Alert 750i Indoor Master - HD-Quality Security System

After several months of use, I am completely thrilled with Logitechs product. I tried several other "nanny cams" before settling on this system and this is BY FAR the best. I can't remember the first system I tried, but it worked through Skype, which was nice, but then you could only view 1 camera, you couldn't toggle between multiple cameras, your computer had to be on ALL THE TIME, and there were no recording cababilities. The second system I tried was WiFi Baby, and it never worked right despite multiple contacts with their customer service, and hours spent trying to set it up and work out the issues.LOGITECH is PERFECT - it does everything I wanted - records, you can toggle between cameras remotely (we have 3, and I definately recommend getting the night vision ones), you can hear sound great, it captures a very wide space), your computer doesn't have to be running for it to work or record (only your wireless router), and set up was A PIECE OF CAKE! My only wish would be for the cameras to look more like Baby Monitors since I am using them to keep an eye on my little ones during the day, and it would be more discreet like that. HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS PRODUCT!! Thank you Logitech.

UPDATE 4/25/13 Decided not to renew the $80/yr service since I couldnt justify the cost of the service since I only had to use the features it a few times a year which basically meant I was paying approximately $4/use which is exhorbitantly expensive especially considering the high initial investment into the system. I went back to my old system of remoting into my main computer to administer the cameras and unfortunately there has been little evolution in the poorly designed desktop software.Besides being ugly and not scaling its text and menus properly therefore if you are using this on a htpc and have text scaled at larger than small the software is less functional because you cant access a lot of the items. The one "upgrade" they added was scheduled alerts, which is a nice addition but unfortunately on this windows 7 box as of this past feb update the scheduler component is terribly broken. Cant assign to cameras and doesnt list the schedules you have made, so in effect you cant even toggle alerts to individual cameras.Scheduled alerts is nice but should be a subset of more basic functionality that this system lacks which is separate motion zones for recording and separate for alerts. I would imagine the most common scenario is someone has a camera capturing the front of the house and would want the camera to record anything that occurs on camera for more than 10 seconds but doenst necessarily want to get an email alert. But if someone comes up the driveway aor approaches the house, they would want to mark that zone for an alert to their email as most likely that is activity they want to know about. For example... They want to record every car that comes down the street but be alerted only when one enters their driveway.Currently if you want to record all activity then you will get an alert for every recording therefore you literally end up with THOUSANDS of extra unecessary emails a year. You do however have the option to only send one alert during a specified period of time. I have it set to no more than once every 15 min so I am not bombarded with emails, but this is actually worse because basically I get an email about every 15 mins of a movement event and miss all the other events for the next 15 mins for a total of 4 emails in an hour instead of getting around 360 emails an hour to catch the one important moment that an intruder may be entering my home. Even though there is a good 15-45 second delay in the system, on a gigabit network with a 50Mbs internet connection, so even if it properly alerted by the time you got it you're probably already being raped or killed...a superset of scheduled alerts should even be snoozed alerts. i.e. say you are going to be out front playing with the kids for an hour. You pull out your smartphone click the front camera and click the snooze dropdown and click 1 hour then you wont get emails for one hour and once expired the alert turns back on so you dont have to remember you turned it off.After those basic features then add scheduled alerts..... I just have to believe that for the few years this system has already been out that Logitech engineers just don't use their own products.So basically I feel like I spent $1500 for a 4 camera system, two that cant even see in the dark, and that it is really only an after the fact documentary system definitely not an effective ALERT, system. Also that Logitech is FALSE advertising because to take advantage of their advertised features you have to get the $80/yr service. With their service you can go to any previous recording and view it fairly quickly. The desktop system if you want to view a time from yesterday. you have to go to the timeline click on the timeframe and then the system has to download all of the footage from now all the way back to then, so if you have 4 cameras it literally takes hours if not a day till it downloads the small clip. To me that is almost negligent. Why not only download immediately the clip selected, the only way you can do it is use the $80/yr service.CURRENT RECOMMENDATION: only consider this system if you are ok with the additional $80/yr cost and potentially tens of thousands of emails you must get to be able to have full recording of movement events and alerts when someone is entering your most important zones. Until they separate alerts and recording zones this system should not be marketed as an Alert system.Update 2/2/12 for the past few days my email alerts are taking about 3 hours to deliver. Logitech has made several updates to software firmware and iPhone apps to "increase performance" which is great but performance has not improved and seems to just keep getting worse.Update 5/9/11Still happy with the system overall. There have been several updates (although I haven't noticed any features added, but assume functionality locally is improved)but I have noticed over the last month or two that the alert lag time has gotten quite a bit longer. I used to get an alert as soon as a car was coming up the drive, where now the alert almost always comes many minutes after i.e. before if the UPS guy was walking up the drive you would get an alert and could catch him before he got back in the truck, now he'll be long gone. Alerts need to get faster as the system improves.... When I make CC purchases with my Paypal card I get an email alert before I have left the counter, literally within seconds of the swipe. This system should be faster especially if they are charging a premium price and especially if they charge a yearly subscription, maybe they could give premium priority to subscribers. i.e. If you are not a subscriber your alerts could be 1-5 minutes like it is now btu a subscribers traffic should be prioritized to guarantee a 30 sec or less response time..I'm running 2 cameras and might get another but am unsure of which one.. The low light sensitivity of the indoor cameras is not that great so basically they are good for 50% of 24 hours. The outdoor can definitely see awesome over 24 hours due to night vision but is bulky and often gets so hot you can barely handle it, whereas the indoor camera is compact, easy to mount and only gets slightly warm.So overall I'm still happy and plan to expand but I get a bit of a sinking feeling as the live performance and alerts begin to get more laggy since it is tied to the logitech's online service for functionality and lthough it seems like Logitech is supporting the system with firmware and software updates I feel like they have a history of abandoning their premium quality/priced products too early. Come on Logitech exceed our expectations!Update 1/8/11Continues to improve as logitech continues to update the firmware. Many of my issues still exist but I still am irritated by the lack of remote alert control. When checking out the upgrade I see it has the ability to hard toggle alerts globally, which made me consider buying it, but when you drill through to the purchase page the info along the way is scarce at best. The item lists remote commander as a product purchase but nowhere along the way does it tell you if it is a 1 time purchase or a subscription. a 1 time purchase for $80 to get the ability to remotely toggle annoying alerts is expensive, per year is exhorbitant, not listing it as a reoccuring subscription is absurd at best. For a premium product the text/email alert logic should be more robust in the included comander then i could iTeleport/remote access easily on the iPhone to change the settings. I have to drop my rating until the info is listed more clearly that the upgrade is a one time purchase or subscription.Update 10/27I must say historically I have loved Logitech products but felt they were a company who put out products close to cuting edge but would abandon them not long after release. So far after the first month the Alert team has put out several software and firmware updates. Now I have ben able to connect through the iphone to remotely view, quickly with no errors.I am close to pulling the trigger on several add on cameras but am still a litle hesitant. Things I want to see fixed or added:The PC interface does not scale. I use it on my HTPC and Windows 7 allows you to make text more readable for this type of setup. With the text larger it causes many of the option dialogs unable to be accessed because no scrollbar or window sizing is available, so that is a UI design flaw.You should be able to prioritize bandwidth (like google's free picasa does) where you can check a box to say conserve bandwidth, so when files are transferring they take a lower priority. Wehn the commander software first comes up it automatically transfers all the videos since last launched, or if active. This eats up your badwidth so all of your primary badwidth on the network like video streaming/recording or transfers become choppy or slow until the videos complete transfer, where you should be able to easily prioritize that.The iphone/remote interface needs to have an alert snooze button for the times you are workin in the yard or you know there is known activity that you dont mind being recorded but you dont want 1,000 emails flooding your inbox to needlessly alert you. Just click snooze and a preset interval 5min, 1 min, 30 etc etcFeature that would be nice to have:Alert zones and record zones. I should be able to easily set rules that i can select zones that I dont mind recording. Scenario: Record activity like my yard and my neighbors yard, or any motion at all in the neighborhood, but only be alerted to my zone that I mark as my driveway or better yet if my zone gets triggred then email me and my wife and if my neighbors is triggered email to their email....SO far I can definitely recommend this product for overall quality and ease of installation a hearty recoomendation remains to be seen but with Amazons awesome return policy it is definitely worth a try.OLD ReviewWas definitely easy to set up. Camera quality is decent but definitely not a good quality HD no way you'd be able to read a license plate. The Software looks to be the wilife software and not as robust as it should be for a company as big as Logitech who has had this type of product for years. The alerts and motion detection should have rules and more flexibility. When you log in from the remote apps you should be able to turn alerts on or off for each account and camera. Motion detection is sketchy and connecting to live view remotely often gives a C5-3 error. Support has said that the initial setups have strained the system causing the errors but this is a terrible excuse. a security system should always have 0 downtime. Murphy's law says that the events you need recorded will happen during a malfunction or server downtime and there are too many motion detection misses and inability to remote view that the percentage is high. You'll get 10 alerts in an hour where nothing passes through your detect zone and then your kids walk by or the UPS guy walks by and no recording because the motion detect didn't work. This should be fault proof. An innovative company like logitech really needs to have a product like this with truly impressive advancements.....

I haven't read any of the other reviews here - The following is my appraisal of the product after using it over a month now at a remote location, together with two 700e outdoor remotes. This is not a full product review; it's just a summary of some good and bad points that I have found.Overall I am quite pleased, but with some reservations.GOOD THINGS:* Reliable, so far. I installed it at a *very* remote location far from home; a place that actually has DSL but is too far for me to reach more than a couple times a year, and is not accessible to others. Thus I need total reliability. So far, so good. All 3 cameras worked right out of the box and are still working in a harsh environment. The location is not quite as far away as Mars is for NASA, but still very hard to reach thus total reliability is a must.* Video quality is quite good. I can easily make out all of the detail I require, and enjoy seeing deer/elk/gophers/birds etc running around on my remote property. I have used (and discarded) several cheaper cameras with low resolution (640 x 480 for example), and these are SO much better! Even viewing live over slow (256K) DSL upload I can clearly see what is going on.* Alerts are effective and do a good job capturing action. Judging by the results, the camera is actually recording all the time, but only saves video for a period that starts just *before* something triggers an alert (i.e. motion detected inside one or more of the alert boxes you defined) and then runs until some time after the alert action ends. This is a great feature because you don't miss the beginning of whatever triggered the alert. I had some cheaper units that didn't do this, and they were of little value. Also the alert triggering is quite reliable; again compared to some cheaper units that had many false triggers and many failures to trigger.* You can easily view your live cameras and recordings from a remote location over the internet with virtually no networking hassles at all on either end, which I think is almost a miracle. In other words, you don't need to open any ports on your router or modem, and it all just works. Wonderful!* You don't actually need a PC at the remote location at all because Logitech's software allows each camera to be accessed remotely over the internet (but I did anyway - see below).NOT SO GOOD:* As far as I can tell, when you are viewing a live picture you can take a snapshot any time you want, but you cannot manually start or stop taking a video. I really wanted to do this several times to capture some action that had not triggered an alert, but the only way to have the camera record video is to have an alert defined.* There is no webcam capability, thus you cannot share your live video or snapshots with anyone else. This really is a surveillance system thus apparently not intended to provide webcam capability, thus I can live without this but it would have been nice.* Although you can view your live cameras and recordings remotely as mentioned above, if you want to add the capability to *manage* your cameras (set or change alerts, turn sound on/off, turn night vision on/off, etc), you need to purchase an annual subscription to Logitech's Web Commander, which I reluctantly did. Alternatively, if you do have a PC at the remote location, you can install Logitech's Alert Commander on it to perform those functions, and then access it using a free product like TeamViewer. I chose to do both as insurance against failure, and am glad that I did. See next item.* Access to your cameras via the internet is done via Logitech's servers. This makes setup and management easy, but - they don't always seem to be available. As I write this, I can't access my remote cameras through Logitech, which is very disconcerting!!!! But I know they are working, because I can access my remote PC via TeamViewer and see the camera output on Logitech Alert Commander which is running on the remote PC. So why not just use Alert Commander all the time? In my case (over very slow DSL), the picture quality via TeamViewer is really low - far too low to be useful. But it does give me another way of knowing whether my cameras/phone line/DSL service/electric power are all working. I also have an answering machine at the remote location that I can call to verify phone & power.* Every so often while trying to access a remote camera view Logitech Web Commander, the camera will give an error saying that the camera is "offline", which is very alarming. Logitech's software then also asks you if you want to "remove the camera" which is just crazy. Fortunately, every offline incident has resolved itself. My guess is that if you try to view live video from a camera that is currently capturing video that was triggered by an alert, it reports itself as being offline because it can't handle too many things at once.Despite the foregoing comments, I still think this is a nice surveillance system and I am glad I got it. In fact, I am planning to add a few more cameras, including some at a 2nd location. And someday maybe Logitech will make a version that I can drive remotely, like NASA's Curiosity on Mars. :-)