Baby monitors come in two basic flavors: those that send video to a proprietary handheld monitor, and those that stream the video over the internet to your phone, tablet, or PC. The Ebemate Smart Baby Monitor Camera ($159.99) is in the latter camp, with smart features that include the ability to detect human faces and notice crying. While the camera delivers good image quality, the smart features don’t measure up to the capabilities of our Editors’ Choice, the $379 Nanit Pro, or even the more comparably priced $159.99 Motorola ConnectView65 Plus.
Ebemate Pricing and Design
The Ebemate started life as a UK-based Kickstarter project in pre-COVID 2020, with an expected price of $269; it’s now selling for $159.99, and even less on Amazon. That price is for the camera plus a plastic mount you can attach to a wall or a crib. A multi-function base with a clamp costs an additional $39.99. The clamp only opens to 1.6 inches, though, so make sure it can fit over your crib rails.
A $79 floor stand, sold separately, looks similar to the one that comes with the Nanit cameras and the Motorola ConnnectView 65; hollow “aerospace aluminum” pipes screw together, with an angled piece at the top. Oddly, the base is hollow; you’re supposed to fill it with water or sand for extra weight, though you can probably make do with wedging the stand between the crib and the wall. Together, the camera and floor stand cost just under $240, a considerable savings over the Nanit Pro with a floor stand ($379).
Ebemate’s cloud service is free for one month. After that, it will store video for seven days ($1.99 per month) or 30 days ($5.99 per month). Nanit’s Insights service is free for a year, storing two days of video history, while Insights Premium gives you 30 days of history for $50 per year.
The Ebemate has a 1080p camera in a 6-by-4-by-3-inch (HWD) egg-shaped housing. A large eye-like aperture contains the CMOS lens, light sensors, and a night-light. It can pan up to 355 degrees and tilt 100 degrees. Most parents will keep the camera plugged in and in one place, but it has a 3,200mAh battery—a feature we haven’t seen on any other baby monitor—that lasts about six hours. This is very handy if you want to temporarily move the 4.5-ounce camera into another room or out to the yard. Just keep it within range of your home’s Wi-Fi signal.
A 6.6-feet USB-C cable is included for power and charging. The floor stand has its own, much longer cable.
The only way to monitor the Ebemate is via your own device, so it has built-in 2.4GHz Wi-Fi. The rear of the unit has a rubber strip that acts as a power button; this covers the physical button plus a microSD card slot (which the documentation refers to as a “TF Card slot”) that can hold cards up to 128GB. There’s a thermal vent on the back, and a decent speaker on the bottom.
Setting Up and Using the Ebemate
The setup process is pretty standard. First, you create an account via the app (available for Android or iOS) and make a profile for the baby you’ll be looking in on. Click the plus icon to add a device and use the included tool to push in the Configure Network Hole under the rubber strip on the back of the camera for three seconds. A voice prompt asks for your network password, and then the app will display a QR code to hold in front of the Ebemate’s camera lens. Once recognized, you’ll get another prompt and the setup is complete. The app supports multiple cameras per baby profile, which is useful if you’re monitoring a bedroom and a playroom or going full Big Brother on keeping every corner of your child’s room within view.
Typos in the setup interface don’t inspire confidence in the Ebemate app. Neither does its inelegant design, with weird small fonts in menus and hard-to-tap toggle buttons. Nanit’s app is much easier and more enjoyable to use.
The app walks you through the basic features you expect with most any baby monitor. It checks on room temperature, humidity, and noise level. Along the top of the screen, you can see the number of online users per camera, the video bit rate, and battery life. There’s an overlay of a D-pad at the lower left that you can use for the pan and tilt controls (there’s no swiping the screen to steer).
You can go into the menu in the upper right to access the display settings. You can choose between 720p and 1080p, or let Auto-Detect make the choice for you. The lower right corner has icons for accessing all other functions. There’s a mute button, a microphone button to hold down for two-way communication, and a camera icon for taking snapshots or video that are directly saved to your device. On the iPhone, they go into Photos.
Below them are the icons for the smart features. The AI button lets you toggle cry and sound detection, set Safe Zone and Danger Zone boundaries, and enable detection of people and faces. The alert alarm can be set to last from 15 seconds to 5 minutes. Sound detection gets an extra intensity setting. The Tools icon lets you toggle the night-light (which kept turning back on because I had it set to be “soothing,” meaning it would reactivate if the monitor detected crying), and turn on Movement Track to follow moving objects in the frame. It tries valiantly to do so, but with the camera mounted on the floor stand and pointing down at the crib mattress, even the wide-angle pan can’t see very far.
Take the camera off the stand and put it in a room with some potential hazards, such as an open staircase, and you can use the app to set up a Danger Zone in the view. You can set a Safe Zone option as well, depending on whether the room is mostly safe or mostly not. The app claims that a kid’s foot crossing the Danger/Safe threshold sets off the alarm, but in my tests, I couldn’t get the alarm to go off. Any moving of the camera lens to pan or tilt erases the created zone.
Most baby monitor systems provide lullabies of varying quality. The songs here, all of which are original, are recordings of an actual musician or two, and they sound quite good on the device’s larger-than-most speaker. You can loop the tunes or set a timer for them to shut down after the baby has ideally fallen asleep.
The aforementioned soothing option lets you record your own 30-second audio clip that starts playing upon cry detection. But the AI detection options were rife with errors. It thought it heard crying when my dog barked, turning the night-light on, but it didn’t do this when a baby was actually crying.
You can turn on a power-saving mode that deactivates all AI and motion tracking options when the camera is running on battery mode. But I found thsse functions so unusable that I kept them off even when the camera was plugged in.
A huge detriment, especially if you want to keep your phone/tablet battery alive a little longer, is the lack of background audio. While the documentation for the Ebemate claims that it’s supported, whenever I navigated away from the app or put my iPhone in standby, all streaming sound cut out. The whole point of a streaming camera is that you can use it with your phone so you don’t have to haul around a separate monitoring device. The Motorola Connectview65 Plus, with both background audio in the phone app and a handheld monitor, is a better bet.
Not Smart Enough
If the Ebemate Smart Baby Monitor Camera were truly smart, the price would be a bargain, but it’s just not up to snuff. By comparison, the Nanit Pro system pushes the AI bar much higher. Of course, the Nanit Pro is also much more expensive, but even basic functionality here falls short—the Ebemate app needs a lot of work, and so do the camera functions. Ultimately, you’ll get a lot more features for a greater peace of mind if you’re willing to spring for the Nanit Pro. But if it’s out of your budget, you’ll still get more bang for your buck with the Motorola ConnectView65 Plus.
