SVAT GX5201 Wireless Portable Video Monitor with 2.5-Inch LCD & Night Vision Security Camera (Color)

We bought this about 2 weeks ago and wish we had bought it a long time ago. The camera has a very good picture for no light/low light settings (although you may need to adjust your monitor's brightness). The daytime/color picture is okay, but not great -- but since we only use the night settings, it doesn't make any difference to us.

We have the camera mounted on the wall, up by the ceiling, above our daughter's crib - which we found to give us the closest, most complete picture we could get. The mounting hardware was easy to use - the only dilemma was where to plug it in...

One design improvement that would be helpful is the placement of the AC adapter plug into the battery compartment. An upgrade to a rechargeable lithium ion battery would be great (like our other sound monitor).

As for interference, using the microwave does screw it up temporarily. The other issue is our wireless network which can cause some interference if the monitor is too close to the wireless router or our computer. Other than that, not too bad.

For the money, this is far and away better than any other product out there. I will highly recommend it to all of our friends with infants and small kids.

This unit works great. I have a number of wireless products in my home and the only time I get interferance is right next to my computers. The resolution is more then adequate to see what is going on. I also get great range, end-to-end in a spralling ranch style home with lots of walls in between the camera and base. The night vision does not work well in a blacked out room, but with as little as a night light going it provides great resolution. Love the function to auto switch between the 3 cameras you can have linked to the base unit.

This unit will pick up interference from any number of household electrical items. In my case, this was seen by a rolling line on the screen - maybe once a second or so. Annoying when using the night vision mode, and also when you want to use the sound from the camera too - with each roll of the line, you get a clicking sound.

I was able to, largely, get rid of this interference by slapping on a ferrite core noise suppressor to both the camera power line and the monitor power line. FERRITE CORE 1/4" CORD NOISE SUPPRESSOR well worth the couple of dollars.... Though why on earth the manufacturer didn't work this little gem out and do it already is beyond me.

I have a set of wireless speakers in the housePodz Wireless Rechargeable Speakers, I use a 2.4GHz wireless router (same frequency as this camera) and was able to prevent interference by using ONLY channels 1 and 2. Using channel 3 blocked my router completely. Cordless telephones were unaffected.

The power adapter input for the monitor IS inside the battery compartment which is a royal pain if you plan on going truly wireless with rechargeable batteries. You have to pull out the batteries and leave the battery compartment cover off to use.

The metal kickstand is alright, it works, it doesn't fold over and droop as I expected.

The 'scan' function works surprisingly well - this allows you to set the monitor to come on whenever sound is detected (baby crying, or door opening etc). You can even set the level at which the thing activates, which is actually quite sensitive.

In 'auto' mode the monitor will track between however many cameras are connected - flicking between views every 10 - 20 seconds or so, which again is rather handy. I will be putting one camera at each end of our basement so I can see what the kids are up to.

The camera mount will move if you even so much as think about looking at it, so place or mount it carefully unless you want to be for ever re-adjusting the thing.

The IR LED night vision... other reviewers put the useful range at about 6 foot - that's generous, but it really depends what you need to see. Still, it's good enough to see what our infant is doing in his crib at night. I dare say you could improve this by using another IR source in the room though (to see what I mean, play around with your TV remote, you will see the flashes...).

The selection switches for camera input are wicked small DIP switches (3 pin) that are secreted away at the bottom of the monitor unit. Still, I suppose that once they are set you don't need to be changing them all too often. I am shocked that the manufacturer did not hide them behind the power adapter input or somewhere even more inaccessible.

Oh! And you can plug this into your TV if you really need to. The picture quality is alright, you can even plug in the sound too.

First, the picture on the screen in the product shot is hilarious. You will never see anything that clear or colors that vibrant. Then again, most people want to hear if their child is crying and maybe see if they've rolled over, or climbed out of crib etc. and for that purpose this works. I took this system traveling with me and its performance varied wildly. In some places it was totally unusable within 10 feet line of site. In others it worked from one end of a house to another. 2.4GHz wifi will interfere. For example every time I clicked on a link in my browser the monitor would go hazy. The bottom line is you will have to test it in your setting. Oh and like other reviewers said, the fact that you have to remove the batteries to plug it in is stupid. I modified, but I doubt most people want to take a soldering iron to their baby monitor out of the box.


Compared to most consumer electronics this is a pretty weak system. But
the sad fact is that baby monitors sold through babys-r-us and the like are of awful design and quality, and they are as expensive as this unit. It is the best option I have found.

UPDATE**********
I have found this system completely blocks my wireless router's signal on channel 2. It has three channels for three cameras. On channel 1 the camera's image is so severely distorted as to be useless. I think this is due to my neighbor's wireless router, but I can't be sure. I have yet to try it on channel 3, but given the fact that I had planned to connect at least one more camera, I think this system is pretty much useless in my house. As I said above, this system is very dependent on your location. I am sorry that when editing an review you can't take away a star.

Product works very well considering the fact that it has to go thru about 5 or six walls that are structured in steel. If it works this good in an environment that has a lot of interference, it should work great in normal environments.