Oco HD Smart Wi-Fi Video Monitoring Camera

I bought the Oco camera to capture those moments with my little one that we might otherwise miss. She's 10 months old and I wanted to catch first steps, first words things like that which you'd normally miss.I visited the website and read the info and saw that it was an iVideon powered camera (something I'd looked at before and knew a bit about), so it looked ideal. The website says the free plan allows "Basic recording and event storage in the cloud for the past 24 hours" and "Unlimited number of clips, clip length up to 1 hours." Which sounded ideal, but is infact misleading. It also has an IFTTT channel (actually two an Oco one and an iVideon one) which suggests it allows you to trigger recording and choose the length of that recording.The reality is that out of the box when it detects motion or sound for the first time (that's an important bit) it records to the cloud, but only for 10 seconds on the free plan. That 10 seconds starts a few seconds before the incident that triggered it, which is great to see the build up to the event... a good feature. However, the main problem is that it won't record again until there has been a period of inactivity and for the life of me I can't work out how long that has to be. Sometimes an event will trigger a recording of someone walking into shot and out again and then 5 mins later another one if there's been no activity, but on other occasions you get nothing for hours. It's very inconsistent.The IFTTT channel wouldn't let me trigger a recording. I'm not sure if it's because I hadn't paid for a cloud plan or if that just doesn't work, but given the inconsistency mentioned above I wasn't going to fork out for one to test it.Knowing that iVideon has a server that you can run on a computer and record constantly from and already having a PC in the house that is on all the time I wasn't too worried about the issues above. I thought I'd just install the server and record constantly to local storage, but the camera isn't compatible with the iVideon server. It has to send it's video through the cloud. I just assumed an iVideon powered camera would be compatible with all iVideon services, but apparently not.For me it's just not suitable for the way I wanted it to work and as a result I've returned my camera to Amazon.It's not all bad though. Actually the camera is pretty good. The 720 video is clear and looks good on a mobile screen. The unit itself is sturdy and feels well built. I like the mounting options, but having the "bottom" of the lens (where the logo is) on the corner means that you can't stand it up on its side without the image being tilted 45 degrees. iVideon is actually a really good service and remote viewing works well.Overall it's a good camera with some drawbacks that weren't made obvious on the website or Amazon description. If you want to use it as a security camera or just to login and watch remotely I think it's probably very good, but it wasn't right for me.I hope my findings help others make an informed choice before buying.

"Setting me up is simple and will only take a few minutes!" is the proud claim on the side of the Oco box. I'm sure it works that way for some people, so despite some poor reviews I thought I'd give it a go. The Oco connected to my wifi at the first attempt (put the settings into the Oco app on your phone, then scan a QR code into the camera) and gave me an immediate movement detection notification. Then it all went wrong.The Oco froze and wouldn't stream live pictures, first giving the never-ending twirling circle of doom while it attempted to get a connection to the server, then just simply wouldn't play. The 10 second clip it sends also refused to play, Soon the camera's LED started blinking red and the app told me it had gone offline. After waiting to see if rectified itself I turned to the online FAQ (the supplied user manual only has setup instructions but no troubleshooting guide) which suggesting resetting the camera and setting it up again. This time the camera refused to connect to my wifi, so I moved it just a couple of feet from the router, still it refused to connect. I tried using phone and iPad incase it was an app issue, reinstalled the app, tried both the branded Oco app and the identical Ivideon app and after an hour or so of messing about I got a connection. It lasted under a minute. Initial clip received to say it detected motion, then went offline again.Yet I persevered, but to no avail. Every time I managed to get the camera online it would drop the connection after a couple of minutes, sometimes it would reconnect, but it dropped again soon after. This game of 'catch me if you can' continued for around three hours before I gave up and returned the thing to Amazon.On the positive side, get the camera to work and the picture quality is very good. Whether it will actually live stream or not is another matter, the couple of attempts I managed, live streaming was jerky and more annoying than trying to watching Netflix on a slow internet connection. All this on a very reliable 20Mbps down, 10Mbps upload connection which showed no issues with any other devices, including simultaneous 4K Netflix streaming and HD streaming. So why can't the Oco manage a 720p stream?Night vision is another plus, I managed a couple of clips from it in the dark and it picked out the detail really well, making use of its IR beams, however point it towards glass in the dark and it'll notify you of itself, with the IR bouncing off the glass, that's all you're likely to see. Unfortunately the connection was never strong enough to allow me into the camera settings to turn off the IR.There's a long, flat power cord as well which was unexpected, along with a wall mount and screws. Unfortunately these accessories are only of any use if the product itself would work. Mine's in the post heading back to Amazon. Good luck to you if you decide to give this camera a go.

PROS : Good video, motion and sound sensing works well, has night vision, uploads to cloud Integrates well with IFTT so can be used to control other devices such as lights, oco seem to update the cloud service functionality quite often and each time it's an improvement, support people are quite helpfulCONS : Audio cuts out every 4 seconds for 1/2 second, free clips are too short (15 seconds) so paying for an expensive cloud subscription essential. Only works with Ivideon cloud service, annoying logo on corner of all recordings obscuring view, needs to be plugged into power (not batteries), setup must be done with smartphone, cloud website a bit slow and fiddly.

After ordering the underwhelming Foscam C2 (which was subsequently returned due to a problem with the firmware/software interface) I ordered the Oco CO-14EU as an alternative choice to the Nest cam (which I felt was too expensive).The Oco is far superior to the plastic-y Foscam aesthetically, but it also functions much more robustly. Settings, live streams and stored 'events' are easily accessed via the IOS app. Turning on/off the camera or notifications remotely is intuitive and a joy compared to the glitchy Foscam equivalent. Equally, despite the Oco being lower quality on paper than the C2 (720p vs 1080p) the difference is not perceivable and in reality the smoothness of the Oco footage (no motion blur) seems a huge improvement after experiencing that of the Foscam.The only slight issue with the camera (as others have mentioned) is that it seems to go into night vision too readily. However, the quality of night vision is such that I do not feel that the omission of a sensitivity setting warrants the removal of a whole star rating.