Canary Pro Indoor Home Security Camera 1080p HD WiFi IP | 24/7 Watch Live Video, Siren, Climate Monitor, Motion Alerts, Two-Way Talk, Night Vision, 10x Zoom, Private Mode, Works with Alexa and More

I bought a house in the beginning of July that was equipped with an ADT system. I wanted security of some sort, but I also am on a tight budget. My house is fairly small, about 1200 square feet, so I didn't need anything huge. I figured I'd give ADT a try, since the house already had ALL of their equipment installed. $48.99/month....seriously.So I started looking into other options.I didn't need anything huge--I knew that. I didn't want anything I needed to completely install myself--after all, I already had all this equipment installed in my house, and you're stuck with it (ADT won't even come and disconnect anything).Then I encountered CANARY on Amazon. I researched and read review after review. I usually don't buy expensive things on Amazon unless it has 4.5 stars or more, so I was really hesitant with this one. But I also was getting nervous because I had a week-long vacation coming up and I wanted some sort of protection. So I purchased one device...and here is what I've gathered.Let me address the biggest complaints I've read about:1. Pets--I have no pets, so this one doesn't apply to me. But I will say that MANY of the systems I researched had customers complaining about pet interference, so it's not just canary. It's pretty standard and universal.2. False Notifications--on my vacation away from home, I received 4 false notifications due to extreme shadow changes coming from the curtains. Many of the light changes were picked up, but I didn't receive notifications. The app has a sensitivity control, so you can control the alert sensitivity. I didn't mind getting these false alerts though because I liked feeling secured and knowing the device was still working.3. App is no good. The first day I hooked up my canary and the app was encountering issues. Tech support immediately responded to my concerns and it turned out that there were server issues going on. Since that the day, the app has been great. I was able to watch live video from my camera using 1mbps DSL on vacation, and that's what canary recommends (at least).(JUST SO YOU KNOW--you don't need a phone line with this system which is a major downfall of things like ADT, because you have to pay MORE for their wireless adapters, which is a huge plus for me.)4. The need for multiple devices. I didn't encounter this problem because I have the camera set in an area that it can pick up both of my entrances to the house. If you have a larger home, and your doors are far apart or in different closed off rooms, you may want to get more than one.5. The need to pay for space on the canary cloud. When you set up you get a 7 day trial of canary's cloud storage, where you can access videos up to a week old from your camera. Then after the trial, it switches to their free service, where you can only access footage from up to 12 hours. This is perfectly fine for me now because I'm using the canary strictly for security and not as a way to capture super great moments. With the free subscription, you can keep 5 videos at a time. The next level up you can keep and download more videos for 4.99/mo (which still isn't bad at all).6. The Canary isn't really security. It might not have an immediate response like ADT or other services of that effect, but the canary's camera is what I think is the best aspect of the device. Even if you're too late, you have that camera footage of the intruder. And I'd much rather have false alarms on the Canary than False Alarms through ADT and those types of home systems because guess who has to pay money for false alarms to police departments? You, the user. With canary, you get to be the one to decide if the alarm is false or not. You get to make sure the situation is real before the police is called. Yes, this might take much more time or you might miss it altogether (if you don't here your phone go off), but at least you have footage to provide to the police department in hopes to catch any intruders. Whereas other home security systems without cameras (unless you want to pay over $60/month) you don't have that evidence.Bottom line: The Canary is not perfect. But, neither is ANY home security system. The best thing about the canary though is that it's constantly improving and updating. Even in the 2 weeks I've had the product, I've seen it get better. I remember reading one post saying that canary company doesn't care about improving their product. This is a lie. It's not perfect, but it has given me a much greater sense of security to leave my home for days at a time. And I strongly recommend it.

I like this product a lot. It does many things that I want it to do, most especially allow me to easily set it up, move it around if I want, and check on my home while I am away. The motion sensing seems pretty good but I need to play around more with it. The options and the APP seems excellent (and I know they are always improving it and the options). The video quality is excellent. It does the things I expect it to do. Some reviewers of it with more negative reviews seems to expect it to do things well that I'd not expect of it--though maybe there are advertised features such as about learning your pet's behavior.I do have one substantial gripe and one desire for the future of this product line. The gripe: Why HD 1080p recording? I know there are examples of people using this essentially to save home movie quality video, and those videos can look gorgeous. I want it for checking my house and security. A good image is what I expect and want. HD 1080p? I'm not recording movies to watch over and over again. I do not understand the fascination or value of that super high video resolution for this purpose. Good quality video would be nice. Even 720i would be overkill in my view but would be great. Why the gripe? HD 1080p is a bandwidth hog. You need seriously high upload speeds to smoothly send and receive this quality of an image. Further, since that is a lot of bytes to shove upstream (where the average person has much lower bandwidth in their home), that also means that in a true security situation like a break-in, it will take far longer than it needs to to get the video up to the internet before the bad guy shuts off the power. And when I'm out about the town and want to take a peek at the home, why do I want to download super high quality video on my mobile bytes on my iPhone? I presume it's smart enough to just send the level of video my iPhone can play well, and not HD down, but I still do not understand the fascination with such a bandwidth absorbing approach to recording security video. I would like to see them come out with a way to step down the resolution for those who don't want the load.I guess there are two features I'd like to see. An option to use lower resolution, and then a product line idea that I believe would be a hit. Make a unit just like this, Canary, with a big old honkin battery in it that can be charged up, and then it can be set anywhere in the home (without an outlet needed) while one is away, such as on a vacation. If RING Video Doorbell can stick a batter in that thing that last months (and it seems like they figured that out), a much larger batter in the base of one of these puppies could last a long, long time while away from an outlet.This is a great product. If could choose resolution, would be five stars. And, if Canary ever makes that battery version, I'm in for one or two of them the next day.Update after a month. I had rated this 5 stars and now am lowering it to 2 stars. I now think the fact that this only records in HD is a serious defect unless you have way way better than average internet service. I have 11 down and 1 up (which is better than the average in the US). DSL, of course. Unless you have cable internet or fiber optic DSL, and perhaps a good 3 or more up, the fact that this can only take HD and needs to shove all that up to see it on your phone is non-workable. I like the device, don't love the software (after an update today, mid June, 2016), but it's high quality stuff. The HD is just a bad decision unless you have wonderful internet and you are hoping to capture family movies with it. Want a security camera or a few security cameras? Poor choice.Addendum after having this a couple of months. I was sitting at home today, and my internet is working better than ever. And I tried live streaming to see what the camera is getting when sitting in my home. Nothing. Would not pull up video. I have no doubt that it would capture motion while I'm out and upload it and could view it. But even live streaming did not work today. This is only for you if you have a blazingly fast internet. Another negative. They recently changed the APP on IOS. The changes made it less usable and less intuitive. There are now a confusion of settings that are not obvious about home and away and privacy or not. I'm sure those are added features but they took settings from prior APP that were very clear and easy to understand and broke that logical structure. Now I would have to go find documentation on the new options and learn about them. You may want to do that, but I think in this day and age, for a function that's pretty simple, if I have to go read about how to use the APP now, they made mistakes. Because of both of these things, I'm lowering my rating back down to 1 star.Update 2-4-17: Ads have started to appear when you open APP for Canary on iPhone. Seriously? That's pathetic. I still like the device and hate that it only records in HD.