The Vacos baby monitor is cute and simple to use, with a great feature set for its price point. But there are a couple of compromises to be made if you buy.
Price when reviewed
$149.99
Vacos baby monitor full review
The world of baby monitors is a complex one. There are split screens, plug-in socks, mattress pads, audio-only models, cot-side cameras, systems that stream to smart phones – and prices range from £50 to nearly £400.
The Vacos is at the lower end of mid-range, and is characteristic of this price point: you get one camera and no Wi-Fi connection. To get more, you’ll need to pay more; and if your budget doesn’t stretch that far, you’re looking at a smaller screen or maybe even losing visual all together.
So, is the Vacos a good buy at this price point?
Design and build
- Sturdy camera
- 720P screen
- Long power cables
In the box, there’s a camera, an LCD monitor, two cables, two power adapters, a user manual, a wall mount with a packet of mounting screws that usefully includes wall plugs. You also get a pair of camera trims: a pair of pink ears and a pair of yellow antlers.
The camera is sturdy, as well as cute. It has a white plastic housing that clasps a black plastic eye and iris, and the circular base has rubberised feet to prevent it skating. There’s no on/off switch at the back, simply a USB socket for power and two needle buttons to rest and re-pair. Vacos suggests you use the 1.2m cable for the camera, which is a decent length. If you want to wall-mount the camera, the mounting hole is in the base.
The monitor isn’t quite as sturdy as the camera, and feels a touch plasticky, but the 720P HD screen itself is 11.5cm long and 7cm high, with the antenna standing an extra 6cm from the top and the flipped-out stand giving you a footprint about 6cm deep. A 1.3m metre cable gives you capacity to place the monitor in a viable viewing spot.
The power button is on the top of the monitor, and the controls are on the front on the right. The two buttons at the top are for volume, brightness and launching the menu. The central button is the zoom and okay button, with the surrounding pad of arrow keys controlling direction. The bottom two buttons switch the camera feed (if you have more than one camera) and launch the intercom.
Setting up the Vacos baby monitor
- Charge before use
- Easy to set up
- Slight lag when connecting
You need to fully charge the monitor before use, but the camera and monitor pair immediately and the system is easy to set up. Just plug in the camera and the monitor where you want them, and you’re good to go.
We did find, however, that sometimes after switch-on, the monitor took a few seconds to find the camera feed, even though the signal strength was a full four bars – this was particularly noticeable if we had let the monitor battery run down to zero.
Display
- 720P display a bit grainy
- 10.8cm by 5.8cm screen
- 360-degree display
The monitor has an 720P display. The brand is calling this HD, although by current benchmarks, it’s really SD and we found the picture a little grainy compared to other brands. The actual picture size is 10.8cm by 5.8cm. The camera view covers an area of 155cm wide (roughly 5ft) with a significant depth field, and there’s a one second delay between movement in front of the camera and the relay to the monitor screen.
Sound and talkback
- Sound delay
- Five lullabies
- Somewhat tinny speaker
Sound quality and voice relay is the area where most baby monitors tend to fall. The Vacos is no exception, although the sound quality is better than some competitors. We noticed a one to two-second delay in both the sound and intercom relay, and we could often hear sound through the wall before it played on the baby monitor, but this is an issue we’ve found with most baby monitors in smaller houses with modern internal walls.
That said, the Vacos can play five lullabies, at five playback volume settings, through its speaker. We were impressed by the relative audio quality, although it is not going to beat your Alexa speaker. Some of the tunes can be a little tinny, but the first piano lullaby is rather lovely.
Read More: https://www.techadvisor.com/review/vacos-baby-monitor-3814942/