HDO1080 All-in-one Home CCTV Camera

After spending ages trawling through the various home security camera options that were WiFi enabled I finally settled on UCam247's product. With the exception of a remote pan/tilt option this camera provided the best combination of features, reviews and pricing. As well as working with a third party service (Cammy) that offers free online storage of footage triggered by the camera motion sensor. (One thing to note regarding Cammy, and it's not always made clear from other descriptions - the storage online and play back of footage from triggered events is not in a complete stream (i.e. not video playback), rather once the camera is triggered individual snapshots are taken for a period of time and then combined into 'slideshow' of these snapshots.) However if you also use an SD card (not included) to store camera footage you can then watch the full video playback for any alerts - this can be done remotely from anywhere you can access the net by using the UCam247 app (or from your desktop computer using a web browser) which allows you to view, download and playback recorded footage directly from the SD card in your camera. There's no need to remove the SD card from the camera and plug it into another device to view your saved footage. Anyway back to the camera unit itself. Many people seem to be asking about how it functions when used through a glass window. My particular camera is set up to watch our front door and its approach from through one of our double glazed windows and works well. The picture during the day remains nice and clear, and at night provided you have an external light source (eg. motion sensor light above the door) and the infra-red is off on the camera (when the IR is on it produces too much reflection from the glass window) it also works well. The glass seems to have no adverse effect on it's ability to detect motion, and triggers an alert or records right on cue when anyone approaches the door. Set up was straight forward and the instructions were clear. I had it up and running in only a few minutes. I did have a problem with my camera shortly after purchasing it, the camera suddenly dropped off the WiFi connection and I was unable to reconnect it or even identify it on the home WiFi network. I contacted the support team at UCam247 and they walked me through a reset procedure, however when that failed to make any difference they immediately arranged to send out a replacement unit at their cost plus a prepaid postage bag for me to easily return the faulty one. I have to say that I was very impressed with the customer service I received from UCam247: fast, professional, and friendly. I wish more businesses would have such great CS. The new unit works perfectly and I have not had a repeat of the initial issue (or any others for that matter). So in summary: Is this a great, good quality security camera? YES Does it have a great mix of features for the price? YES Will the after sales support stack up when you actually need it? YES My recommendation: Just buy it.

This is my 2nd indoor camera, and I plan on adding external cameras 1080p Full HD outdoor wireless WiFi security camera. All-in-one home CCTV camera with built-in Cloud DVR. Setup, view Live and playback clips using our mobile and tablet apps. 15m night vision, motion sensor, ONVIF ready. UCam247-HDO1080 in the near future as well I've had several makes of indoor cameras before, but they have all been awkward to set up, particularly for smartphone viewing - who wants to muck around with obscure router settings - the beauty of these camera is that set up is very easy, and linking it into your smartphone/tablet or PC/Mac is very simple. I originally bought the first one for pet monitoring whilst my wife and I are working during the day, and it gave fantastic video quality. I've since repurposed it to monitor the pathway in front of our house after another brand of external cameras failed due to water damage - even facing through glass, it picks up a huge amount of detail, especially in night mode. Local police asked to see the footage recently after a couple of cars were vandalised nearby. The camera had good footage of the individuals walking past my house after the event, and the police were very appreciative of the image quality of the recordings, even in night mode I definitely plan on adding at least one external camera to the setup as well in the near future to replace my existing broken setup - I certainly won't be buying that brand again. It seems to me that the UCam247 models are easily expandable, and by having 2,3, 4 or more cameras around the house, I can get top quality results at a reasonable price, with real ease of use. I don't want to have a mixture of makes, so this ease of expandability is a real strong point. I'm recording onto a network hard disk connected to my router, but the SD card setting also works well. I'm also planning to purchase the separate WiFi Micro Cloud NVR Network Video Recorder (No Subscription or Storage Fees). For use with UCam247 WiFi IP Security Cameras. Playback clips remotely using our Free apps. as well, as the reviews seem very good Support has been great from the team - the two occasions I have contacted them for firmware upgrades, replies have been within two hours or less For my needs, I really can't fault this camera - highly recommended

My 4th Ucam247, bought specifically for indoors, this is an excellent product. Follow the instructions and it really is easy to set up. The camera is HD 1080p producing a wide screen view with minimum barrel effect. I use my camera to view outside from within the house. In sunny conditions this results in the camera showing a reflected image of itself in the window. To overcome this I made a black card shield with a precise hole to enable it to locate on the lens housing. Infra-red does not work well through glass anyway so nothing lost. Installing the Micro SD Card is very easy and can be done without interfering with the camera, no need to switch off. Record settings are not difficult. The images produced are good and as others have pointed out, the night vision capabilities/images are really good and the zoom using the Android App is smooth. On a laptop you get full or reduced screen not variable zoom. Viewing the .mov files using Windows 7 is good. Some report a week signal on WiFi. I have had no problem over a distance of 30 feet through two double brick walls. I have not tried it outdoors. Deleting movie files is probably quicker installing the card in your laptop or PC. Some say the “WiFi signal is quite weak, and is a bit subject to interference”. I have had no such problem, even two rooms away through double brick walls. Another report wonders whether the outdoor cameras work as well. They do, I have 4 outdoor cameras, all on WiFi, all greater than 40 feet from the house with the signal passing through double brick walls. I do like these cameras and prices are coming down. Try to afford the 1080p

I have a total of five cameras, three of which are H264 (720p) cameras and then I have two UCam 247 1080p camera. All the cameras were bought from Amazon and are as follows: 2x UCam 247 1080p 2x BW Wireless HD IP Security Camera - PTZ, IR Cut, H264 [this is an indoor camera] 1x Koolertron Waterproof Wireless WiFi 720P HD Outdoor IP Camera 40m Infrared IR Cut Pan/Tilt PTZ 3x Zoom Night Visibility I can't add a lot to the other reviews here in terms of the quality of the product - it is exceptional and by far has the best image quality of the 4 cameras that I own. While the H264 products claim to be HD, the UCam picture quality is significantly better. Also when the UCam streams the live video, you can choose the quality and so you can stream in full 1080p, whereas the other products mostly stream a 640x480 image unless you use their recommended P2P software. You can also configure two streams - say one at full HD for when you are connected to your home network and another at a lower quality so that you can access it on your mobile quicker over 3G/4G. Also the image on this camera has the widest angle of any camera I own and so you get a fantastic image quality and the picture width is wide enough to easily monitor a large area (say 50 to 60 ft wide). The night vision on the UCam stands-out - the image quality is really clear and the range is easily that advertised (and I live in an area where the council turn off the street lights between 0000 and 0530). The Koolertron has night vision too, but the effect is more of a "searchlight" (i.e. the centre part of the image is brighter) whereas the light distribution on the UCam is even. I guess this reflects the fact that the Koolertron is a Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) camera. One thing to note is that even with a 64Gb MicroSD card, the high quality of the image means that you will only be able to save about 2 days of continuous recording footage on the card (on a rolling basis). I have now settled on using the "record on alarm" features of the camera. The images are easily accessible via the web interface and the video files play directly in the browser. The only really minor downside on the UCam compared to the other cameras is that they come out of the box with a free pre-configured Dynamic DNS address - so this allows you to remotely view the images when not at home. The UCam supports DDNS, but you may have to subscribe to a service - the camera suggests some services and has a "Register" link in the relevant configuration page. The other challenge is balancing the trade off between relying on the signal between your wireless router and any wireless enabled camera (to ensure that fluctuations in signal or general technology "wobblies" mean that recording is interrupted or that you can't access the camera via the web interface). Also it is really important to remember that 1080p HD generates image files and video that are large in size and so if you want to use the web interface over wifi to access images or videos stored on the camera then if your wifi signal is flaky then you could get frustrated. A 30 second video captured by the camera is at such a high quality that the file can be over 50Mb. I decided to take the plunge and hard wire the camera to my network. This involved buying a large drill bit (which was 40 cm long) and drill through the outside wall of my house. My advice to anyone would be to buy an IP rated waterproof box and install that adjacent to the camera on the outside wall as the camera has a short ethernet cable with a HUGE ethernet "socket" (about 2cm square). You would have to find an enormous drill bit to drill a hole big enough to get that through! So all you do is run the cameras cable into the waterproof box (note the socket is so big the standard holes in the box are too small so you are forced to carefully split the side of the box so that you can push the cables down) and then drill the hole big enough so that you can get standard ethernet plug through the hole and a low voltage wire for power. This sounds harder than it actually is. Another option of you don't want to drill a hole is to buy a flat ethernet cable from Amazon and run this out of your window with the low voltage cable to the waterproof box - I did this on my second UCam and it worked a treat. One obvious pint to note that you will need to plug the cable into your home network and so if your camera is not near your router, you can use any product that allows you to run a network across the mains circuit of your house (search for power line and you will find these on Amazon). UCam have their own application called "UCam247Live" on both the iOS (Apple) and Android platforms. I have tried it and it is ok, but I tend to revert back to one of the pieces of software below purely because on iOS the application is optimised for iPhone screens and so on an iPad you have to use the zoom function which makes the application and video appear grainy (when of course the video is HD). On the plus side the application is easy to set up - as long as the camera and the device are on the same network then it's search function will find the camera and also the app lets you directly search and play videos stored on the camera. I have noticed since I posted my original review that UCam market a "free cloud recording solution." This is not their own product but an excellent product called "Cammy" which I use on a daily basis to monitor the alerts generated by my camera. The plus side is that although I record to MicroSD on my UCam, I now have an online copy of images that I could use if an intruder were to smash the camera. The software is easy to set up and basically transfers photos to a cloud service that are aggregated together. When they are aggregated the Cammy service has a feature called "Smart motion" that creates a thumbnail image showing what it thinks are the key motion triggers in the file - which appears as a mini video. It also has a smart search feature that allows you to search for events on a specific date between a specific time across a single camera or across all of the cameras being monitored. After getting into the habit of scanning what has happened on my cameras most days the smart search feature has altered me to the fact that we have an almost daily visit by a fox in the middle of the night. I would never have found this unless I used Cammy as activating motion detection on cameras can generate hundreds of images per day. One final point to note is that UCam have stopped posting their firmware updates online recently (Jan 2015), and so you have to contact them with a screenshot of your camera configuration and they will send you a file. They told me that this is because they have had problems with people trying to install the wrong firmware on their cameras. Most of the other camera manufacturers seem to do this too, but as an advanced user it is a little frustrating that I can't do this as easily as before. I have read reviews where people have problems setting up cameras and viewing the image on various devices, especially on Apple Mac's and on tablet devices. So here are some tips and tricks for each camera, but note that I use paid-for versions of the software (as you only really get what you pay for): Mac software The UCam's web software works fine on Safari, with the key advantage being that it does not use any ActiveX plugin for any of its features. The IPCam software supplied with the Koolertron is extremely challenging to use, as it was developed with Internet Explorer in mind and requires an ActiveX control to be downloaded. Therefore I tend to only view it using my iPad (see section below) or Android phone. I use "IPCamera Viewer 2" which allows me to view images from all the cameras simultaneously. The key challenge was to find a camera profile for each of the cameras because none of the manufacturers name appear in the software. I use these profiles: Ucam247 - select Generic -> MJPEG Stream and put in the camera address of [...], where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the camera. BW Wireless PTZ - select Generic -> RTSP Stream and put in the camera address of rtsp://X.X.X.X:81, where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the camera and 81 is the port number that the camera uses by default. Also select "TCP" as the stream protocol. Koolertron PTZ - select Wanscam and enter the IP address of the camera. Note that the software does not seem to fully support the camera - it only comes up with a grainy image. Note the BW and Koolertron Cameras are Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) cameras but the software does not support these features. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ iPad /iPhone software I use "LiveCamsPro" to simultaneously view the images from all the cameras. UCam247 - Select the camera profile MJPEG and put in the camera address of [...]. The fantastic thing is that the software picks up the full 1920x1080 image from the camera and so it is crystal clear. BW Wireless PTZ - Use the camera profile Edimax H264. The PTZ features of the camera are not supported. Koolertron PTZ - Use the Camera profile Wanscam HW series. The software supports all of the features of the camera including PTZ, Infrared off/on, preset views etc. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Android software I use "IP Cam Viewer" (available on the Google Play Store) to simultaneously view the images from all the cameras, with the exception of the Koolertron camera, where I can connect but the profile in the software generates a very poor quality image. Ucam247 - Select the make "Generic URL" and then the model "Generic URL (e.g. [...]". The URL is [...], where X.X.X.X is the IP address of the camera. BW Wireless PTZ - Select Make "Edimax" and then the model "Edimax IC-7010Ptn", which appears under the "Edimax" make. Koolertron - this is a Wanscam HW0025 by another name. Therefore, I use the "Wanscam E-View7" software than can be found in the Google Play Store. This is very easy to configure (you need the unique CamID which can be found on a sticker on the camera) and supports all of the features of the camera including PTZ, Infrared off/on, preset views etc. Apologies for the long review - but I'm sure it will save you some time!

If you’re looking at this camera then you’re obviously looking for a CCTV solution without the subscription of the likes of Nest. I have had 2 of these UCAM247 cameras for about 2 years now. Yes I have saved at about £200 in subscription costs compared to the likes of Nest but I do sometimes question whether this was the right route to take. First of all the app crashes frequently. I have a super fast broadband of 200/12 Mbs with a strong WiFi signal. The connection quality is not the issue. In addition to this the live video footage is jerky and pauses every few seconds. A moving car for example will appear to jump across the screen. Attempting to view recorded footage is even worse. Sometimes the app can’t view any footage from the SD card at all. A force close and reopen a few times will normally resolve the issue but that’s not the point. The app / camera setup is flakey to say the least. It’s always a bit embarrassing when you’re showing off your home CCTV setup to friends and family and the damn thing doesn’t work. Also it’s become apparent that the way the system records to the SD card is a bit of a pain. Last year my neighbours van was broken into. He asked if I saw anything on my camera. I was away on holiday at the time but was able to (just about) review the footage from the app. Unfortunately the app does not allow me to download the footage to my phone. As a result I had to play the footage on my phone whilst recording my phone screen with another phone. I then sent this poor quality home video to my neighbour. In today’s day and age I should be able to download the file and send it in seconds without having to wait until I get home, get the ladders out, remove the SD card before putting into my PC and taking a copy. I would also add that the movement / notification setup is pointless. If your house is anywhere near a road (like most residential houses) you will find that the notifications for your driveway camera will drive you to distraction. Basically it regards the headlight of your neighbours car shining on your property as the same as an intruder. The reason for this is because the camera and software compare pixels of the current frame with the previous frame. A change is regarded as ‘movement’ and therefore sets off the notification and begins recording. This means that in the daytime you will have hundreds of recording from moving foliage in the winds. At night you will have lots of recording from the mentioned headlights. You will soon tire of spending an hour a day review these false alarms to see if there’s been any intruders or suspicious behaviour around d your house. The seller will explain that you can adjust the sensitivity of the cameras. This is true but it will then fail to fire when someone walks into your property. Pointless. I have now accepted that I have maybe a hundred recordings a day. I never bother reviewing now. I have also learnt that insects live infrared. These camera have infrared LEDs surrounding these lens. They supposedly allow you to see in black and white at night. This is true but the camera will continue to fire throughout the night as the infrared lights attract insects from miles around. My conclusion is that these compromises would be acceptable on perhaps a £50 camera. However £140 is waaay to much for a camera setup such glitchy software. I may well look to move over to a subscription model soon.

Firstly, the pictures of the 1080p camera are a bit misleading as they don't show the two cable connectors dangling out the end of the unit - not what I expected! I believe other models have connectors in the base. Not a big issue to me as I intended to use wired Ethernet, but if I was connecting via WiFi I would be wondering what to do with a dangling Ethernet connector - cannot disconnect and nowhere to stow it. Having said that the camera was easy enough to set up and connect (in my case) to a NAS device. Have had lots of questions as the documentation provided does not match the device or the software, however the support provided by the service desk has been excellent. I still have a few issues (e.g. why does it say 18 fps in HD available but I never see anywhere near that?) but I have just left it running for now. Images are clear and works very well in B&W at night. The iPhone App works but it is not exactly elegant and does tend to freeze up. Main issue is that every time you review a clip, you have to exit the App and restart to look at the next one. Hope they releases something better soon. Main problem to consider is not really a problem with the camera, but with any video motion sensing device used outside: it is insects and birds! I never thought about this before, but even after extensive playing with the sensitivity and threshold controls , you are guaranteed at least 3-4 false triggers per night (I currently run it 11.30pm- 07.30 am). So it goes without saying I have switched off push notifications for now! So in conclusion, as a deterrent it is probably good: to provide evidence after any intrusion it would be great: but don't expect to use it as an alarm system in its own right! Plus the manual should include some general guidance on how to best use this kind of system in practice - things to consider - not just the technical stuff.

The best thing I could say about this camera is that it does exactly what it says it does....which isn't to take for granted. A lot of these products come with a long list of features but with subpar HW and SW that sometime works and sometimes not. Installation was quick and simple and I got the camera set up over WiFi with motion detection, saving great quality HD videos to a local SD card and sending alarm notifications to my mobile phone all within 10 minutes. I had to make slight changes to the motion detection configuration in order to reduce the number of "unwanted" alarms (mostly dust particles or small insects lit up by the IR lights when its dark) but quite quickly got to zero false alarms. The mobile app's response time could be improved - moving between screens and getting the initial connection to the camera is just a little too slow - but it works well whether connected to the same wifi network or from outside the house using the public internet (or mobile data connection). A few things that I'd like to see improved is the motion detection zone configuration (if you want to split up into 4 different detection zones) - sometimes needs to be configured more than once to "catch on" and to have the ability to stream video to both the local SD card and remote NAS at the same time (currently either-or). THE MAIN THING IS THAT WHEN IT MATTERED MOST IT DID ITS JOB! While at work I got a motion alarm notification on my phone and immediately, when opening the app, saw 2 strangers in my home. I immediately called the police who arrived 2 minutes after the criminals left (nothing the camera can do to improve police reaction times) but using the video and audio captured by the camera (the burglars didn't notice the camera at all but even if they did, the motion alarm footage is also recorded to a remote FTP server) the police were able to identify and catch them the next day. The detectives said they would immediately buy these cameras for their own homes! Bottom line - worth its cost, does it job, easy to configure and use.

After fiddling with the WiFi,finally managed to connect to my home WiFi. But... For some reason I can only see the secondary stream 768x432?!?! And also the speaker does not work. I can hear what's going on in the room,but they can not hear me. I have made sure the mic and speaker slides are to the Max. in the app. I have yet to access the can via web browser. Hopefully this will sort out these things. update.. the camera is nowhere to be found in the broswer. also the camera is wire connected to router,lap top connected to router...used the utility to find the camera in the network for the advanced setings...not happening...every time the internet goes down in the house...when it comes back,i can not see the camera in the android app.it says `connecting` for 2 minutes and then `unknown device`...oh the joy. I am offshore and the wife is home with a LO of 2 months and now she has to fiddle around with the camera again and every time the internet goes down cuz the apps are limited and useless. the point of this camera was supposed to be.install and forget about it. not waste 3 days on trying to get it on wifi.the manual says`after you disconnect the wire it SHOULD connect to the wifi` what kind of a technical manual uses the word SHOULD?!?! there are no solutions if the camera does not connect to wifi as it SHOULD. not to do the same thing everytime the internet goes down in the house..imagine being somewhere for a vacation...the internet goes down the 2nd day and the camera does not go back online by itself? whats the point of having a camera then?! ah yeah....customer support?! whats that? just read the wannabe manual with the words like `SHOULD`