Google Nest Cam Indoor - 1st Generation - Wired Indoor Camera - Control with Your Phone and Get Mobile Alerts - Surveillance Camera with 24/7 Live Video and Night Vision

IP video cameras are a pain, especially when you first set them up or want to view their output over the Internet when outside of your home or business. I found cameras from Foscam and Amcrest difficult to connect to WiFi and difficult to view over the Internet. Though more costly, the Nest Cam is a breeze to connect to WiFi using the Nest smartphone app. And, the camera just works when viewing over the Internet. My time is valuable and the extra cost was well worth it in the time saved setting up the Nest Cam.

This camera has been wonderful to keep an eye on my newborn when I returned to work. Our many was made aware that we have this camera in our living room / kitchen area. It has been very helpful to assist our nanny if she needs to show or talk to me about the baby. We have daily conversations through the cameras talk feature. My husband and I can monitor or home during our hectic work weeks and keep an eye on our children. My 7 year old loves to show us his work or read to us on our drive home.

The Nest Cam is a great camera for someone who isnt technically savy or doesnt have actual security needs to address. Ill summarize the pros and cons below and give a mor thorough review after that. Pros: • easy setup • decent picture and sound • one of the more intuitive apps • two-way audio • nice mounting bracket Cons: • no local stream • no local storage option • paid subscription isnt very economical • no POE or POE adapter from Nest • USB only of power • pricey for what it does • would not consider this a security device Before I go any further, I want to say I like this camera and I will probably buy another down the road when I have spare money for novelty items. That being said, if you need something to address actual security issues this might not be the best camera for you. It is 100% reliant on the internet to do anything. It has no local options at the time of this review and if you want recorded footage you have to pay a monthly fee. For those out there who arent as technical and might wonder why does this matter?, consider the following point - if you are genuinely concerned with security or reliability of seeing the camera at any given time, do you really want to depend on having a camera that can only be viewed when your internet connection is working? Think about service outages with bad weather or general issues with internet providers where you still have power at your house or office but the internet goes out. Real security devices have to be reliable and highly available. This is neither. It is as reliable and available as your connection to the internet. Nest could do a few things to improve this, such as add a local streaming option that would allow you to at least view the camera on local wifi, or add edge recording that would let you record to a micro SD card for redundancy. Im not sure that fits into their business model of IoT paid subscriptions though. The lack or power options also makes it hard to take this camera serious. Its great that any one can simply plug it into the wall and its ready to go, but that works the same in the sense that if youre putting this camera in a easily accessible spot by a plug, it would be too hard for someone to unplug it either intentionally or accidentally. You can resolve this with third party USB POE injectors, but this would require a little more work than most people would want to do. I understand this camera is marketed as an easy to use, ready to go out of the box solution, but its not a real security device and for all intensive purposes it is a glorified web cam that only works through the internet.

Great monitor for my childs bedroom at night. Great picture and sound quality and I love that it connects to my phone. Easy to set up and use. People writing reviews have complained about the green light on the camera that doesnt turn off but it hasnt bothered my child.

This camera is worth every penny our home is monitored and alerts my husband or myself at work through his Samsung frontier gear 3 phone is someone is walked in the house we can monitor our home talk to the kids or dog lol and keep and eye on our home best money spent! Picture quality is excellent!

Ive had the cam for over a month now and the only issue that I have found is that it will not let me download the video clips that I have created. The link to share clips to social media or download just isnt available, despite having paid for the subscription service. Im assuming its a software issue that will eventually be resolved. Other than that, it works well as a security camera (I get almost instant smart phone notifications if it senses movement). The app on my phone also works well with the camera. I would like to say that despite what the instructions in the box state, it takes at least 15 minutes to set up, especially if you are new to the Nest system like I was.

I read so many great reviews about this camera on the Amazon site. I read mixed reviews on other sites. I should have stuck with my original intuition and gone with a different camera. The picture quality is so so. I figured 1080p would be clear enough to identify an intruder. Not so. The picture is slightly tiled. The camera turns on for no reason. I was getting mad at my wife because I thought she was spying on me. She was not, the camera would start whenever it wanted to. I can live with that. I cant live with it turning it self off when we are gone. It has happened every time. I need the camera to stay on when we are gone. It does not. I do like the fact that I can review footage from the cloud. It does let me know when something is not right. It also is only 50 percent on that. Quite often it says it detected someone, when no one was there. I do feel better having a camera, but not this one. I can not feel my family and house is safe when the camera turns off for no reason.

Simply put, the specifications for a high-resolution camera with night vision, an internal mic and speaker are great until I realized I could not use this device at those maximums. Buyer beware that your ISP speed and WiFi signal in your home should be heavily scrutinized before you buy this product for its high-definition capabilities. I am disappointed with this camera, mostly because the the camera has frequent disruptions when watching the feed, there is no way to view the video feed locally on my network without going through the Nest site, and there is no POE/Ethernet option, which means a strong WiFi signal is a major necessity. To be fair, I am not sure if my feed disruptions are caused by poor ISP service (poor upload) or bad a WiFi signal. But, there also is not a way for me to make these determinations/troubleshoot the problems. If I could view/listen to the content/feed from a service on the device, I could easily determine the problem and mitigate the poor service while I am in the house or away from the house. If I were to do it all over again, I would forgo the easy access to the device from anywhere and go with a product like Axis which has similar features and could be viewed locally or externally via an extra network video monitoring solution. I like what Nest stands for (e.g. interface simplicity and ease of use), but I wholeheartedly regret making this purchase.

High quality camera and very easy to set up. With the app, now I can see both cameras and nest thermostat. The only reason I am not giving it a 5 star is that one of the cameras does not go live on the app once a while and requires several reboot of the app to get it to work even my phone is close by and the wifi is very strong.

I really wanted to like this camera and I really wanted to ignore the negative reviews. We have to dropcams at our house; a Dropcam HD and a Dropcam Pro. They have been fantastic! We have used them religiously with the Dropcam app for over a year to watch our two boys. When the Nest Cam came out, I thought it would be a good idea to put in the playroom. I had nothing but problems with it from the first moment I started it up. To put it simply, the only reason I gave it two stars instead of one was because when it worked, the video looked great. However, it rarely ever worked for me. I tried the Nest app on a Nexus 7, a Samsung Galaxy Note 4, an iPad Mini 2, a Samsung Galaxy S3, as well as through the website. I was determined to get this to work somewhere. I reset it numerous times and its still just had problems. The nail in the coffin was when this camera was on the network, the Drop Cams started having issues. When I finally removed the Nest Cam from the network completely, everything returned back to normal and the videos from the Drop Cams worked great. I think the camera is probably a good piece of hardware but until they resolve their application issues, it doesnt matter how good the camera is.