Hi
I would like your suggestions to which camera is best for ST currently, supporting:
-Good WAF, it should be white probably
-Good picture
-Good / direct integration with ST
-Good motion sensor, to trigger actions
-Possibility for me to record video / take pictures
-I dont want a monthly subscription to any service
Are Samsungs own ST camera the best or are other as good or better?
I would like to hear opinions and experiences from you all.
Thanks in advance
I use the Foscam C1, and it seems to be working well for me.
I bought Dlink. They work good. The inside ones work great, outside one work great in daylight and suck at night. But when added to the hub and set to record on certain events my hub would freeze over night which is when they were set to record at. They are working on a fix but in the meantime I had to have my cams removed from the hub. Since then the hub has not froze again yet.
Love my Blinks. Not sure of your definition of direct, but RBoy app and DTH are excellent.
Ditto, love my Blinks. Going to add a couple more too. Night vision stinks, but I trigger lights if needed.
The WAF for the Blink cameras is good too. She did not like the Samsung camera because of the size, looks, wires, and how it mounted. Because of that, the Samsung camera has been moved to the garage.
I currently have the Samsung SmartCam HD Pro - which works with ST, but doesn’t really do much. But it works fine.
I also have the Samsung SmartCam HD Plus - which doesn’t work with ST and is honestly not any different than the Pro, other than it’s smaller and black.
I also have 2 Samsung SmartCam HD Outdoor - these are terrible. Given me nothing but problems, constantly disconnecting from my network. I’m actually getting rid of both as soon as possible.
Also, the Samsung SmartCam app is terrible. Crappy interface and not easy to work with. One slow-loading stream at a time.
Right now, I’m probably going to get rid of all of them and chooser a Blink setup (love that it integrates with ST) or Netgear Arlo (love that it’s got nightvision and outdoor rated).
Ultimately though, I’d pick the camera that works best for you, regardless of ST. None of the integration with ST is all that valuable. All ST can do is tell most cameras to grab a clip when SHM is triggered, from my experience.
Do you need nightvision? Do you need 2-way audio? Out of your other considerations, you’re going to use the camera’s native app for almost all of those features. And any decent indoor cam from Nest to Samsung or Foscam, etc - will provide the same service.
Hi
I will look into the Blinks 
Your right “direct integration” is not very precise.
What I mean is that I hope I will be able to take advantage of many triggers and actions in ST.
For example if motion is detected and my ST is “armed”, start recording and send me a mail with a picture.
But I dont know if I would do such actions in ST or directly in the Blink app?
Which possibilities are there to store video and pictures with Blink?
Again I dont want any monthly subscription, but would prefer to be able to store video and picture on a local server/FTP or sync to my Google Drive or something like that.
I would reach out to support to see if the know issue with cameras is dlink related or all cameras. As right now clips and all are in beta stage. Because once out it will be a prem feature.
+1 for Blink, especially since you said indoor cam. No true night vision, but I find them fine for lighting up a room. Right now they check most of your boxes, but not local video storage. There’s hope that may come in the future, however.
Hi Allen
Well no, it doesn’t have local storage, but where would I then have it to record a videoclip if I have a break-in?
That would be one of my main purposes to have a indoor camera. To capture some video and/or pictures of the bad guys.
I kind of gave up on smartthings for camera stuff and finally went the blue iris route.
Motion sening done there, clips recorded there, clips copies to a NAS, snapshots dump into my google drive. I get notifications and clips on my phone.
Motion sensing triggers siumlated motion sensors in ST. ST modes trigger camera recording profiles in Blue Iris.
I use smartcam hd pro inside (overpriced, but they do give good images), and amcrest outdoors.
When ST works its in past events on your dashboard. But as I said in another post the traffic made my ST hub run out of memory and freeze until a reboot. Not sure if it effects all cameras yet or just DLink.
I’ve been debating on the Piper NV
apparently integrate very well, 180 degree field of vision too. Sale on until about the 9th august too. However I still feel they’re very expensive.
My problem is that I’d like a couple of outdoor cameras as well is inside, and only the Netgear Arlo seems to offer that.
I like my video in the cloud in case house is torched or NAS was stolen.
I have so many Blinks I’ve lost count…
They don’t have local storage but it is on their list of features scheduled “toward the end of the year.”
https://blinkforhome.com/proud-announce-first-new-feature-release#comment-735
So far Blink has added features without breaking others, contrary to what seems like an industry standard. I prefer late features over those that are introduced too early. To me this is a sign of a disciplined company and adds to the other reasons to choose their products.
So how do you upload to “the cloud”? Which “cloud”
Within ST or the Blink app?
Blink only records to the cloud today. Its own cloud. I’m 100% fine with cloud-only recording, I just want longer clips out of my Blink cams (even 20 seconds would make me thrilled). Rumor is that they might wait for local recording in order to increase the max clip length, but those are just rumors as far as I’ve seen. I’d prefer it to just use cloud storage and only use local if the cloud is down or something like that.
Your right, and I dont mind cloud storage actually.
Reason why I would like local storage is that I thought many camera provides only offered cloud storage for a monthly fee, which I would like to void.
Reading Blinks FAQ I see their cloud storage are free, so great
And I see in there FAQ that they are targeting local storage through the USB on the hub late Q3, so thumbs up for both good solutions.