Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology: For $200, I Expect NO Flaws
Written: Nov 02 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Super-clear signal, great range
Cons: Tinny lullabies, next to useless amount of battery life
The Bottom Line: The Bottom Line thinks this is a really nice monitor. Just not $200 nice.
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| pippadaisy's Full Review: Philips Lcd Digital Baby Monitor With Dect Technol... |
Whenever I get an offer to test something for a company and write an Epinion, I jump at the chance. By the time you get to child #4, you have at least one of everything and the budget doesn't allow for trying new and improved anything, and the idea of a monitor with no interference would have been very very tempting.
The Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology arrives in a cute little white and orange package, with all the pieces arranged in a "travel bag." You get the parent unit, base unit, two AC adapters (one for each), and the charging station for the parent unit. A quick start guide shows you how to get started, and you are immediately put off by the note telling you that the parent unit has to be charged for 16 hours before use. I must be missing the part where that sounds quick. Further reading of the regular manual tells you that you need to run the battery down to nothing and repeat this 16-hour charge FOUR TIMES for optimal battery function. For $200, they couldn't have done this in the factory beforehand??
I got everything set up, plugged in the charger next to my bed, and resigned myself to starting my test the next day.
::: Features :::
The Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology comes with a load of features, including a walkie-talkie feature (allowing you to talk to baby from the parent remote or one parent to page another from the base unit to the remote), night light, five lullabies that can be played individually or all at once, and a temperature sensor to let you know the exact temperature in baby's room. This feature also has an alert you can set so that if the temperature drops below a certain point, the parent unit sounds an alert.
::: Why I Wouldn't Pay For This :::
I'll admit that the Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology has some really cool features and the "no interference" works EXACTLY as advertised. This is actually my fourth baby monitor, and it definitely has the clearest signal and the longest range. The product literature promises 900 feet of open space, and it delivers as promised. I have a tiny ranch and can usually hear baby no matter where I am unless it's the basement, but every day at 3:30 or so, I have to go out and meet my daughter's bus. With a neighbor's help, I took the monitor out, leaving Butter in her crib and started walking down houses. I made it past four neighbors before the signal started getting patchy. Before that, I heard my daughter's wails of abandonment loud and clear.
I was also pleased with the temperature alert. I would imagine most families would find this feature pretty much useless, but I live in a 1950s-built house where a lot of things don't make sense, such as the thermostat being in the main hallway area right at child height. There have been many days when my house is either a sauna or an igloo, and the temperature alert lets me know before I realize that the children have messed with the thermostat again by telling me that the temperature in the girls' room has gone below or above my preset temperatures.
However, these two features don't make it worth the price in my book. The lullabies are the tinny MIDI files that are becoming all too common in electronic children's toys now. The night-light feature has to be manually shut off, so if you forget, the lights stay on. The menu system on the parent unit is kludgy and far from user-friendly. A combination of the "Menu" button, the "Ok" button and two side buttons have to be used to change settings, and even after using this system for over a week, I still accidentally exit the menu or change the wrong setting by pressing the wrong button combinations.
The worst problem with the Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology, however, is the battery life on the parent unit. I don't have the sensitivity or the volume set very high; after all, my daughter is over 12 months and can bellow with the best of them and I no longer need to hear every tiny sound that she makes at night. Even with running the battery down and recharging the recommended four times, I have no trouble CONTINUING to run the battery down constantly; it doesn't even last a whole day for me. My kids get up before 6 AM most mornings, and the baby doesn't go down before 10 PM. If a parent unit can't last off the charger for that long, what good is it? I can move the charger to the living room, but then I can't charge it at night when I'm least likely to move it around. The remote paging feature to find a lost parent unit is useless because odds are, by the time you realize you've lost it, the batteries are dead.
Overall, I was disappointed with the Phillips LCD Digital Baby Monitor with DECT Technology. It has a lot of really great features, but the battery life on the parent unit alone causes it to fall well short of being worth the huge price tag. Most folks will never need the extreme range of the remote, and if your house is that big, I'm willing to bet you won't blink at the price tag. But for those of us with smaller homes and smaller budgets, I'd have to take a pass. I'm willing to sacrifice a little bit of clarity for longer battery life and ease of use. I'll be sticking with recommending the lower end systems unless Phillips makes some improvements with this system.
I received this products from Hass MS&L in exchange for your honest opinion.
Recommended:
No
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pippadaisy
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Divorce seriously cuts into the amount of time for reviewing.
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