Foscam FI9831P review

We encountered some of the same annoyances with the FI9831P as we did when testing the FI9826P. Chief among these is configuring the motion detection. You’ll find yourself blindly trying to select the detection zones as there’s no live image overlay to help you pick out areas such as doorways. You’ll also need to use the web interface to set up email notifications, as this can’t be done through the app, which is inconvenient. The FI9831P has a full-size SD card memory slot on its back for saving footage locally. Otherwise it can be integrated with a Network Video Recorder (NVR) such as the Foscam NVR FN3004H (around £50) to save footage away from the camera.  

You can also use Foscam Cloud to save footage. All pricing is in US dollars, but the service will work fine from the UK. Packages include Basic at $8 per month, which includes support for four cameras and one day of recorded video, Standard for 10 cameras and a week of footage for $20 per month and Premium for $50 per month, which allows for unlimited cameras to be monitored and a month of video backed up in the cloud.  

We were reasonably impressed with the FI9831P’s video quality. Daytime footage showed a decent amount of detail but appeared blocky from compression. Footage taken at night was clear up to a good 8-metre distance, but like the daytime footage, it was overly blocky.

Foscam’s camera produces fair video image quality, but is tricky to set up and manage. It’s certainly not for anyone looking to have an IP camera set up and monitoring quickly, as it will take a certain amount of technical knowledge and tinkering to get the FI9831P working autonomously. For this reason we much prefer the D-Link DCS-5222L, which is worth the extra cash for its ease of use, or if you want to save recordings to the cloud the Y-Cam HomeMonitor HD is a better choice.