I had a few of these cameras and they have been working well for over 6 months, not requiring reboots, etc. Motion detection works well too. I decided I needed two more but suddenly the prices everywhere were in the $100-110/camera range.
Then I found this ebay listing and used the Make an Offer option starting at $65 and we went back and forth a few times until they accepted $75/camera, $150 total. Since they are accepting lower offers than the list price, I thought I’d list it here in case anyone else is in the market…
I did it on an 8x Ebay bucks day, but I just received a 10x Ebay bucks offer so I’m guessing a few other people might have that too, which would cut another ~$7 off the cost when you redeem the ebay bucks at the end of the quarter.
I bought the 2 refurbished ones and it looks like they’re shipping from an Amcrest warehouse in Texas? The packaging was exactly like the new ones I’ve gotten before, and they shipped pretty quickly and I had the cameras in hand about 4 days later.
The only thing that I don’t like about them is that trying to download a settings file from one of the cameras I’ve already configured and upload it to the new camera to get things close seems not to update a lot of the settings, so I"m not sure which settings it is backing up.
I haven’t played much with the Smart Things integration aspect yet, mostly because I’ve configured the cameras to only be accessible when I VPN into my home network, and don’t particularly want video streaming to 3rd party services/“clouds”. But there is a long thread for the community device type. What I have been thinking about doing is having an inside camera that is attached to a SmartThings compatible plug which only turns on when the house goes into Away mode, giving privacy to occupants when home.