Which camera to monitor two rooms with Mac/iPhone?

[philyre]

We have a house with very thin interior walls, so we rarely need a baby monitor for sound reasons. We do, however, sometimes need to know if our 1.75-year-old is lying down in his crib or not, and what his 4-year-old big brother is up to also in the same shared bedroom (i.e. has he climbed into his brother's crib)... and we're expecting another baby this fall who will be going into a separate bedroom. As such, we're hoping for two cameras with night-vision that we can monitor via our Mac computers or iPhone. We really don't need or want a separate handheld monitor - we just want a camera that works well at night, audio a bonus.

We're generally tech savvy but not experienced with router type stuff, so we want to know if using an IP camera is really as horrific to set up as some reviews make it sound.

And, Costco is currently selling the Lorex Live Ping, two cameras for $180. They SOUND like a good idea, but does anyone have any feedback?

[georgiegirl]

I've hard good things about foscam, but they are supposed to be difficult to set up. I looked into IP cams, but I ended up getting a traditional video monitor because I wanted to be able to run it all night. I read lots of reviews on amazon.

[philyre]

We ended up going with the Lorex Live Ping, because skipping the difficult setup sounded like it would be worth paying a little bit more for (as compared to the foscam). The Lorex Live Ping ended up working out GREAT for our family - getting it set up was super-easy and quick (open box, scan code on camera with phone, the end), and it's worked brilliantly for what we wanted it to do. The only issue we had was that the lights on the camera are very bright and illuminated the room at night - we covered them with a piece of opaque tape, and that solved the issue perfectly - we can still see (dimly) the lights if we needed information about power/conncetion, but the room is dark for sleep... and the image quality is totally unaffected by the dark room. We had a lot of fun spying on the kids during a week of going to very long operas - it was fun to check on them during intermission. I'd recommend it for someone who doesn't like the complicated setup idea but who wants to avoid the traditional monitors.