Summer Infant Baby Touch Digital Video Monitor

The Summer Baby Touch truly is an innovation when it comes to digital baby monitors. If you want to keep an eye on your little one, day or night, then this is the camera to have! My 4½ month old has just recently started to turn onto his tummy unaided, but since he can't get back onto his back on his own he starts crying and gets stressed. With the monitor I can see him during the night (and day!) and make sure that I'm there to help him turn back over, if needs be.

I had the monitor up and working within 5 minutes of taking it out of the packaging, so no problems at all with the setup! Having acquired the product from the UK (I live in Spain) I was pleasantly surprised to see that the plugs were of the European connection, which was great since I didn't then have to go out and buy 2 UK to Spain adapters. The product also comes with 2 adapters for use in the UK and an A/V cable for viewing the video through your television.

The camera can either be placed on a unit/shelf or screw mounted to the wall and it also has a battery pack for portable use. One of my favourite features is that fact that you can remotely move where the camera is facing, by use of the parent monitor's fab touch screen. It's this feature that I feel gives the product longevity of use, where other video monitors would falter. As your child grows you can still keep an eye on them as they progress into a bigger bed and also when they are playing in their room, since you can move the camera to wherever they might be, just by tapping the up, down, left or right arrows on the control monitor.

The screen is a good size and the picture is extremely clear during the day, showing up in colour and during the night, when it is completely dark, the picture is still surprisingly clear, due to the built in infra-red function. Other features on the parent monitor include a zoom in/out button, room temperature display, brightness adjustment, volume for audio (which can be "muted" by turning it all the way down), sound lights, a talk back button and a video on/off button. This last feature is especially handy during the night. The glow from the camera is quite strong (even on the lowest brightness setting) and the on/off button allows you to turn the picture off if you like to sleep in a really dark room, whilst the audio part of the monitor continues to work. If you wake in the night and want to check your little one all you do is tap the video on/off button and there they are! This is whilst the monitor is on the AC adapter base, which incidentally charges the unit as well.

When you are using the monitor in portable mode, the picture stays on the screen for approximately 3 minutes, but it then turns itself off and goes into sleep mode, saving battery power. Obviously, if you keep switching the picture on a lot this will run the battery down quicker! On a side note, the second time I used the monitor we had a power cut in the middle of the night. In portable mode, the monitor came in quite handy as a "torch" to light the room for me whilst I dealt with the baby! :-)

If you've got or have used a touch screen phone then you'll have no problems with the monitor interface and even those who haven't used a touch screen phone will find the interface extremely user friendly. No interference with other devices in the house, which as a "techy" family, we have quite a few! You also have the option to add another 3 cameras to the unit, allowing you to place cameras in different rooms, which you can them view all from the parent monitor, depending on which room your child is in.

All in all, it's a great product and worth the money. I'd recommend it to anyone who's in the market for a baby video monitor.

First off, I have to say that this video monitor is fantastic. Period. Great picture quality, quiet operation for remote camera control, and Summer Infant customer services are also very good - they care about problems that their customers experience, and work hard to solve them. Having done lots of research, I think this is the best video monitor you can buy.

I wish I could give it five stars though, but to be honest, they need to lose two because of various issues: the battery life for video, problems with wi-fi interference, and a high temperature readout. The wireless issue clearly does not affect everybody, but be careful in particular if you are an O2 broadband user, before ordering this (see below for details). We have the O2 Wireless Box IV.

To save power, the device switches video off automatically after a couple of minutes when you are not on the mains stand. Even then, it will not go a whole night without being on the charging stand, if you try to view the video image more than a handful of times. Battery life is excellent if using as an audio only video monitor though, and you do get a clear readout from green, orange and red LED's to show how noisy the baby is being, if you have the speaker switched off.

I probably would have gone for four stars were it not for the fact that the temperature readout also runs 2 or 3 degrees centigrade high, compared to two dedicated thermometers I have tested against, though this may be because we have the camera wall-mounted. I think the sensor picks up warmth from the camera, leading to the high reading.

We also initially had a couple of other problems out of the box - the battery pack that you can attach to the bottom of the camera, for non-mains use, would not attach properly, and kept switching the camera off. The power supply for the monitor charging stand buzzed noisily. And as I said, the monitor interfered with our wi-fi signal at home, such that Apple TV would not work, and wireless printing would not work when the monitor was switched on. Data transfer rates were also much slower in general when the monitor was switched on.

I told Summer Infant about these problems, and in a heartbeat, they sent a replacement monitor. This took care of the first and second problems, which were clearly just a one-off manufacturing fault. But the wireless problem persisted.

They tried to help, but in the end gave up, instructing me to get a new wireless router, which I didn't intend to do, unless it could be proven that the 50 pounds investment would fix the problem. Besides, the Summer Infant Baby Touch is supposed to avoid wireless interference.

I am still considering switching my wi-fi provider to BT, which offers a router that avoids all wireless interference automatically, though in the end, I have discovered that a workaround is to try and play something via Apple TV, then switch the camera for the Baby Touch off, then back on again. This manually activates the Baby Touch's automatic wi-fi avoidance, and lets us carry on as normal. Apple TV starts playing, and the interference goes away.

I think Summer Infant need to look at a firmware update to make the wireless avoidance more robust, and have suggested this to their product development team. It will be interesting to see how they respond.

We have used a IP-network Pan&Tilt camera for two years now to keep an eye on our little one.
Although many people are shaking their heads when they hear we watch our kid on camera, we wouldn't have missed it for the world. It's perfect to check on the little one (is she awake or not?) without having to go into her room and wake her up that way. And it's great fun to see how she is playing with things on her own, without us disturbing her play.

So with a new baby on the way I decided to buy a new camera for that one too. Looking around and reading reviews I decided for the Summer Baby Touch.

Why?

A) SILENCE PLEASE!
First of all because reviewers mentioned the quiet pan-tilt operation. Our IP-CAM is so noisy that it is not wise to move it when our daughter is sleeping, which is bit of a problem when the camera is not pointed to her bed before she falls asleep. When she was between about 12 an 18 months old she would even be scared by the noise and start to cry.

The Baby Touch on the other hand is really quiet when turning around, your kid has to be a very light sleeper to wake up from this. Really well done by Summer!

B) RANGE PLEASE
We have a very difficult house for wireless connections, that's why for the first cam we decided for a wired IP-camera. But the downside for that is that you can only view the image on a computer and not on a small portable device. So after reading positive reviews about the range of the Baby Touch I decided to take the gamble and hope that it would be sufficient to penetrate our thick walls and bridge the large distance in our strange building. And in fact it does do the job. Careful positioning of the camera was necessary but I'm more than happy with the result. Again well done Summer!

Having fullfilled my two most urgent demands this could be the conclusion of this review and it's more than enough to call the product 'recommended' and 'value for money', but to be complete some additional details:

Image quality
... in bright light is very nice .... but who has bright light in a kid's bedroom? The quality in relatively dim light is just 'acceptable' as is the nightview, our IP-CAM gives definitely a better image on low light and nightview (but it's bigger and more expensive and of course has no monitor, so no fair comparison). But all in all it's not a big issue, the image quality is good enough for it's purpose and probably all other baby monitors are same or worse.

General design
... is very good. Both camera and monitor are well designed and practical. Operation and functionality leave nothing to desire. The 'charge-stand' for the monitor is practical to charge it without having to plug in and out a cable (although that's also possible).

The battery stand for the camera is in my humble opinion a briljant bonus although some other reviewers saw no use for it. Just take the camera from it's normal position (bedroom), mount it on the battery holder and you can use it in the garden where there's no mains power, use it in the bathroom without risk of shock or in all places where people would normally trip over the cable, and so on. I'm very happy that they decided to add this usefull item AND that you can actually operate it on rechargable AA batteries (they even recommend that), too many devices will only work properly on alkaline and not on the lower voltage rechargeble batteries, but Summer again did it's homework.
On a fresh set of GP ReCyko 2050 mA the battery stand gives me about 7 hours of operation (in daytime and with only few camera movement, when the IR-LED has to kick in when you use is in the dark it will probably be shorter).

The touch screen operation is just perfect. I thought it to be more of a gimmick than functional technology before purchase, but it really beats a bunch of mechanical switches and is really practical.

Not sure about the design of the belt clip, it seems to me that it's easy to lose the device, because the clip can flip open to fulfill it's second function as a stand (when not used in the charge-holder). An other (very) small critical note: the lack of rubber feet on the stand and camera.

The temperature display seems about right on average, but I sometimes watched it fluctuate from 19 to 21 degrees and back in a room with no draft so obviously it's not that accurate. But should we care about that ... no, the purpose of it is to have some idea of the room temperature to prevent freezing or boiling the kid. A deviation of 2 degrees Celsius is not a big deal. Have you ever checked the temperature difference near the floor and near the ceiling? Could well be about 4 degrees or more. So in fact there is no such thing as one accurate room temperature measurement. The temperature indication of the Baby Touch is accurate enough for it's purpose.

As for the WIFI problems some people experienced .. so far I didn't notice any problems and the Baby Touch signal passes 2 WIFI routers on different channels on it's route from A to B. But I didn't do any thorough testing of loss of bandwidth, just tested whether I could still use the Internet on my laptop. No problem there.

All in all I was not sure to give a 4 or 5 star rating for this product. Fact is that the low-light image quality could be better. But on the other hand there are so many other things to be really pleased about that it seems only fair to give Summer credit for their good effort. Selection of a camera module for this kind of small and relatively cheap devices (compared to 'real' cameras) is obviously all about compromises and finding a balance in regards of size, power consumption and price. I suppose they made a fairly well choice for the Baby Touch. So let's forget about our wishes for spotless images in low light conditions .... and reward 5 stars !!

(Don't mind my English, I'm just a simple Dutchman)