Foscam 960P Wireless IP Camera (Refurbished)

  • The more expensive of these WiFi cams has 3x optical zoom - otherwise they’re basically the same
  • Remote viewing and controls including pan, tilt, night vision, motion alerts, and two-way audio: it’s your personal robot spy slave
  • Record to an SD card (not included), an FTP hosting service (not included), or your computer (obviously not included)
  • Model: FI9826PW, FI9831PW (oh yeah, big joke, let’s mix the letter I and the number 1 in a model number, confuse the rubes, ha ha, real funny except one of these days someone’s going to get hurt and then it won’t be so funny at all, Foscam, IT WON’T BE FUNNY AT ALL)
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"Which one?" depends on "what for?"

You know what these cameras are, basically. They shoot 960p video, they connect to WiFi, you watch and control them through an app. These particular ones have pan and tilt controls, two-way audio, night vision, and motion detection. To record, you can insert an SD card, hook 'em up to a computer, or pay for Foscam’s cloud service (but that’s between you and Foscam).

You know what optical zoom is, basically. It’s where a lens focuses the camera’s image in greater detail on the zoomed-in area (aka “actual zoom”), as opposed to digital zoom, which just blows up the same pixels without adding any detail (aka “fake zoom”).

What you need to know is that one of these cameras has optical zoom. The more expensive one, naturally. Is it worth it? Well…

If you just want to keep a camera pointing at a reasonably wide area - a room, a yard, a garage, etc. - to catch whatever might happen and review the footage later, you can probably save yourself the 10 bucks. Go forth in cheapness.

If you’re going to be live-monitoring the video area and might want to zoom in to get a better look in real time - maybe for a baby or pet cam - you can do that with optical zoom.

If you need to focus on detail in a limited area - to record the face of everyone who walks into your shop’s front door, or the license number of every car that comes up your driveway - you can set the zoom to focus on that chokepoint and really capture the details that matter.

If you need to focus on something far away - say, a shed at the far end of your yard - same deal. You’ll see more of what you want to see and less of the unimportant stuff on the margins of the field of view.

And, of course, if you enjoy showing off your gadgets, explaining the advantages of optical zoom will give you several minutes’ worth of material and a boost in prestige. It’ll be well worth the extra 10 bucks. But if this is you, we’re sure you’ve figured that out already.

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