Tiny Traveler Car Cam Review
A truly wireless baby monitoring system
Retail Price: $239.99
A piece of baby tech that I’ve used daily since my son was born is a travel monitor and camera for the car. I’m firmly in the anti-mirror camp as they’re difficult to utilize and ultimately distracting for the parent driver attempting a quick glance at their child in the rear seat. A camera monitoring system is the way to go and when I was deciding between the wide assortment of options, I was truly lost trying to choose a reliable product. As a tech enthusiast, I trusted my instincts and went with the Tiny Traveler kit. It’s a fully wireless setup that completely eliminates cables to the camera and the monitor if you so choose. That fact itself makes this an enticing opportunity as wires are cumbersome and require immense setup and risk when dealing with a child in a vehicle. This one premium feature comes at a high cost as the Tiny Traveler is a lofty investment upfront. After using this setup daily for more than a year, I can earnestly say that there are baby monitors at half the cost that provide the same video quality as the Tiny Traveler– they just have cables attached to them everywhere. Let me then explain why I still think the Tiny Traveler was the best choice I could have made for monitoring my son in the car.
Camera and monitor kit
Truly Wireless
The main selling point of the Tiny Traveler is the portability aspect of the system. It’s a car camera first and foremost, but it can be so much more than that. The main two components to this setup revolve around a small 720p camera and a 5” touch screen LCD display. Once again there aren’t any cables connecting the camera with the monitor nor is there one to a power source required. They both have their own individual batteries built in. Their connection to one another is purely wireless through their own Wifi channel. You don’t need internet connectivity or Bluetooth as it's completely offline. It does a pretty good job in the latency department as what I see is just slightly delayed from what’s happening real time. I’d say less than a second and not hindering the user experience, but still noticeable nonetheless.
Back to the portability thing, because this setup is fully untethered, you can take both the monitor and the camera and place them anywhere and use them at any time as long as they both have a charge left in them. I pulled this off my car when I stayed at a hotel and used it to monitor my son at night in his crib. I’ve also pulled this off our car setup effortlessly after parking at the Grandparents house and let them borrow it for a few hours as they babysat him when I ran errands. I can’t overstate the luxury of not needing a second baby monitor to bring along with me for all of the random times we may need to watch him on a monitor outside of the house. It’s more frequent than you may think. It’s something you don’t think about much until you’re experiencing it and I’m grateful I chose a wireless option that is capable of a clean, easy multi-use function.
The camera is shaped in an horizontal oval form with a square latch mechanism on the backside. This mounting format is how all of the Tiny Traveler items connect and disconnect from their mounting stations. In this case, the camera slides into the headrest mount that goes over the headrest of the carseat the baby seat is on. The kit also includes a spring-loaded clamp that can mount the camera on an headrest extension rail or something else that can provide the stability for the clamp to lock into. I’ve been using the headrest mount and while the headrest on my Kia EV9 is shaped oddly for a carseat – it’s shaped more like a headrest on an office chair than a car headrest– it does hold the camera up on even the most bumpy of roads. There’s a tilt adjustment that can be locked and unlocked to angle the camera to the little one in the baby seat in order to get the best view possible. My setup does bounce a bit more than I’d like it to while driving, but it’s mostly due to the shape of the headrest in my car not allowing the elastic material to take form around it. Still, it does the job and keeps the camera in the right location nearly all of the time.
Picture Quality
The video quality is the bare minimum requirement of high definition. At 720p, this is likely the main detractor for most parents when they’re doing research on this category of baby products. I would say it’s acceptable, but by modern standards, it’s clearly working with outdated sensors. There are plenty of baby monitor systems that utilize a 1080p sensor at a fraction of the cost, but when you filter in the wireless aspect, that list dwindles. The camera is sharp enough to see details for a 5-inch display in normal daylight, but it does lose some of its clarity during the automatic night vision transition. When the sensors recognize lower exposure points, it automatically switches to night vision which images grayscale. Like most security cameras, this IR technology isn’t the strongpoint in their technology showcase and it's more of a compliance than anything else. However, I can distinguish my child’s eyeline and immediately recognize objects on the display so I won’t complain too much about it.
As someone who works with high level Electro-Optical and Infrared systems as a day job, I’m not easily impressed with consumer image quality. There really isn’t a superb option out there if I’m being honest. Regardless, for a baby monitor, you don’t need the highest quality as long as you’re able to see what you need to see, which is the action of your child in front of the camera. And for this one specific matter this product was designed to do, I think the Tiny Traveler does fine.
The 5-inch monitor mounted on the dash
The HD touch screen monitor is also a good reliable piece that compliments the Tiny Traveler agenda. It has a built-in kick stand that can prop the display up on a table. The kickstand folds into the body and like the camera, uses the square mount to hold in place with an arm. Tiny Traveler provides a window suction mount that can be warped into whatever angle you need. It’s like one of those cellphone window mounts people use. This is where my monitor sits on my dashboard 99% percent of the time. While you have the flexibility not to plug the monitor in, I do have it connected to my 12V DC socket (formerly known as the cigarette lighter) via the micro-USB port on the monitor. Through this route, when the car is powered on, the display connected through this socket will automatically turn on. It will also automatically shut off if it doesn’t sense that the camera is turned on. Showing its age, both the monitor and the camera itself charge using a micro-USB port. Fortunately for the camera, the kit includes a power bank that the camera snaps inside of that does have a modern USB-C port on it. We’ll get back to this in a little bit.
The touch screen monitor is where most of the interactions with the Tiny Traveler system happens. There’s a MicroSD card slot to store pictures and footage recorded by the Tiny Traveler. It’s interesting that the storage of the files isn’t located on the camera, instead operating as a screen recording of the images the monitor pushes from that camera. Through the touch screen interface drivers can quickly press the on-screen shutter button to record or stop recording a video, to transition to photo mode, or to swap camera views. If you have more than one Tiny Traveler camera, a single monitor can broadcast the live views of the two units. I can’t attest to this convenient feature as I only have one camera unit, but I’m sure it's an attractive function for parents with bigger families to view two kids on one screen side by side. That kind of goes with the theme of the user experience of the Tiny Traveler which is convenience and portability.
Speaking of which, the battery longevity of a single camera can be extended using the power bank or what Tiny Traveler calls the Battery Cradle. I’ve only ever used the camera plugged into the Cradle during our commute throughout the week and the power bank extends the battery life by 8 hours according to the company. This cradle does add extra weight to the otherwise really light camera so it does make the elastic mount strap sag. This is easily accommodatible by merely adjusting the tilt of the mount. I can tell you from real life experience that I averaged a charge every week and a half. I spend a little less than 2 hours on the road each day so I’m pretty happy with the battery life of the camera combined with the cradle.
The power bank has one button that turns the camera on with a single press. Two presses on the button will turn the camera off. When the camera is on, blue LEDs on the frame will showcase the current battery life with a scale of four dots. Unlike the monitor which does have the ability to automatically turn on, you will always have to manually power on the camera. It’s a slight inconvenience as I’ve had to get out of the driver’s seat and turn on the camera after placing my son in his seat and forgetting to turn it on while in a rush. I’ve also forgotten to manually turn the camera off a few times when quickly unloading him too. This drains the battery life as its just running without a need when none of us are in the car anymore. For the most part manually turning on and off the camera isn’t a big deal in this setup as a parent will always be at the location of the camera when the car begins its journey and ends its journey as we load our kids in and out of the car anyway.
final thoughts
I’m quite happy with the Tiny Traveler after more than a year using it on a daily basis. I very much appreciate the versatility it provides me as a parent constantly moving around with a young child. It’s not just a car monitor, it’s my baby monitor outside of the house too. Is that enough to justify nearly twice the cost of other products that point a camera at a kid? I could argue that I otherwise would have needed to invest in a car monitor and then a second home monitoring system to give to my in-laws or to take with me when we stay at a hotel. Those are not use cases that happen on a daily basis, but the Tiny Traveler covers those bases without a second thought for us. It also does it in such a simple and neat package that any parent regardless of knowledge of how cameras and touch screens work can get it up and running without hesitation. So to my family, I do believe this kit provide appropriate value for the amount of benefits it provides us.
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