The Best Baby Video Monitor? | Motorola MBP36S Video Monitor

The Best Baby Video Monitor? | Motorola MBP36S Video Monitor Review

Once our firstborn started sleeping a bit more and would go to bed in her own cot at night instead of staying downstairs with us, we decided that we needed a video baby monitor. We were not comfortable with a just audio one as we wanted to be able to see what was happening as well as hear our baby if she was crying.

We first had the Chicco Baby Control Video Digital Top one which was fine but one thing that really annoyed us is that you had to charge the monitor all the time. You only get one cable in the box and you use this to either plug in the monitor or the camera. We charged the monitor and then used the camera plugged in. You can use regular batteries if you haven’t charged it but the video monitor eats the batteries in one night so that’s not an affordable option.

When the cable broke we got a replacement one from Chicco which was very kind but the charging fuss made us decide to buy a different one soon after. We looked online for reviews and recommendations and I googled “Best Baby Video Monitor” which gave me lots of results for Motorola MBP36S Video Monitor. It seemed very popular, was available at a decent price in shops online like Amazon and in store from Argos (which is where we bought ours) and it ticked an important box for us which is that it’s not a WiFi one. Baby monitors that are connected to the internet in some way are a big safety issue and privacy concern so we were adamant that we wanted one without internet connection.

Other things that we like about our Motorola baby video monitor that we’ve had for a year or two now are:

• Pan, tilt and zoom function. It rotates so widely that we can monitor both children when they are asleep in the same room on different sides. This is amazing!
• The screen is quite large at 3.5 inches and it is a colour screen but at nighttime in the dark, everything looks black, blue and white.
• The two-way communication so that we can talk to the children through the monitor to reassure them that we’re coming upstairs.
• The high sensitivity microphone is very good and the sound is really clear.
• Room temperature monitoring on the screen is very handy as we don’t use any other thermometers upstairs at the moment.
• The menus and buttons on the parent unit are easy to use and understand.

The fact that both the parent unit and the baby unit includes mains adaptors (at the time that we bought it — check before buying that this is still the case) is great as it means we never need to worry about charging. You can however use the parent unit wirelessly and just use its rechargeable battery but we’ve never had the need for this.

Other features that we don’t use but that others might be interested in are:

• Infrared night vision recording
• 23 channels
• Up to 300m range and out of range indicator
• 5 lullabies
• Wall mountable camera
• Power saving mode
• Low battery indicator

I would like the camera base to be more like a webcam so that you could attach it to a cot for example for better positioning. This would make the camera almost perfect! We were considering buying an additional camera that you can use with he same parent unit to observe two children in different rooms at the same time but the additional cameras cost nearly as much as a the complete set so we might just buy another full set which would give us two screens too.

I can’t comment on the battery life if you’re using the camera’s rechargeable batteries as we have never done this but for us, the way we use this video monitor, it works very well and I would happily buy the same one again.

The Motorola MBP36S Video Monitor is currently available from Amazon.co.uk for £88.99 compared to £139.99 from Argos.