"ZOSI CG1 Rechargeable Battery Powered WiFi Camera" review THE GOOD - very pleasantly surprised with the generous and helpful voice feedback from the camera, although it was very pesty until I got it far enough to be able to format the SD card. - I like the camera shell design. I worry it may not be as waterproof as necessary (like can it be exposed to a severe thunderstorm, as we get frequently around here) Time will tell. A previous camera purchase was listed as "weatherproof" and it turned out to rust in the rain, white out if exposed to high temps, and black out when it got too cold. (they refused to explain how this wasn't considered "weather") So I hope this one does better. The weather seal fits loosely and there are openings (like on the bottom and the side clips) that may be a problem. - Audio is 32kbps stereo. - QR code in the booklet you just open the built-in (iOS) camera app and aim at the code, it links to download the app, very slick process! When I went to download it I see just 2/5 stars and think "how can the app be so poorly rated? this is looking so good?" (more on that below) - similar to getting the app, you select your SSID and enter the password and it displays a QR code on your phone. You just aim the camera at your phone and it scans the code and the camera attaches to your wifi. THAT is slick. The camera uses verbal feedback during this process, though it keeps badgering me to format the SD card, and I can't do that until after I complete the setup process. They ought to set a flag to "don't pester the user to format the card until they reach the main menu". Owell, minor annoyance, not something I'm going to have to suffer through more than once. THE BAD - several "supported" features are only available with paid subscription, and are not clearly marked in the listing as to what's "supported" (immediately available) and what's "supported" (you have to pay for) One of the most prominent features (identifying people, pets, and vehicles) is a paid feature. Zoned motion detection is also a paid feature, which pretty much every security DVR system includes natively. So you'd better not aim it where a street is in view, or you're going to have hundreds (no, make that THOUSANDS, see below) of unnecessary videos to delete every day. And you DO NOT want to have to do that from the phone app. - There's no excuse for some of the "pro features" to require a paid subscription. Motion detection features? What does that have to do with renting cloud storage? I can totally see and expect cloud storage and viewing over the internet to be a paid service, but not features that don't require any cloud access. Telling me the camera "supports" zoned motion detection and then only telling me I have to pay by the month for it after I've bought it, is like the dealer telling me the truck has 4wd and then finding out after I buy it that I have to pay for 4wd on a monthly basis. That's just bait-and-switch. - I should have read the reviews on the app before buying this camera. (not sure I would have been able to find it?) It's only got two stars, and pretty much every review is lambasting this app for being badly written, crashing, etc. Nobody seems to like it. If I had seen those reviews before I checked out, it would have been instantly removed from my cart and I would be reviewing something else right now. - app frequently hangs or produces errors when trying to change options in settings (initial setup required three app reboots, one of which was a stall waiting for a firmware update to finish, yikes!) I see one reviewer that said he had it set up in only a couple of minute. Impossible. It took me that long just to start the firmware update on the camera. (I had to force quit and relaunch the app when it stalled at 83%, though the camera said it was done, so I spent 4-5 minutes waiting at 83% before finally deciding to risk force quitting the app *during a firmware update*) I kept finding options I could not change, like trying to set record time from 10 to 20 seconds - it would just spin and then tell me my wifi signal was poor, despite being full bars. I finally figured out that when it started spinning instead of doing things, you just had to force quit and relaunch it again. It becomes a very regular thing when trying to use the app. Use it a few minutes, goes unresponsive, force quit and relaunch, repeat. - app absolutely devours battery life on phone. my iphone heated up like it was rapid charging and blew through 30% of its battery in less than 20 minutes of setting things up and testing. (it's a new battery too) I could be paranoid and wonder if it's mining bitcoin or something, but it's probably just incompetent software programming. My charger appears to be able to keep up with it, my battery was still showing 100% after watching an hour of video feed while plugged in. (the phone was very warm though) - they don't show your recording options on the listing. I was EXTREMELY disappointed to find I can record videos of 10, 15, or 20 seconds only. My cheap trail camera can do 60 second recordings! Why does this camera support 128gb SD cards when it can't manage to record a single continuous video bigger than about 2mb? (that's 64,000 video files! a bit over 14 days continuous) A five minute long event will span 15 video files. And there's a 3-4 second gap between videos too, so you might lose important things like catching someone's face as they turn around, or snatch a product and slip it into their pocket. Trying to watch an event by starting a new playback every 20 seconds is like trying to eat peanuts one at a time - it lokos doable, but gets really annoying really fast. And it won't just start playing the next one when one finishes, you have to start a new playback every 20 seconds. Scroll, tap, tap, wait, watch 20 seconds, repeat. - my trail cam makes (max) 60 second videos about 100mb. This camera makes (max) 20 second videos about 2mb. Trail cam video streams 16kbps, vs this camera is less than 1kbps. The literature says "high quality video", but on what planet is 1kbps "high quality video"? The stills look good, but the frame rate is just terrible. Video files record at between 13 and 14 frames per second, but only that fast when there's not much motion. If you're trying to view live video on the phone, you'll get 2-3 frames per second. Yeah, it really is THAT bad. The listing shows still frames but no video, and now I know why. I wave my hand back and forth, wait ~3 seconds for my hand to start moving on the phone, and see my hand jump and jerk, almost slow enough to count the frames. It's like trying to video conference with someone that's on a slow internet connection, where their movement is continuously choppy. I'm using a new Samsung Evo MicroSDXC class U3, so you can't blame the card with its 90MB/sec write speeds. - Engrish on the packaging, engrish in the app. Lots of it, especially in the error messages. (and a few error messages are just flat out in chinese... I'm serious, chinese characters) Most of the time it's livable, but it's pretty unprofessional. Google Translate may be free, but c'mon, a quick look-over by a native english speaker is a no-brainer. - Navigating the app is difficult. There are several places where you change screens and there's no clear way to go back where you just were. Sometimes it's easier to just quit and relaunch the app rather than try to figure out how to go back. You can't just tap things, you have to tap and HOLD for about a second. This took me a little while to figure out, as I'd tap tap tap on a button to try to get it to work while it ignored me until I held my finger down on it. - trying to find a video to play back via the app is a complete waste of time, given you're likely to have anywhere from hundreds to thousands of videos to look through, at 20 seconds apiece. You have to know the date and exact time to find the clip you need, or you're going to be spending a lot of time browsing files one at a time, instead of being able to just tap FF repeatedly to find what you need. That doesn't appear to matter though because I have been unable to convince the camera to play back videos remotely. Every time I try to connect to any clip, it spins for awhile and fails to connect, telling me the camera is "offline" despite being able to connect and play live video. So you have to just pull the SD card out of the camera and try to find what you need on the computer. (a security camera that you have to turn off to view the video on.... just... wow....) It does accurately timestamp on the videos though, which is useful. Makes it really obvious the 3-4 second gap between each clip too, seeing as one clip may end at :13 and the next starts at :17. There's just NO excuse for this. The max clip size I've seen is 2.1bmb, and it's writing that to a class U-3 card. It has NO excuse for that inter-clip delay. And saving video in separate 20 second clips with 3 second gaps is laughable from a security footage standpoint. - "color night vision" is pretty deceptive. At night it has either IR mode or LIGHT mode. (it turns on a bright white light) That's not my idea of discrete nighttime recording! When I read "color night vision" I expect good low light performance, like "starlight", where it can get ok color all the way into dusk. That was one of the primary reasons I picked this camera, and it doesn't DO it. If someone's stalking around on your property at night and a bright light turns on from a camera that you just have to *reach up and grab* to pop it off its magnetic mount, what are the chances that camera's going to be gone in the morning, along with what was in your garage? I love how their promo picture shows the burglar with the crowbar, about to smash that camera into next Tuesday when he sees that blinding light turn on. And if you didn't pay for cloud storage, there's ZERO chance that camera's going to be there for you to look at the SD card when you get home. But turning off the "flashlight" for color night vision causes it to switch to infrared mode. It's black-and-white, but the resolution is still good and the two IR LEDs hidden in the faceplate do a good job of illuminating, I get about 30 feet of good lighting. The two IR lights (along with the two blue lights, one for power and one for motion detected) still make this camera easy to spot at night though. Try to at least mount it up out of arm's reach, preferably using the tripod screw mount on the back instead of the magnetic mount. (the mag is handy for sure, but when a thief or vandal can just reach up and pick the camera off the base like an apple from a tree, that's not good! Fine for indoor personal use but absolutely not for outdoor / security use) - There is no app available for the computer. So to view your live feed from your security camera, you have to get out your phone? Why isn't there a computer app? I'd be satisfied with it only being able to play the live video feed and do nothing else, but you don't even get that. This would be extremely useful on your computer, to run the live video feed in a window on the computer while you work (especially at night), for any number of reasons like seeing who's at the dock door when the bell rings. (and talking with them, assuming the two-way voice works, haven't tested that yet) - if you try to leave your phone on the desk streaming live video to keep an eye on, expect to get disconnected at random intervals - might can stay connected for 30 minutes or 30 seconds. Again, virtually unusable for continuous monitoring. I can see why one reviewer said he was always disconnected by morning - I can't stay conneted for more than about half an hour straight. I believe what's happening is it disconnects when it detects motion. It's a security camera, that quits working when something happens. *shrug* - There doesn't appear to be a way to schedule the camera. I can't for example tell it to record motion between 8pm and 6am. That would be SUPER useful for use as a security camera. After you're done fixing the laundry list of critial problems and obvious oversights, see if you can find time to add this feature. - after running it a few days, I've discovered more. Every time the recording strts, there's a mechanical sound that's reocrded in the first two seconds. It's the same sound every time, though isn't loud enough to be a serious issue - it's just unexpected. Video frame rate seems better in IR mode at night, with a lot less glitching than during the day, no idea why. Sound recording is pretty good, and is surprisingly sensitive. I have motion sense set to high but it still struggles to trigger on smaller movements. If someone walks up to a door to pick a lock, you'll get 20 sec of them going to the door and then proably the next clip will be several minutes later when they are opening the door after having picked the lock. This was another (unexpected) consequence of the 20 second record limit. I finally managed to play a few video clips remotely, but then was unable to play any more, (phone refused to connect for playback, while claiming it was connected for settings and srtatus) and had to wait until morning to retrieve the SD card for playback. - over the course of one evening there were over 100 twenty-second long video clips on the card. File names and creation dates matched and made finding a clip easy IF you knew when it was taken. Otherwise, just trying to browse over the footage to see if there was anything of interest was time-consuming and tedious. The clips were named using UTC date/time, which for me is 7 hrs off, so I was ignoring that and just going by file creation date/time stamp. I wish I had an easy way to just merge all 106 clips into a single file for viewing. Battery charge went from 95% to 75% over the course of about 12 hours, thats a 20% drop in 1/2 a day. Just based on that, this camera probably will run for less than a week before needing a recharge. (not sure how long that will take the camera out of action for? at least an hour, probably two?) The literature says this camera can run for *months*. I wonder if they mean "if it has nothing to record"? The angle on the lens is pretty wide so it should work well where the camera can't be mounted very far back from what needs recording. It should go well even if you need to aim down at a door in a narrow hallway. - While viewing live video, you can tap to reove overlays, double-tap to zoom in or out (nice!) and while zoomed you can drag the zoomed region. From here you can also toggle audio and activate the mic, as well as change btween SD and HD. Aaaaand tap "Reconnect" every once in awhhile as it keeps losing connection. You won't want to leave the adio on though, as it auto adjusts the sensitivty and will blast a bird chirp froma nearby tree. Despite the sensitivity, it still tries to cut in and out the sound, so it just continuously crackles on and off, making it incredibly annoying to keep on. There are also icons to take a snapshot (nice) and also to start a recording. I'm not sure the method of the madness on the recording, a timer starts and sometimes stops 2 seconds later, or goes for 15 seconds, or not at all. The video auto rotates when the phone is rotated, and displays a nice widescreen view, although when you tap to view Settings, it auto rotates back to standard. After many tries I managed to get a recording going that didn't just auto cancel, and to my surprise it kept going past 20 seconds. Honestly I wouldn't mind if it just recorded continuoiusly (that' be a nice option! to be able to turn it on, even remotely, and leave it recording, I have a 128gb sd card in it) But alas 45 seconds after starting the record, it disconnected again, and it appears the disconnect stopped the recording too. There's so much potential here, but it just can't finish anything it starts. I wonder if they're just chasing after too many features at once, not having had the time to finish the most recently added feature when a new one gets put on the table? (leaving them with a plethroa of unfinished features instead of a smaller set of well-polished features) - I'm using an older 802-11-G wireless here, I wonder if that is related to the constant disconnects I'm getting? Nothing else here has a problem using the wifi though. Vicoo says "wifi: good" in settings. I notice there's a battery icon in the upper right (on the live feed), no percentage but the relative charge is nice to see. To the left, what looks like a streaming bitrate indicator, it's topping out around "146k" on HD I switched to SD and compression artifacting gets absolutely horrible for some reason but the rate is in the 40-50 range now. I really would have expected HD to artifact more than SD, not less, so that's weird. Will leave it on HD I guess. The 2mb 20-sec clips I mentiopned earlier were all recorded SD. Will have to take note of the file size increase next time I pull the SD card. Also, there's a space used / available counter you can access from the app which is a REALLY good idea, though it's buried in the advanced video settings - it would be nice to have an icon on the live feed for that like they have for the battery. All of these overlays are in fine white lines with no shadow or protected border, so I didn't even notice most of them while viewing the IR night feed, it's only now that it's daytime that I can see the icons on the screen. I suppose that's not a problem, now that I know they're there. The bitrate doesn't drop when I zoom in, (which magnifies the video glitching) so the manification must be getting done on my phone. Another missed opportunity - how about you do that on the camera instead so I can get a clearer zoomed image on my phone? - after only a few days its battery reported down below 15%. At this point it had accumulated many hundreds of video clips, but was using less than 2gb of the 128gb SD card I had purchased for it. I've got no idea why they advertise a 128gb max on a camera that has absolutely no chance of getting anywhere near that capacity. (this is yet another reason I was expecting longer video clips, and believed them when they said it could run for "months" on a single charge) Again reviewing the video, IR night clips had good resolution and sound, but daytime clips all had nonstop horrible video glitching and low resolution, only managing 750kbps on average on a 1080p video stream is almost criminal. I had to watch several video clips to figure out the brown blocky bits were actually a chipmonk that had wandered by. Despite being very close to the camera, and even when it stopped for a time, it was just this mass of brown video glitches most of the time. - After plugging it in to charge, I realize I could not connect to it wirelessly to view its batttery state while charging. There's no charge indicator on the camera itself, other than a "charging" indicator, so I placed it on a USB power monitor so I could keep an eye on how much power it was drawing while charging. After having started out drawing around 250-300mA, after about three hours I checked and it had dropped to 20-30mA, which looked like a "finishing the last 10%" sort of top-off draw. Not believing it could be done yet. I unplugged it to turn it on to check charge, it was only at 56%, so I plugged it back in again, and when I checked it an hour later it was back up to 250mA or so. I had to leave it charging overnight, I'm not sure how long it took but it was at least six hours. By morning the charge indicator had not changed color, but the monitor indicated it wasn't drawing power anymore. I guess you just have to put it on charge and wait some preset amount of time since there's NO way for the average person to tell when it's done charging. That's sloppy, you've got lots of LEDs on the front, it's trivial to flash one while charging and go solid when done, that's what almost all of my rechargeable electronics do. Another case of good hardware let down by bad software. To be clear, most rechargeables I have here, (including several larger USB power banks) usually spend 80% of their time "bulk charging", and the first 10% and last 10% of the time they're starting up or topping off at a much lower level. I've never seen anything that drops its charge rate down so low in the middle of the charge cycle, and have no idea what's going on there. The manufacturer's recommended charge curve for a LIPO battery is a well-established thing that everyone should be following, to get the longest lifetime out of the battery. Regardless, I got less than a week of runtime before requiring a recharge overnight. I'm not sure this qualifies as a "security camera" if it requires that high a percentage of downtime for charging. Claiming this camera can go over a month between charges is blatantly false advertising. 6 days in place and there are over 800 (20-second long) video clips, 1bout 1.6 GB of files. (less than 2% of this 128 GB card's capacity) factory reset instructions do not work. I was able to delete the videos from my online library but cannot figure out a way to remove the saved SSID. SUMMARY It looks good on paper. The design is clean and the voice feedback really gives a positive impression, but it's all down-hill from there. Features you're expecting (either because every competing product in the market has it, or because the listing SAYS it has) you just don't get, unless you're willing to pay a monthly subscription, for an already expensive camera. The videos you do end up getting are disappointing due to their small duration and low bitrate, and the app looks good but fails on many levels. It's a shame too, becaue the hardware and physical design are very solid. The firmware / software / implementation just ruins it. return notes: many features not described as requiring a paid subscription. video bitrate is HORRIBLE. Only captures 20 second clips. battery life is under 2 weeks. ios software very buggy, won't stay connected