camera live, that's understandable. Setup: Setup was pretty easy for me, but I'm pretty tech savvy. However, it's pretty simple. It has voice notifications for customization, which is nice. You can set up a wireless connection through the app, but it's easier to do it with a cable, even if you end up using a wireless connection. Sometimes the settings didn't seem to work or the installation froze, but turning off and on again solved the problem. Connectivity: I currently have two of these cameras configured as Wi-Fi and one wired. I have pretty fast internet and a good router so your mileage may vary but they work pretty well. Sometimes the wifi freezes for a few seconds but generally works. Wired is probably the best route if possible, but that's not a problem for me. Storage: You don't need an SD card to watch live TV. If you want to backup your channel, just buy an SD card and you can watch it on your computer or mobile phone in the free app. When the card is full, it will automatically overwrite the old file. There is paid cloud storage if you want, but I didn't buy it. Image: It has a fairly wide field of view, which made me very happy. Even though it's 1080p, it doesn't feel like Blue Ray quality. Not sure why, but I'm assuming the video is compressed for size and streaming usability. I don't see any setting to change this. It looks closer to 480p to me, but the picture isn't bad. There's not really much lag between the movement when you see it in real life and the tape. Maybe a few milliseconds of delay, but not bad. Like I said, for a sub $30 camera, I think it's great. I assume your Wi-Fi will affect this. I don't think there's 5.0GHz WiFi support, only the 2.4GHz band, which I found odd, but that's not really a problem. The 5.0 GHz WiFi will not connect. So during the setup, remember to connect to the right wifi or else you will run into problems. Features: You can flip the view to install it on the ceiling, it has night vision. Automatic and works pretty well, although part of the image was a dark room and the rest was lit, it sometimes went into night vision mode and I fixed that by moving it a bit away from the dark area. This is another nice pan and zoom feature. The zoom is about as good as my Galaxy S7, but don't expect miracles at the medium resolution, but it's pretty good. I couldn't read my thermostat at about 10 feet using Zoom, but the numbers are pretty small. The pan works pretty well and has great freedom of movement. You can also hear audio and speak through the camera, which is a pretty cool feature that I wasn't expecting. AP: The app works fine for the most part, but as I said, there are some freezes when something is changed during installation. It hangs every time the time zone is changed. So I just turned it off, it saved my previous settings and I go into camera settings and change it there. It's nice to be able to view your cameras from your phone or computer for free and view your SD storage. It's very rare that a channel freezes or goes black for some reason and I have to restart the app, but like I said, it doesn't happen often. One feature I would have liked is being able to watch all channels at the same time. It's possible to get multiple instances of ap and do it that way, but it's far from ideal. Overall I am very impressed and happy with what I got for what I paid for. You will work well for me. The only thing I don't like is the inability to watch multiple channels at once and the inability to see through windows at night, but that can be fixed by Googling and it wasn't really designed for that anyway. So I can definitely recommend this camera and I don't regret the purchase at all. It has some quirks and it's not perfect, but it's great value for money. If you have a ton of money to spend on a camera go ahead, but for my needs it's all I could ask for.