Summer Infant Baby Zoom Digital Video Monitor Review

We looked at quite a few baby monitors whilst waiting for our first child to arrive. Obviously there are ones that let you hear your baby – these are by far the most popular, as they’re the cheapest, but there are other options. You can get monitors that tell you if your baby hasn’t moved – they sound pretty good, especially in these days of heightened awareness of SIDS, but on looking into them further we found too many stories of false alarms causing more stress than the monitors alleviated. This somewhat defeats the point, if you ask me! I’m not saying they’re bad, and I know some parents have found them to be (literally) a life-saver, but we decided not to bother.

Instead, we looked into video-equipped monitors. There are quite a few to choose from – but surprisingly, there are only a few that offer what we considered to be “essential” features such as a digital wireless connection and remote control of the camera.

After looking around at all the options, we chose the Summer Infant Baby Zoom Digital Video Monitor for a number of reasons – I thought it’d be helpful to list them, and say whether it met our expectations or not:

The camera

It’s digital: This should mean it offers a stronger signal and is less prone to interference. Whilst the signal is strong, reaches out into the garden of a typical 3-bed semi, and doesn’t suffer from interference from other devices, it does have a side-effect of causing it’s own interference. Since the camera can be remotely controlled by the handset, there’s a two-way connection when the screen is turned on, and this interfered with our WiFi network at home (both operate on 2.4GHz). After some experimentation it seems the amount of interference may depend on the router used for the WiFi; Sky’s NetGear and Sagem routers were particularly affected, but Apple’s Airport Extreme was not. If you’re fortunate enough to have newer equipment which operates on 5GHz then you’ll also be fine. The interference is most pronounced when the handset is displaying the video feed from the camera; however even just receiving the audio would cause some disruption to WiFi (but not as much). The level of disruption varied from slowing the WiFi network speed (OK if you’re just surfing webpages as a 4Mb ADSL connection would still be faster, but ruins any streaming of video to an Apple TV or PS3) to completely disrupting it. You might feel that some WiFi disruption (which only happens when you’re using the handset, remember) is an acceptable price to pay for the peace of mind such a product delivers.

It has remote pan/tilt control of the camera: We felt this was important as we could foresee various times when a fixed field of view could be inconvenient. The remote control works wonderfully; there’s a joystick on the handset which you just push to move the camera. The camera rotates on the base, and tilts on the “legs”. It can point down at a reasonable angle, and can point straight up; you’ll probably find it best to wall-mount the camera to get the widest range of movement. The only drawback is that the camera’s motor is quite noisy; if the baby hasn’t quite gone to sleep and you move the camera, it can startle them. However, this has come in really handy, as we use sleeping bags rather than traditional blankets for our baby and she has a tendency to roam all around her cot during the night – being able to move the camera to see where she’s gone is very reassuring. And entertaining (more on this later). Speaking of the handset, it has both a built-in stand and a belt clip, so it’s very easy to keep it to hand whatever you’re doing. A button on top of the unit turns the video on or off; audio is always on, although you can turn it down if needed (and there’s a set of LEDs under the display that always flash when there’s noise from the camera).

The monitor

It has night vision: Pretty much a necessity for a baby video monitor! Not all have it, though. On here it works perfectly; it automatically activates when the light level drops too low and gives you a black & white picture. There is, as you might expect by now, a slight downside – the infrared LEDs that enable this are visible on the camera, so when the baby is lying in bed, s/he’s got a big red glowing eye staring right at them. I suspect Frodo’s parents may have used one of these too.

There are a few options we would have liked as well, but at the time of purchase no systems offered all of them – you can’t speak to the baby over the handset, there’s no A/V out (many TVs offer a Picture-In-Picture mode these days), and it doesn’t have a temperature display.

However, those – and the points above – are all minor compared to the benefit of this device overall. I can’t begin to describe the joy this has brought us over the past year or so – watching what our daughter gets up to she’s on her own has been wonderful! Of course, there’s the peace of mind of being able to see her breathing even when you can’t hear her, but seeing her “chatting” to her cuddle toys, playing with her toes, moving to the other end of her cot before returning to where we left her in the morning – none of this would have been possible without a video monitor. The picture quality is surprisingly good – not as good as watching a video on your smartphone, but better than I was expecting (and perfectly good enough to see a baby’s chest moving) – as is the audio. A fully-charged handset will last all night on just audio; using the video will shorten the battery life, but we plug it in overnight and only use it on battery during the day. The flashing lights mean you can turn the audio off completely and still be alerted (also handy if you’ve got guests).

Is this unit perfect? No, but it’s perfectly acceptable, and I definitely recommend it – although if you don’t mind spending a bit more, there’s a newer version which addresses some of the issues with this one.

Rating: Get it!