It’s understandably tough for a parent like you to mind your child while doing household chores or working from home. Baby monitors are a recommended way to keep a watchful eye on your baby when you can’ t be in the same room as him/her. While leaving the transmitter in your baby’s nursery, you can carry the parent unit with you throughout the house. Monitors have several features you to consider when purchasing, including talk-back, mute, voice activation or the ability to connect multiple cameras. A baby monitor is especially recommended for parents with children who need frequent supervision because of health issues.
Things to Consider When Buying a Video Baby Monitor
Audio related features
Like anything else worth purchasing, the question of cost vs. quality will arise when shopping for a good baby monitor to suit your and your child’s needs. However, best baby monitors (not necessarily the most expensive ones) will leave you and your child with a peace of mind and better sleep. Therefore, find the monitor that won’t give you as much problems like sound static or interference from other gadgets. LED lights that indicate the volume of sound in the nursery are also very useful and, fortunately for parents, most baby monitors have them.
When choosing good audio, an important aspect to consider is sound activation. With this feature, any noise the baby makes will turn on the monitor’s sound on your end, which will signal you to their needs. Not every baby monitor has voice activation feature, many of them transmit both video and audio continously.
Some monitors have a feature that would let you drown out background noise, so all you can hear is your child. This technology isn’t perfect right know, and some parents complain about this feature, because it sometimes picks up child’s voice as background noise and doesn’t transmit it. Quite a few of the popular models would also have the digitally enhanced cordless telecommunications (DECT) feature, which wouldn’t pick up as much static interference due to very little bandwidth clutter.
There’s one more very important feature when it comes to audio-related things. In addition to watching the child, the parent can speak with the child using the talk-back feature, of course it the monitor itself has this feature..For many parents this is a game changer, because as any parent knows, nothing soothes a child more than their parent’s voice.
Video related features
There are a couple of things to remember when it comes to video features. First off, you need to make sure the image is sharp, so you can see your child well. Night vision (or infrared) is a useful feature most devices possess – it allows you to watch your child without an additional lights in the room. Great thing for watching the child by night.
Video monitors cameras can pan, tilt and zoom, but some may even have sensory movement technology. This is a great (and probably expensive) feature if you have a child that crawls or walk; whenever the child moves around, the lens will follow the child. In most cases pan, zoom and tilt are more than enough, especially if a monitor lets you save a few various camera settings, so you can alternate them without physically reconfiguring the camera.
Battery life
Battery life is huge when it comes to baby monitors with portable parent units. As you probably know, the battery life of a video monitor is quite shorter than an audio monitor’s one. Some monitors have the option of shutting off video on parent unit and leaving the audio on so you can listen to the baby while your eyes are on another task. Other monitors have the ‘mute’ feature, which disables the audio and video until there are some noises in the nursery.
Can you connect more cameras
If you plan to have more kids, you already have two or more children or you would like to monitor them in more than one room, it’s a good idea to buy a baby monitor that supports connecting additional cameras. It’s a definitely better way to go than buying mutiple single-camera units. If you’re interested in buying a multi room monitor (than allows multiple cameras), check out this article about multi room baby monitors.
Best Video Baby Monitors
There are quite a few monitors on the market, but there are only a couple of them which are really worth the money. When searching for the right one, start with the monitors mentioned below.
Infant Optics DXR-5
Infant Optics DXR-5 is an inexpensive video baby monitor with talk-back feature. If you’re on a budget (and even if you’re not), it’s definitely worth checking out. It has quite a few great features – it goes silent after a certain period of time without any noises and activates right after first noise. As many video monitors, it offers night vision. It allows you to adjust the volume of sound and microphone sensitivity in the nursery unit. One more thing is definitely worth noting – it’s an expandable baby monitor – you can connect to up 3 additional cameras (so there are 4 cameras total).
