Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsGood monitor with average battery life
Reviewed in Australia on 5 February 2021
If this was the first baby monitor that I had used, I would probably have thought this monitor could not have been approved upon. It has exceptional image quality both from the camera and the screen, great feature set (direct connect and wifi), good build quality and decent operational menu. However this unit is replacing a 5 year old baby monitor from another brand. And directly comparing the two some deficiencies become more noticeable. I still think this baby monitor is very good and any who buys it will be very happy with it, but if VTech fixed a few minor issues it would be close to perfect.
The deficiencies i see when compared to my older baby monitor are:
- Poor battery life. The battery probably lasts around 3 hours, so the unit feels like it constantly needs to be plugged in, which limits your ability to move around the house. The old baby monitor even with an old battery would last around 10-12 hours without needing to be charged.
- Poorly explained menu options. Im still confused about many of the option that are found in the menus and I have been required to perform trial and error to try and work out what some of them do. The bad thing about this is that there is a help option against each option available on the monitor that you would think this would explain what it does, however it just brings up a web url to follow which you need to enter on your phone that takes you to a generic help area. This is just a wasted opportunity.
- Very bright notification lights. There are a couple of lights that indicate the noise level in the room. With white noise playing in the room, these lights light up constantly (as to be expected). But these lights are overly bright, especially compared to our old monitor. This is only a problem when trying to sleep next to the monitor as they can and have woken us up while sleeping.
- Volume on the monitor is on the quite side. The speaker volume i think is a little too low (even when turned up to the highest). I have personally not woken up when the unit has turn on to alert to an event while we have a fan on in our bed room. My partner is a lighter sleeper so she has woken up. But compared to our old unit, this would never happen. You could make the old unit very quite when needed, but at full volume was very loud.
Even with these deficiencies, I still think that this unit has been a solid upgrade on my old unit and I would recommend it (if you can deal with the average battery life). I feel that VTech have a great product on their hand, but without a lot of effort they could have made this product amazing.
