Gearhead Mom

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

The Guardian Angel Is a Devil of a Product

Posted by Roger W. @ 4:05 AM

This just in from my uber techie husband. Thanks, dude!

Am I just too used to well-made and well-designed products? Is it too much to ask for something that works as you expect it?

Since Baby G’s arrival, I was tasked by GHM to find a better monitor system. My feature list was simple:
- One handheld monitor, two camera system
- Night-vision in the cameras
- Monitor can automatically cycle between the cameras
- 900 MHz or 5.8 GHz (so it doesn’t interfere with our Wi-Fi network)

It literally took me days of research. A single camera baby monitor is simple. We have used the Summer Infant handheld baby monitor since Sy was born and it’s been great. (Sure the picture’s a little fuzzy, but it’s good enough to make out what’s going on.) But once I started to look for a system with multiple cameras, the search got much more complicated.

First, I ruled out adding another camera to our Summer Infant system; there’s no auto-cycle feature. And having two monitors was just such an inelegant solution. [Ed. Note: Because the rest of our house is soooo elegant right now. Thanks for thinking of the overall design scheme, hub.]

A look on Amazon and Google yielded a dizzying array of results, mostly from no name brands. Surprisingly only very few monitor systems met my feature list. Ultimately, I chose the Guardian Angel from Safe Baby because it had precisely all the features I wanted and got good reviews on Amazon.

OK, my first clue to my experience with the product should have been the photo on Amazon. Really? Cameras and a monitor on a cheesy waterfall background with an image of an angel? And look at that font!

Even before I plugging it in and turning it on should have given me more clues. The cameras and monitors look like cheap imported knock-off electronics. There’s no polish to the design: just a lot of square corners (perfect around babies), tiny buttons (perfect for sleepy parents’ fingers), and cheap plastic. The “Safe Baby” logo looked like it was slapped onto the back of the monitor and cameras by a crew of 2 year-olds. The instruction booklet that came with it referred to it as a “Wireless Colour Surveillance System.” Clearly this wasn’t originally intended for baby monitoring.

Setting up the camera was easy: just plug it in, or use optional batteries. The camera itself is pretty bulky because it includes a motion sensor. But guess what? Every time the motion sensor is set off a green LED light turns on at the top of the camera! I can just imagine Sy play with this as a game: “Ooh if I move I can make that little light turn on.”

As soon as I plugged in the LCD monitor it started beeping this really loud annoying beep at me. And there was no way to turn off that beep or lower its volume. The beeping was an alert that motion was detected. That same beep was used every time I pushed any button on the monitor. Because this wasn’t originally designed as a baby monitor, the makers of this didn’t realize that loud noises wake up babies and annoy parents.

I tried playing with the other controls briefly. I have no idea what I did when I pushed the “Menu” button or the “+” or “-” buttons.

And quite honestly, that was the end of my testing. I put it back in the box and returned it. I guess we’ll be getting another Summer Infant handheld baby monitor. Note to Summer Infant, Graco or any other major manufacturers of audio baby monitors: This is a huge opportunity for you—produce a multi-camera video monitoring system that works for babies.

Snapshot:
• Don’t buy this

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