Oco Wireless Surveillance Camera

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00O7Y96IM/

This camera, which I received at no charge in exchange for my unbiased review, is actually quite a disappointment. I can not recommend it to anyone who is considering the purchase of a wireless surveillance camera. 

For starters, the picture quality on this camera is not as good as on the only other camera I can compare it to, which is a Nest Cam. While the Nest Cam offers 1080p resolution, and this Oco camera only offers 720p resolution, I don't think that difference is what I am noticing. (I have watched plenty of 720p videos on YouTube that look a lot clearer than the video this camera produces.)

The sound quality, and what sounds the Oco camera can pick up is also not as good as what the Nest Cam is capable of.

If those were the only issues with this camera, though, I would have rated the Oco camera three, or possibly even four stars. The really big issue I have with the Oco is that unless you pay for a cloud storage service you can only either a) watch video live, using a phone app, or b) see 10-second clips when the camera detects motion. And even those 10-second motion-triggered clips are not recorded consistently. The camera seems to miss plenty of things that should have triggered a 10-second recording.

I wanted to be able to use this camera to record our dog when we are out, to see what she does, etc. In most cases a 10-second clip will be recorded when the dog starts to get up off the couch, but then the clip just stops. So all the camera does is let us see some of the time when the dog got up, and we can see from the time stamp when that was, but we can't see what the dog did unless she did it within 10 seconds of starting to get up.

I am not certain if longer clips can be recorded if one of the cloud services is purchased. The cloud services cost $9 per month or $99 per year if you want ten days of clips saved. I believe that even with the cloud services, however, there is not a way to simply record everything.

It seems to me that if you have the need for a surveillance camera, you probably want to have access to everything that happens once you have turned it on and set it to record. With the Nest Cam, (which also does require a cloud service if you want access to more than the last three hours), everything is recorded and there are ways to easily find the parts of the recording that include motion.

The Oco camera was easy to set up, and does seem to be reasonably well made. I understand that an Oco 2 model is coming out soon that will allow for SD storage of video. It sounds, though, like the Oco 2 is still only going to record clips. (I could easily be wrong about this.) I'd be happy to evaluate an Oco 2 camera as well, and compare it to the Oco camera I received, but I have a feeling that based on how critical this review was, an Oco 2 may not be in my future.