Blink Mini- Indoor Smart Security Camera

Review updated after 3 months:My original review is below. I mentioned that these cameras make a nice toy, but are not good if you are looking for a home security camera. I've had the cameras 3 months now and the motion detection on one of them stopped working. It would either continuously detect motion so it filled up my storage, or it would not detect any at all, making it unusable for anything other than live viewing (which is very glitchy and doesn't always work either).I contacted support via e-mail. I told them I had tried various debugging things: unplugging the camera, moving it, verifying the network could reach it, etc. They asked me in e-mail to unplug it (which I had already done), and then asked me to do a hard reset, neither of which fixed it. After a few more e-mails with different support people, they again asked me to do a hard reset. I told them they already asked me to do that, and could they just please replace the unit, and they said "Well try it again and let's see what happens," which I did. I again re-iterated everything I did told them that resetting it didn't work. They then replied and asked me to move it to verify the network connectivity. This was after almost 2 weeks of e-mail exchanges back-and-forth, and finally I got frustrated and decided to just stop using the units and find something that works better.Original review--------I got this system primarily to monitor a pet at home while I am at work, which it is good for. I've deployed and managed professional security video systems at large and small companies, and if you are looking for something to serve as a security camera, you should choose a different system.The Good: It's a very inexpensive system. The cameras can be moved around very easily they take very little effort to set up and configure. You could use one to watch a living room one day, and a back yard the next day if you like. The video quality is pretty good and the wide-angle camera means that you can cover relatively large areas with just a single camera. If you get the Sync module, you do not need the subscription service so you can operate this with no monthly fees if you like. That means for roughly $100 you can have a 2-camera system with absolutely no additional costs. There are a few caveats to using just the blink module which are described below. The 2-way voice communication is ok, and it is a fun feature for messing with my dog when I'm not home. (It does make you sound a little bit like Darth Vader though). The sync module takes any USB memory stick. I have many of those laying around so I didn't need to buy one. I have an 8GB USB on it and have been using it for almost a month with 2 cameras and it's only 30% full. I do unplug the cameras when I'm at home, though, so they are not used 24x7.The Bad: The system is very slow. It takes several seconds to start watching a live stream video or to watch video playbacks. If you do not use the cloud service, it takes even longer to start video that is stored just on the blink module. The system will only record a maximum of 30 seconds of video and then it has to wait at least 10 seconds before it will start recording again. Also, several times it's evident that motion continues beyond the 10 second reset, but it doesn't start recording again until several minutes later. This means that you can miss critical events in your playback. About 30-40% of the time when trying to view live video, it gives an error message of "Playback is not available at this time" or "System is currently busy" or something like that. I believe this has to do with it not being able to record and play back live video at the same time, so if it has started recording a motion event and you want to watch the camera, it won't let you. In addition, it won't let 2 people try to watch live video at the same time, so if you have multiple members of your household want to use the app at the same time, forget it. If you use the cloud service, the stored clips will have a picture associated with them so you can easily identify what triggered the movement detection. If you use just the sync module without the cloud service, though, you do not get this image preview. This makes it difficult to identify which clip you may want to watch if you are trying to find a specific event amongst the several stored on your device. Also, the motion sensitivity does not really seem to work too well. It keeps triggering with slight changes in shadows even though the sensitivity is turned to the minimum level (i.e. if you have changing light intensity coming into a room through a window due to a car driving by or shadows from a tree, even if the car/tree/window is not in view of the camera). Due to the wide-angle lens, you won't get a lot of very good detail (i.e. facial features, text that is written on things, etc) out of images, but they will be good enough to see what is going on.Bottom line: This is a fun system, but it really is a toy compared to some of the other systems out there. If you are looking for something very low-cost for a non-critical type of usage, then this should be ok.