Motion detection home monitoring camera to send videos to my e-mail while on holiday

Question

I'm looking for indoor camera (a room) with motion detection feature which can send me reliable videos to my e-mail once movement has been detected.

I'm aware there are plenty out there, but after I've already tested few of them, none of them actually worked as expected (e.g. Linksys and few other), so I believe this is actually hard to find.

I had one WiFi camera which was sending 5s videos with motion via wireless router to my e-mail and FTP account, but the problem was that in all recored videos I could see only the light/contrast changes (especially in the mornings also when getting dark in evenings and sometimes some lights reflecting on the wall from the windows) ending up with hundreds useless video files. I understand there are some options to specify the spot area or sensitivity and I tried to play around with them, but it didn't work, so I believe it just need a better hardware to work properly.

The camera should have:

• wireless option,
• web interface,
• ability to send e-mails or upload files into FTP,
• reliable IR motion detection (should ignore contrast changes),
• record videos with detected motion of at least 5 seconds in length,
• Infrared night vision would be an advantage
• smart phone app integration would be an advantage

Answer 1

D-Link's wi-fi cameras provide the sort of thing you're looking for.

There are a number of models, and which one you need depends entirely on your use-case so I won't recommend one, but the page I linked above gives an overview of all the types.

• They're wifi cameras, which is definitely wireless
• There's an interface (not sure if web or not, but probably given their wifi nature)
• Sends emails for movement alerts, including the relevant files
• Good motion detection (contrast changes don't register - it's actually looking for movement, not light levels)
• Records videos of motion (not sure of length, but probably at least 5 seconds). You can also connect a central hard drive to stream or record footage of longer periods - say a day, which you could review the footage of when you get home.
• All models have night vision, though the range varies from 15ft-26ft between models
• Has an Android and iPhone app

In short, sounds perfect for what you want.