Garmin BabyCam Wireless Back Seat Camera

Product Information

If you want to be able to keep an eye on your child from a restaurant on date night or during a work trip out of town, you need a Wi-Fi–enabled monitor, which links a camera’s feed to an app on your smartphone. Many of them allow multiple people to log in and see what baby is up to, which is super reassuring for parents who might be away from the home and their baby.

The five-inch touchscreen monitor, which is rimmed with a silicone bumper and is thus more durable than most, is preloaded with interactive videos, picture books narrated by ‘Hubble the Bear’ and simple games. We also like that this model has white-noise, lullaby, and night-light options, as well as an accurate temperature dongle outside the main body of the camera. More expensive models will generally have more features, larger and better quality screens, and better cameras.

Day or night, the camera captures quality video, and its adjustable viewing angle enables you to focus in on baby — or widen the picture to include multiple children and carseats in back. Faulty products will be replaced as soon as we are able to verify the fault and ship another to you.

The small, neat camera can pan 360 degrees side to side and 94 degrees up and down and has an 8X zoom that you can operate from the parent unit’s screen, or remotely from your phone. This monitor connects to a well-designed app that allows you to check in on your baby from home or away, and it’s the most stringent of the Wi-Fi monitors we tested on security. Up to 4 cameras (Garmin babyCam or Garmin BC™ 30 Wireless Backup Camera, each sold separately) can be combined in 1 system for your vehicle, allowing for multiple camera views to be displayed on your Garmin sat nav’s screen.This includes a live stream you can access from anywhere, the ability to pan and zoom, two-way audio, plus you can program lullabies or white noise to play for your baby. The walkie-talkie-like parent receiver must stay within a range of about 1,000 feet, as with a local-video monitor.

Finally, we tested each monitor for battery life, noting how long each of them took to die without a charge.

Ideally, the monitor should also have a setting to conserve the battery with an idle display and recharge efficiently. You can forgo paid membership, but in that case, all you get is a barebones version of the app, which consists of a live stream of the camera feed, use of the night-light, and access for one other person on the account.

The app also offers nicely-presented and unique sleep analysis, such as how long your little one slept and how many wake-ups, correlated to what might have caused them, such as a change in room temperature. If you want an audio monitor that displays the temperature in your child’s room: The Motorola PIP11 does that, and it also allows you to play lullabies and control a very low night-light remotely. If you have your heart set on continuous sound from at least two cameras, consider the Nanit Pro Smart Baby Monitor.

After logging in with your username and password, you receive a four-digit code on your phone that you use to confirm that it’s you who has signed in on a new tablet or smartphone. If this isn’t possible or convenient, then you might need to also invest in a separate smart device like an ipad, that you can use predominantly with the brand’s video monitoring app and always have it plugged in.