Costco blog/discussion forum

Costco.com is selling a wireless video baby monitor system, the Q-See 2.4" TFT monitor with wireless camera (Costco item #298791, available online only). This comes with a small handheld monitor, a camera, two power adapters, and a video cable. Both the camera and monitor can run off of either batteries or the power adapter, which is plugged into the wall.

You probably want to mount the camera somewhere in the baby's room, plugged into a wall outlet. If you use batteries on the camera, you'll spend a fortune, since the 4 AA batteries will only last about 5 hours. The monitor, on the other hand, can run off batteries. The trick is to put the monitor in sleep mode, (turn off the video portion) when you aren't actively looking at it.

This wireless baby monitor is regularly priced at $189 at costco.com, with shipping and handling included. However, a $20 discount is available for the month of June 2008. This does not appear to be a great deal. You can get the same $169 price, directly from the Q-See store. Since it's the same price, you might as well buy it from costco.com in case you need to return it. The Q-See store, however, also sells a second camera for $69.99.

Last summer, costco.com was selling a similar version of the Q-See baby monitor for $150, but a $50 off discount gave it an effective price of $100. It was identical in appearance, but I believe the new version contains updated hardware/software. We bought two of these and used them for a few weeks, before ultimately returning them. The major complaint we had was that the audio portion of the monitor did not work at all. The video portion worked quite well, including the night vision. We contacted Q-See customer support about this via email. The lack of audio was apparently due to our wireless computer network, which operates in the same frequency band as the baby monitor.
I noted occasional bursts of interference on the video monitor. I tracked these occasional bursts to our microwave. When the microwave was in use, the video was very scrambled.

A few weeks after returning these at our local warehouse, I received an email questionnaire from costco.com asking why I returned it. The questionnaire contained several multiple choice questions including one about the lack of audio. So perhaps this was a common problem that has been fixed in this updated (and more expensive) version.

Q-See is not a brand known to many parents. The Q-See wireless baby monitor (Model QSDB8209C) is one of a number of products made by Digital Peripheral Solutions, Inc of Anaheim, California. All of the other products are related to surveillance video. For instance, in many Costco warehouses, you can buy a complete video surveillance system, which includes 4, 8, or 16 cameras, a monitor, and a digital video recorder. This product is usually located near the televisions. Although Q-see does not specialize in baby products, they do specialize in video surveillance.