Foscam FI9831P
Feature packed and affordable.
For its modest price, the Foscam FI9831P has excellent specifications, including the ability to capture and stream video at 1,280 x 960. It has motorised pan and tilt, two-way audio, SD-card storage and long-range night vision that was our pick for best nightvision reception.
The software interface left us a bit cold, though — it doesn’t have the consumer friendly polish of some of the competition. But it has excellent options for motion detection and capture, colour adjustment and local recording and capture. It can upload captured images to FTP servers or send them via email, and you can set up multiple users with different access rights. The mobile viewer apps are more user-friendly, but they don’t let you do much other than view feeds and perform the most basic wireless configuration.
Foscam also supplies a free Windows app for capturing and recording streams as well as a free DDNS service that makes it possible to access the web interface remotely, though you need some technical know-how to set that up. If you want remote access to your feeds, you’ll need to subscribe to Foscam’s paid Cloud Service.
If you’re comfortable with the technical stuff, or plan on using third-party software to control the camera, the Foscam is great value. Its night vision is great, its general image capture is good (though we thought the compression a little too high, resulting in some blurring and blockiness) and its hardware specs are better than most of the other cameras here.