As a parent with two small children that share a bedroom, keeping an eye on them when they’re supposed to be sleeping is sometimes an arduous task. We’ve tried a couple of different baby monitors with varying levels of success. The Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe presented an opportunity, so I wanted to see if it could stack up to some of the previous options I’ve tried.
In the box, you get the camera itself, the monitor screen, power cable for both the screen and camera, and the Hubble grip which allows you to mount the camera to a surface in your home. The power cables are fairly long, which is nice since the best camera placement isn’t always right next to a power outlet. Once you make an account with their app, HubbleClub, it will guide you through the setup process, which is fairly simple assuming there are no issues connecting to Wi-Fi.
The monitor has an internal battery so that you can unplug the device from the wall and take it around the house wherever you might need it, but I found in practice that it would run out of battery very quickly. The internal battery is good for situations like brief power outages and the like where you’ll be able to get it back on the juice before the battery runs flat.
The camera itself has a really good quality camera for a baby monitor. The resolution on the screen is 1280×720. This allows for crystal clear imaging of the room in question. Combined with great night vision, means you’ll always be able to see what’s going on in the room. The night vision automatically engages when the room is sufficiently dark, so you never have to worry about turning it on or off.
“All in all, the Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe is a great camera and monitor pair if you want it to point at a single location the entirety of its lifetime.”
Where I started to have issues with the Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe was the actual touchscreen of the monitor. The 5” touchscreen can pan the camera across the room by swiping across the screen, but the movement of the camera when doing so is so minimal that it becomes a multiple swipe task to pan the camera the equivalent of 8 feet in the room in question.
There have also been a few times when the image just did not show up on the screen even though it was connected fully and had shown an image five minutes prior. I could hear the goings-on in the room but couldn’t see anything. Restarting the monitor tended to provide a fix, but it was a pain at the best of times.
“Where I started to have issues with the Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe was the actual touchscreen of the monitor.”
The Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe has a myriad of other features for the kids to use the monitor as a tablet. There are videos and games built-in, but again the issue came from the screen’s inability to scroll with any kind of speed or consistency. So much so that we simply abandoned the idea of it and left the kids to their own tablets anyways.
The app to control the Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe can also display the camera in the room, and I did try to get it working, but it was not to be. The image never showed up on screen, and I couldn’t control the movement of the camera any better when it did than when I used the monitor. Sticking with the monitor became the way forward.
All in all, the Hubble Nursery Pal Deluxe is a great camera and monitor pair if you want it to point at a single location the entirety of its lifetime. This was not the replacement for the camera we had been using as we are still employing that one to monitor the other half of the room that this one doesn’t see. At $199.99 USD, that’s a lot of money to spend on a camera and monitor when you can get a regular camera that has an app that works for a fraction of the cost.
