Panasonic HomeHawk Window Home Monitoring Camera

I really wanted to like this product. I'm currently unable to mount a doorbell camera, and wanted a camera at my front door for both security and notification when packages arrive, and another one on my back porch for security. I'd tried putting a regular networked camera behind the window next to my porch, but it was having focusing issues through the glass and additionally couldn't use the night vision light due to glare. When I saw this camera, I thought it would be perfect for my use case, and indeed when first setting it up it seemed great. However after using a couple of them for a week now, there are too many flaws with it to rely on it. - The "night vision" is not really night vision. Most other security cameras like Nest and Ring use an infrared light to illuminate the viewing area in the darkness. This camera doesn't seem to have a light, and instead just does some digital brightening of the image. So at night, unless there are lights on outside, you still just see mostly a black image. - Limited image recognition. Its nice that it does have the ability to differentiate motion vs people, but it doesn't have features that for instance Nest cameras have, like recognizing when a package was left, or being able to tag specific people's faces to be able to recognize familiar people. - Limited detection area settings. When setting up motion detection notifications, it only gives you a grid of squares to either turn on or off notifications within each square, with notifications settings being global based on either motion or people. Other competitors allow you to draw and define (potentially overlapping) areas that can each have their own notification settings for detecting motion, people, animals, packages, etc. - Clunky UI. Changing settings on a camera is somewhat awkward, with pressing the back button on many settings sub menus returning you to the home page rather than to the previous settings page. The UI also feels like it was designed 20 years ago, its very boxy and clunky. Also on the home page, it lets you "view" all your cameras. But its not a live view, its just a single static image of the last time you connected to the camera, so you can't view all your cameras at once, you have to connect individually to each one. - Doesn't work well with the Google Home app. After connecting my cameras to the Google Assistant and the Home app, I was hoping to be able to view my cameras alongside all my other Nest cameras that I have connected in the Home app. However the Home app almost always shows the HomeHawk cameras as offline. Clicking retry on the feed will sometimes make them show up as online, but then they'll frequently go offline a minute later. I've rarely been able to get both of my HomeHawk cameras to show up as online at the same time in the Home app, and trying to view the live freed from within the Home app hardly ever works, even when I'm at home on the same network as the cameras. - No local or cloud storage syncing options. While its nice that it records events to an internal microsd card rather than requiring paying for a cloud service, it would be nice if it had options to upload triggered events to either a local NAS server or a cloud service like Dropbox or Drive. As it is, its not really great as a security device for break-ins, as any thief breaking in can easily grab the device off the front window and take it with them with the recording. - Remote viewing usually doesn't work. This is the biggest problem with the cameras for me, as they can't reliably be used as security cameras. When I'm not at home, the cameras often can't be connected to, even if my phone is connected to Wifi at work or a friends house. I'll try to connect in the app and it will say the connection is unstable and can't be connected to. Checking my router's device status page, it says the cameras have good wifi connection, so the cameras should be online, and I do get motion/people notifications from the cameras. Just when I click on the notifications to open the HomeHawk app, it often can't connect to the cameras. On the rare occasion that it does connect, when trying to playback the motion event, the video feed stutters too much. I have the recording settings to record 30 seconds on motion events, usually it will play maybe the first 2 seconds of the video fine, then the video will freeze up (while the video time code keeps playing), then maybe 15 seconds later I'll get an updated frame or two, it will freeze up again, until the end of the video. Additionally while remote, it won't let you download the video to your phone. Because of all this, it makes the camera largely useless as a security device. - The Android app is terrible. If you upgrade your phone, the newly installed app forces new installations to first add a camera to your phone. So you have to go through the setup process again for your camera. It doesn't let you just sign in to your existing account which should already have your cameras. Whoever designed this app had zero foresight into how users would actually interact with it.