Review on Amcrest Security Dual Band 4 Megapixel IP4M 1051W by Ryan Olsen

This is my eighth Amcrest camera and despite its flaws I keep buying it because it's the best of so many miserable options on the market. I like them for video quality, cost, hardware reliability and open architecture that allows me to save FTP, NAS, local SD card, time intervals, email alerts and save as much as I want, where I want ( Google Drive, OneDrive, my server , website) with no monthly fees for the rest of eternity like nest, battery swap or base station purchase like the others. Full Disclosure I'm a techie, but basic functions like browsing your phone are easy. I can run one of these in 3 minutes out of the box. Here's the bad news: setting up full functionality requires a PC running Amcrest WebView, a pathetic beta-quality Chrome extension. It works, but it's terrible to use, especially when you need to remember your IP. The iPhone mobile app is good for viewing, but there's no setting for motion detection sensitivity and levels, and playback is sluggish (add cameras every time), a clunky interface for viewing events, and things like setting up E -Mails are only available on the PC interface. The iPad app seems to be 5 turns older than the phone version, very buggy. One of my cameras can always play on PC, but sometimes it never turns off (accidentally) in P2P mobile app while the other cameras work stably. Uploading to NAS is reliable, but FTP events, especially periodic images, delete old images (fatal but old open bug on support site). So I'll keep buying and hope Amcrest will eventually invest in product support to improve their platform. From my perspective, it looks like most of their investments go into marketing and email marketing. The camera hardware is solid. If they would spend some money on app development, they could own the market. I hope the Amcrest guys read this!