HOMIEE 720P Digital Wireless Baby Monitor

Well this week I had something really unusual sitting on my desk when I got to the office: The HOMIEE 720P Digital Wireless Baby Monitor. HOMIEE has made a stand alone home monitor system to fit a growing market of digital baby monitors. I still have small kids, so I took it home to get a better feel for the product and see just how this “baby” performs. Let’s check it out.

In The Box

The HOMIEE Digital Wireless Baby Monitor comes in a very lively box covered in graphics and information about this device. In the box is a 2.4Ghz digital wireless camera which looks like a little robot. That camera can pan and tilt well enough to see around any child’s room and find them sleeping in the corners if you have a restless little boy like mine. It can also be mounted above a cradle or bassinet directly to the wall so you can monitor an infant and receive sound alerts or temperature alerts on the monitor if the room gets too hot or cold with a range from 59 F to 86 F at the extremes. If the temperature goes beyond those ranges an audio and visual signal is sent to the monitor screen. The monitor for the HOMIEE system is a 5 inch 720p display which is the control system for the camera. It’s got a rechargeable Li-on battery and very easy to understand and use controls. The folks at HOMIEE included separate power cables and charging blocks for the camera and the monitor. They were nice enough to label the cables and wall warts for each device, so it’s easy to connect them properly to the correct charging and power systems. There is also a nice thick clearly written instruction manual which I only looked at after I realized I didn’t need it in large part. The manual is in English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish. The monitor is simple, and easy to figure out with every button clearly defined. Let’s look deeper.

Camera Chameleon

The HOMIEE 720P Digital Wireless Baby Monitor comes with a very flexible 1280 x 720p 2.4 GHz camera: It is able to pan 360 degrees and tilt 105 degrees. That allows a parent to move it around using the keypad on the monitor to look anywhere in a child’s room, or bed if mounted directly to the wall. It works great either way, but for whole room monitoring, I found sitting the HOMIEE Bot on a dresser worked best. In daylight or artificial lighting the sharp image is in full color, and at night the face of the camera has infrared LEDs which give a great, clear black and white image but don’t change the light level of the room. The HOMIEE camera also has a microphone for listening in on your baby and you can set audio alerts so if the baby is crying you can see, as well as hear. The HOMIEE 720P Baby Monitor also has a speaker so you can talk to your child or baby to reassure them, or tell them to “get back in bed”. The speaker is also used for playing the built in Lullabies, we will get to those in a minute.

Hey Mon!

The 5 inch diagonal display monitor for this HOMIEE Baby Monitor is more than just a way to see, and hear your baby: it’s also a great way to interact with your child. Let’s get into the details: The Monitor screen has a range of 1000 ft. In my experience, the rechargeable battery didn’t have enough charge to last the night, so remember to plug it in at night for total monitoring success. With a full charge it lasts 7 hours on power saving mode and 4 hours with the display screen turned on. Let’s go through the buttons: Starting at the top and moving down there is the power button, the Menu and Sleep buttons on the next row, The Keypad which allows you to both manipulate the pan and tilt of the camera, zoom in/out with the camera, and navigate the menus. Moving further down is the shortcut and talk buttons, a sound level meter and a red led which is only lit when plugged in. There is a very handy fold out stand on the back along with a fold up antenna to help extend the range to that 1000 ft. Let’s move into the details.

Buttons and Menus

Being a long time tech person the first thing I did was connect the camera to the correct cable and charging port. Then I turned on the Monitor and the camera was already paired. It is very easy to pair/unpair the camera from the menu. When the HOMIEE 720P camera first boots up it runs through the Pan/Tilt functions then settles in the center of the system. A quick push on the Menu button give you access to the pairing menu, the sound detection level menu, the temperature alarm menu, the lullaby menu, sleep mode, and additional settings. All the menus are very simple and easy to figure out. Using the keypad to curse around the choices are mostly On/Off or “Levels” like sound alert or sleep mode timeout, which shuts down the monitor screen so you can sleep without the light, but it does boot right up when the sound alert, or temperature alert is activated. While the screen is off, the microphone/speaker are still allowing you to monitor the baby’s voice or other noise in the room. The HOMIEE monitor will give an audible as well as a visual alert for temperature or sound. The sound is really  crisp and clear in the monitor. The shortcut button allows you to quickly access volume and brightness on the HOMIEE monitor, and the talk button is obviously PTT(Push to talk). The Sleep button puts the monitor in standby position. To zoom in/out you just push the OK button in the middle of the keypad. When first booted up you can also access the time/date in settings and that is displayed on the monitor. IMO the manual is great if you can’t figure something out quickly, but the HOMIEE baby monitor is laid out so well all settings are easy to find and adjust by pushing buttons and just looking around the menus. There is no “back” button so once you have adjusted a setting: push the menu button again, and in a few seconds the monitor screen fades back to the camera image.

Lullabies too!

If your baby is still a baby, you and your child will enjoy being able to access the 5 songs included with the HOMIEE system. You will want to turn down the volume in the monitor when playing those since the speaker and microphone are in the same unit and the music gets really loud in your ears. HOMIEE also gives the choice of playing all the songs, or just one and it’s on an infinite loop so you have to manually play/pause the songs in the menu. The songs are: Rock a bye Baby, Brahms Lullaby, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Hush Little Baby, and one song for the life of me, I can’t identify. These are digital recordings and will play as long as you desire. It’s about 5 minutes for me, but the baby likes to fall asleep listening them, so he gets them for a half hour. Like every built in sound source you will want to play with levels to keep yourself sane. Still a great feature which I’m sure most parents will love. The HOMIEE eliminates the need for a seperate device to play sleep time songs, and they are going to play until baby is asleep, or you are.

HOMIEE Don’t Play That

I’ve only got one complaint and that’s interconnectivity. Actually it’s the lack thereof which makes me take some points away from the HOMIEE 720P Digital Baby Monitor. These days, IP Cams are ubiquitous and cheap. This is a stand alone system which does not connect to the internet for remote monitoring. There are advantages and disadvantages to this as a person who has had both types of baby monitoring systems over the past several years. There are safety concerns with the potential for hacking of your baby monitor which I’m sure some of you have seen in the news the last few years. But there are also safety concerns when a parent is out on the town or at the movies, and there is a babysitter in the home. Family or not, trustworthy or not, problems can occur and to be able to see the baby, or monitor the baby’s safety when out, is a great feature which HOMIEE did not decide to offer in this middle of the price range baby monitor system. For example: my mother in law was watching our first born. She has hearing problems and sleeps without her hearing aids in. We were able to get an alert from an IP cam that our son wasn’t in bed, but was in the bathroom making a huge mess while Grandma slumbered away. We called her, to get her to put him back in bed and we went back to our fun. Peace of mind at home and on the road is a great feature.

Sleepy time Monitor and More

The HOMIEE 720P Digital Wireless Baby Monitor is a great device with some very useful and sophisticated features in a neat package. It’s extremely simple to set up and operate. The included Lullaby feature saves parents the hassle of winding up old school toys, or having to have another device in the space. The camera is clear and crispy in light or darkness, my only complaint about the camera is a halo around the center of the image while in night mode which comes from the very bright and powerful Infrared LEDs. The Pan/Tilt functions are amazing and every menu is simple and easy to understand as well as set levels, play/pause songs, or just talk to your children day or night.

In my opinion it would be great if the HOMIEE 720P Digital Wireless Baby Monitor had internet connectivity, but that feature isn’t a deal killer and HOMIEE purposefully left it out for easy Plug/Play. Good clear sound at both devices, good clear picture day or night, easy to understand menus and controls, and a very extended range. We have a big house on an acre lot and I was able to use the camera while out at the pool with no range or signal problems a couple hundred of feet away from the house and baby’s room. I took a walk up and down the street to check ultimate range with my radio shielded steel siding home. I was getting an audible and visual range warning at about 300-350 ft from the house. 1000 ft is potentially possible with a newer home with vinyl siding, wood, or stucco but still: Not many homes or yards are 300 ft by 300 ft. Within my 3500 sq ft house, within my acre lot, there was no reception or connection problems. 9.5 out of ten for me, but a true 10 out of 10 for those who don’t want an IP camera paired with a phone app. Nice to see a great product from HOMIEE and I hope to see more of their remote health and home monitoring systems in the near future.

Update: 

Since this story has posted: the folks at HOMIEE have given our readers a great exclusive discount code! Enter  “BM1OFF20” at the Amazon link for 20% off the price of this HOMIEE system.  This offer expires 9/15 /18 so if this is a product for your home and family, please take advantage of this great offer only available to POCNETWORK.NET readers. Nice.

*Average price is based on the time this article was published

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