Glad I found this forum... I recently purchased the
Amcrest ProHD for ~ $99 off Amazon. I bought it as a test to see if it would be suitable as a replacement for my almost 5 year old Foscam FI8918W cameras that are still going strong and surviving the outdoors under a carport since 2011, but video quality is so yesteryear on them.
The good: The Amcrest's video quality is fantastic for a $100 camera. tilt and pan motion is fast and smooth.
The bad: The motion detection sucks. Really badly. It is unreliable and either way too sensitive or not sensitive enough to be usable. I exhausted all combinations of settings and could not find a happy place where it was reliable and just sensitive enough to trigger if something like a bobcat or coyote was walking under my carport. It would either pick up every moving leaf shadow yet not detect a car, or it would take something big as a car to set it off. Also, it would only send one single snapshot with each motion-detect email and that snapshot would be several seconds behind the motion event so that the object that triggered it was no longer in view. Useless. They have no clue about writing firmware/software for what could be amazing hardware for the price.
So, I then bought a Foscam FI9821P since my old Foscams had such good motion detection and sent me 6 snapshots of the motion in each email. Well, the image quality of course does not compare to the Amcrest since it's not only 720p vs 1080p but the sensor in the Foscam just is not as good. That's OK since 720 blows away my old cameras. The motion detect is good and reliable too, but it only sends 3 snapshots per email, when Foscam's sales rep told me via web chat that it would send 6.
The really bad: This camera requires you to install a buggy, half-baked browser plugin that only works with IE and ignores the browser's proxy setings. That means I cannot even access my camera from the office since all web traffic there goes thu a proxy for security. My old Foscam cameras worked perfectly fine on IE, Firefox, Chrome browsers and also on Windows, Linux, Mac and Chromebook computers too and went thru the security proxy just fine.
I can access this camera thru the IP Cam Viewer android app on my phone using our Wifi network at my office but video is extremely choppy and herky-jerky and drops out for several seconds at a time. My old Foscam units are smooth as silk in this very same app in comparison. I've even got both main and sub streams tuned down to low res and slow framerates on the FI9821P to use minimum bandwidth, but that did not help much.
I'm now so disappointed in Foscam that I must find a new brand of camera and do not recommend them to anyone anymore. Stay away from them. Their software has become useless rubbish.