Foscam FI8918W Wireless Camera Viewing Review

There are 3, one in the garage, one in the back hallway, one on the porch. They have all been there for over 3 years, working 24/7 and connected to the Blue Iris software on a rarely used laptop. Also connect them to OWL'R on my Android smartphone. Setup couldn't be simpler in either environment. OWL'R is fully automatic, no port forwarding is required on the router to set up external access. Since they are getting old, I ordered a few more just in case. Although advertised as indoors, I have…

What a disappointment. I have owned this camera for almost 2 years. It worked fine except sometimes there were issues with the reset function and the sound didn't work at all. I've decided to update the firmware (as I've successfully done before). I followed the very detailed instructions they included in the download file for fear of doing it wrong as they warn that doing so could disable your camera. Regardless, my camera froze completely and I spent 2 hours with a tech support rep trying to…

I love Foscam! I can observe a sleeping child without entering the room, and then I can enter when he wakes up. I have this wall mount so that the baby can be seen clearly whether it is in the cradle or on the swing. However, it took HOURS to set up! It was a nightmare! The guide was so bad. I called support and they didn't help. The support agent just wanted to hang up asap. He would only answer one question and not go through the setup process with me. It was very frustrating to set this up…

Nice camera! When we go on vacation I have to leave my pets with babysitters at home, so I decided to bring a camera to monitor the foot traffic coming and going into our home. I bought 3 of these for our kitchen, living room and great room. I installed the program on my smartphone to be able to update camera information and they work great. I know there are other cameras out there that show a lot more detail or have fancier features, but for us these fit the bill. We have a good overview of…

Great for home surveillance with a few simple settings: In the alarm service settings, enable the motion detection feature and check the "Send email on alarm" box. If you don't need alarms all the time, review your schedule and set everything up, then delete the times you don't want alarms. Next in the email service settings: I recommend creating a NEW and dedicated GMAIL account - it's free and you'll get MANY alerts depending on where you place it and how much traffic that area gets. For…

, I had no problem setting up the device on the network so I could manage it, but setting up the client software is unintuitive. After playing around with the web interface and Foscam IP camera client software for a few hours, I found that I was spoiled with my old DLink camera and IPview Pro software. If you just need a surveillance device or email snaps this may help, but I need 24/7 motion recording. Two things I noticed after learning how to use the camera software were that motion…

So my dear hunting dog is pregnant and ready to give birth. I set it up in 5 days to get everything working. I monitor from work whether everything is in order on the day of delivery. Well her temperature dropped 2 degrees indicating she was in labor and guess what?! The camera turns off. I'm going home because it's about to burst and I'm going to fix the camera. The wireless equipment in the camera has completely stopped working. The Foscam software doesn't find the camera, neither does my…

Hard to beat for the money. I connected this to my (new and expensive) router via an ethernet cable, but there is a noticeable lag of a second or two behind "real time" on my Wi-Fi connected computer. I wish there was a way to tweak the color rendering, but overall it looks pretty good visually. I can control it from my smartphone with a third party app. I wish the camera software came with an app that I could install on my phone that could provide more functional accuracy, but when I can sit…

ordered two of these from Amazon Prime. both arrived on time as before, with boxes wrapped in a piece of cardboard inside a large box. Everything looked fairly new, although nothing had been sealed. I don't know if they were originally sealed. I turn on camera 1, I can't bring up the camera control panel. it still rejects the factory default password. After several tries I tried a full camera reset and lo and behold it works. which makes me strongly suspect that someone before me couldn't get…