Let me first say that I love photography and cameras and I should also mention that it’s RARE that I struggle writing a review article. I’d like to believe I can find positive in anything, but I’m afraid you may be about to read one of my only articles that I would not describe as positive.
Today we talking about the Kitmesh SQ11 HD Motion Camera or as they call it the “Anti-Theft Mini Camera With Night Vision & Camera.” The camera is heavily advertised on Facebook with a price of $17.97 + $4.95 shipping and shipped from China. Delivery took roughly 2-weeks and the item arrived in a plastic bag (not box) and included the camera, a USB charging cable, and a clip to be able to clip the camera to objects. The camera was supposed to also come with a fixed mount, but that was not included by Kitmesh.
The camera itself is small and cube-shaped with each side being roughly 1.25 inches and overall with the clip attached, the camera weighs just 7-ounces. The website photos show a rainbow stripe around the camera, however the stripe on my camera had fallen off in transit. Personally I wasn’t interested in the missing stripe or the missing wall mount, but unfortunately it was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Kitmesh.
The camera includes “instructions” but as you’ll see, the team at Kitmesh had some pretty awful Chinese to English translations, making operation of the camera difficult and with some features, close to impossible. I was able to work though instructions like “The machine built-in rechargeable lithium battery, first time using this machine, please charge, can be charged by the following way…” however from there it was almost unusable with statements like, “Click On Off button to boot boot blue light normally on click on the switch machine under the blue light flash 3 out of 720p video video process lamp don’t suggest a segmented automatically save 5 minutes continuous video cycle cover click…” and of course the instructions only got worse as we explored more features..
After some time searching on google I did manage to find alternate instructions from another Chinese vendor selling the same camera, but with a slightly better translation. Unfortunately these didn’t help very much either. The camera has a power button and a mode button as well as a pinhole LED light and all of the settings on the camera rely on intricate combinations of pressing these buttons and the color and flash of the tiny lamp. Even simply powering the camera on and off was tricky, let alone setting video quality, “night vision” or motion detection. After hours of experimentation, I contacted Kitmesh for help. After 2-days of waiting for a response and continued testing, Kitmesh provided better instructions, or at least so I thought.
As I tested more, the shortcomings of the new instructions as well as the camera itself became even more apparent. The camera does NOT include the micro-SD card, but I did experiment with multiple size and speed cards, and I did charge the camera without an SD card for 3 hours as suggested by Kitmesh. I also attempted multiple hard resets on the product at Kitmesh’s suggestion, and in the end nothing really helped or worked.
I can say at some point I was able to accidentally record 5-mins of video. There was no indication on the camera that I was recording, but in the end when I plugged the USB cable in, there was a video file. Based on my experience with cameras, I would rate the quality really poor. Despite my setting (or attempting to set) the camera to 1080, the quality was awful even if it was only set to 720. Even standing close to the camera made it hard to recognize faces and the overall video was dark and somewhat blurry. The below sample video was taken by the Kitmesh SQ11 Camera on a fixed mount on a sunny day.
The camera does have “night vision” but it is a completely manual process. If it was your plan to place this camera and have it record day recordings and night vision as well, that simply won’t work. The camera does NOT auto-convert based on lighting conditions. This means you’ll have to pick one and either your video will be too dark for night recording or too light for day recording. To me this was one of the major flaws in the design of this camera. Night Vision is either On or Off and not based on lighting conditions.
As far as battery life, I’m not sure the camera worked long enough to assess how long the battery will last. I can say that just playing around with the camera and trying to get it to work, the battery dies in less than 90-mins. Perhaps if it was recording longer it would die faster or last longer on motion detection. There simply was no way to test battery life because the camera constantly died and stopped recording for no apparent reason. According to Kitmesh the camera can be powered via USB to extend motion recording without using battery, however you can’t activate motion recording when the USB plug is in and the motion detection turns off when you plug in the USB.
The majority of my testing time was spent trying to configure what I suspect will be the function most people will be using this camera for: Motion Detection. The instructions call for a power on followed by holding the mode button for 3-seconds until you see a specific light sequence on the LED. I tested this sequence roughly 40-50 times from various power on/off states and I can tell you that on three occasions the camera “activated.” By activated I mean that the camera immediately recorded a 5-minute clip (with or without motion), which according to the instructions would indicate that the camera was in motion detecting mode. Forget how wasteful it is to record 5-mins of video on your micro-SD card (and battery) just to activate motion detection; but more importantly, be aware that the camera never records again, never gives any indication what it is doing and just stops. Motion detection simply won’t work despite waving in front of the camera, moving the camera or any other motion that should easily trigger motion detection mode. In the few instances where I could actually get Motion Detection to launch successfully, the camera only every recorded the initial 5-min video.
Keep in mind that on three occasions the camera indicated Motion Detection was activated, but never detected any motion. On the other 45+ times, the camera did NOTHING. The indicator light on the camera behaved exactly the same way when the camera did NOTHING or the camera recorded a 5-min video….and of course in both cases it never recorded actual motion. This is a pretty big deal breaker for a camera billed as “Anti-Theft.” Whether this was a camera defect or a near immediate battery outage, the camera failed completely to record motion.
After several days of frustrated testing, I again contacted Kitmesh again. They again responded almost 48-hours later and again sent the same instructions. I responded that the instructions weren’t working, that they had already sent the instructions previously and that the camera itself doesn’t seem to be responding the way the instructions indicate it should. Kitmesh then responded to confirm that I had actually inserted a micro-SD card leading me to believe that either they weren’t reading my detailed responses or the language-barrier was becoming more of an issue.
After no response for another 48-hours I contacted Kitmesh again and asked what process a customer would go through if they had received a camera behaving like mine. I was told the customer would have to ship the camera back to the Bao’an District of Shenzhen, China and pay for shipping with tracking to China. Once they received the item back, they would send a replacement camera. Keep in mind that shipping to Chine from the U.S. begins at $23.50 without tracking and quickly jumps to over $33.00 (for a camera valued at less than $20). As of today, Kitmesh has no longer responded to any questions about getting the camera to work or replacing the camera.
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| Image Courtesy of Kitmesh |
I’m sad to report that The Kitmesh SQ11 camera would appear to be a bit of a scam by Kitmesh. The camera comes nowhere close to living up to their advertising, and in my case it didn’t seem to function at all. The micro-SD card is not included, the mount was missing from my shipment, the instructions are unreadable, night vision has to be manually switched, the video quality is poor at best, the controls are impossible to navigate and the Motion Detection feature just doesn’t work. Kitmesh then seems to want to fall back on your inability to return the camera to China (with tracking) for a replacement as an excuse to do nothing further and keep your money. At best, I can say that perhaps the camera they sent me was simply broken or damaged, but their inability to support that issues leads me to believe that the Kitmesh SQ11 is simply THAT BAD!
I continue to contact Kitmesh in an effort to resolve this but they seem to have even forgotten that they sent this camera to be reviewed! Based on everything I’ve experienced with Kitmesh, I’d recommend you avoid dealing with them for the SQ11 Camera or anything else. I will update this post with further details as I attempt to get comment from Facebook as well as PayPal (Kitmesh is registered on PayPal as “Some Shop LLC” and a non-existent website of https://www.bluefirestore.com/).
UPDATE 13 Mar 2019: Kitmesh has now offered to send a replacement camera. The replacement camera arrived over 3-weeks later. This camera also had the rainbow stripe failure (it had fallen off in shipment). As a bonus, the SD card slot on the replacement “camera” was broken and insertion and removal of the SD card was difficult. After some additional experimentation, I did get an SD card to seat. Unfortunately the camera failed in exactly the same way as the first camera did. Motion detection does not work, the video quality is poor (assuming you can get it to record a video) and the same crappy instructions were included.
I wish I had better news to report, but I continue to feel that the Kitmesh SQ11 camera would appear to be a bit of a scam by Kitmesh and I would recommend you NOT buy it.
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| Image Courtesy of Kitmesh |
PS: I did attempt to review the camera on the Kitmesh website and the review was never published. This camera is also sold and labeled as “Cop Cam.”
Unfortunately I purchased 5 of them Yes, stupid. I am now out $107.00. These advertisers need to be held accountable forscamming people.
ReplyDeleteI wish I had seen this sooner I really do I bought also the cop cam and everything you have written is TRUE sad that this is still happening
ReplyDeleteI too have 1 of these cameras. It is now a small pile of black, broken , plastic from were I stomped the piece of worthless crap.
ReplyDelete