Photograph: Nicole Kinning
The Home monitor can run wirelessly and charges via a USB-C cable. It relies on your Wi-Fi network to connect to the camera, so while you can carry the monitor around your home, you can’t take it fully “off-grid” or use it outside your home network (not a dealbreaker for many families, but thought it was worth noting).
The flexibility does come with some limitations: The battery doesn’t last a full day, so if you’re using it off its charger, you’ll need to power it down when not in use to keep it alive. I found that most days, after I put my daughter down for her 10 am nap, the device, if left on and unplugged, would be nearly dead by bedtime around 7 pm.
Clarity Check
In most conditions, Nanit’s video quality is solid. My personal litmus test is whether I can see my daughter’s eyes in night mode, and from a standard view on the Home, the answer is yes. Zooming in brings out some pixelation, and the fixed floor-stand height means you can’t fine-tune the frame as much as you might like. But for a quick check-in glance parents make a dozen times a night, the clarity holds up.
The live feed is responsive with no noticeable delays or buffering, which I’ve found to be crucial in determining if certain sounds are cries or just sleep grunts. The display also shows room temperature and humidity levels, which is a nice touch as we dive headfirst into a Midwest winter.
The sound is clear as day. When set to do so, the Home monitor will ping when it detects crying or motion, and I have yet to miss any alerts while I sleep. The only hiccup came when I had the device lying flat on my desk; because the speaker sits on the back, the audio was noticeably muffled. Luckily, the built-in kickstand solves this, so it’s an easy problem to avoid.
Screen Time
Onto the reason why you’re all here—the touchscreen monitor. Its home screen is a mixture of widgets: the live feed, your baby’s status (when they were last attended to, how long they’ve been sleeping, etc.), a nightly summary, and environmental conditions (temperature and humidity). The interface of the live feed mimics the Nanit app pretty closely, with controls for the microphone, nightlight, audio monitoring, breathing detection, and camera power sitting along the bottom of the live view.
Something worth noting: the screen is very bright. Even with the brightness turned all the way down in the settings, it was still bright enough to disrupt my sleep. Pressing the power button once enters standby mode—your audio stays on, and you’ll get sound and motion pings, but the screen stays dark. (Sometimes you need a second to prepare your eyes for a blast of blue light first thing in the morning.) There’s one catch: if you’re on the live stream view, the screen won’t go to sleep automatically and stays illuminated. On any other tab, it dims after 30 seconds to a screensaver displaying the time, date, and notifications, similar to a phone lock screen.
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