Discussions

I am looking at a baby video monitor as a gift I never owned one before so I would like to get some tips on what to look for that works properly and friendly and which ones to avoid also.

and we have a vtech monitor. Its only for sound and its not a digital one. I would avoid buying a digital one because there a people out there who hack into digital monitors and they will swear on them and watch your baby, that is why we don't have one.

I have the summer infant wide view digital monitor. It is awesome and I recommend it to anyone. It's a 5" screen monitor. Has sound and video. You can talk to the camera from the monitor to soothe baby. Also has zoom in feature and night vision. It is not wifi so no one can hack into it. We got ours from Sears. But babies r us and Walmart have it as well I believe.

We had a summer infant video monitor with our first child. It was great until the night vision stopped working. After googling the problem I found out it is a very common issue with those monitors and not an easy or worthwhile fix. We plan to continue using it as a sound only monitor for the next baby. I just ordered an ip camera (WiFi) to use for video/audio monitoring. The above mentioned privacy concerns are only really a problem if you network isn't secured and even then it would be unlikely anyone would actually access your camera. The camera was half the price of the video baby monitors and has pan/tilt/zoom in 720p which I can view from anywhere I have an Internet connection. A big bonus is that once you no longer use it as a baby monitor you have yourself a security camera for your home.

The ones that can be hacked are Bluetooth and/or WiFi compatible. so I'd avoid that although some people really want that feature. I like having the time shown on the screen. Our new one doesn't have that but it does have a temperature senser which is nice. I don't know that brands off hand. A feature that I love is being able to control the position of the camera with the parent unit.

We've had several motorola video baby monitors, and found that we needed to send them back for warranty a lot. Make sure you get something with warranty!  
 
Ours are digital two-way pan/tilt, upgraded from the non moving one that died twice and Motorola upgraded us to the better model for free. None are Wifi but proprietary digital, so nobody's going to hack in and scare our children.  
The screen went out on one, the camera digital radio transmitter died twice on the previous model.  
 
That said, we are really happy with the performance now that the bugs are out. The range is really great, like the entire yard outside, and the whole house, unless you hold the monitor up close to a wifi device that's being used at the time.