Project Nursery 4.3 Review

Melisa Fluhr and Pam Ginocchio are interior design enthusiasts who wanted to help parents develop tools and find products for baby's nursery and kid friendly projects. The Project Nursery website has grown and reaches more than 1.5 million millennial parents, and design professionals. Project Nursery now has some licensed products that include nursery electronics, with a joint venture with VOXX International.

Performance Comparison

A quick look at the chart below makes it clear why the Project Nursery 4.3 (shown in blue) video monitor did not win an award.

The sections below will further illustrate how the Nursery Project fared in our tests during side-by-side comparisons.

Range

The Project Nursery monitor earned a score of 3 of 10 for range. This is the lowest range in the review, barely working through 3 walls and 54 ft in our indoor house tests. By contrast the Philips Avent SCD630, another dedicated monitor earned a 9 for range and worked up to 5 walls and 92 ft. Project Nursery claims a line of sight range of 800 ft, which is different than indoor testing, but even our field test results only showed 700 ft and that was touch and go with coverage we didn't feel confident about.

Audio / Visual

This monitor earned a 4 of 10 for sound clarity. In contrast, the Philips Avent SCD630 earned an 8 for sound. The Project Nursery monitor has a bright and somewhat "echoy" sound. It is not super clear at any volume and it doesn't get as loud as the competition. It does offer sound sensitivity adjustment and background noise reduction, but it doesn't do either very well.

The Nursery earned a 5 of 10 for video quality. The picture quality for the monitor is not the best. It looks sort of washed out, muted and strangely stretched like it is trying to fit a screen wider than it needs. The colors in the daytime are muted and the zoom makes the image fuzzy. For night vision things didn't get better. The image becomes really washed out, and the bottom part of our eye chart disappeared. Almost all of the clarity it has during the day is completely gone in the dark.

Ease of Use

The Project Nursery earned a 4 of 10 for ease of use, the lowest score in this metric. The Philips Avent SCD630 earned an 8, making it the highest ease of use score for a dedicated monitor. The Nursery comes in a cool box and the presentation makes you feel like you are special and have purchased something akin to an iPhone. Setup is easy as the camera and parent unit come pre-paired. This however, is where things take a turn. The overall usability and day-to-day experience of this monitor is more difficult than the competition.

The buttons and menus are not intuitive for this monitor and you need to select options inside options inside options to accomplish the simplest of tasks. This means a lot of button pushing in a sleep induced haze that may be difficult even after you've owned it a while. You also have to repeat your steps to get back out of the menu, making it annoying to deal with if baby is crying. The zoom button is the only easy button to use and it works the camera movement as well. Pan and tilt for the camera requires holding down the zoom button until the arrows appear, but moving about can be herky jerky and slow.

Battery Life

The Nursery earned a 6 of 10 for battery life, its highest rated metric in our tests. This monitor has a lithium ion battery in the parent unit that lasted 10 hours in our tests. The manufacturer claims 8 hours for the mini monitor and 16 hours for the larger parent unit when using the sound activated power saving mode. While our results do not match those claimed, they should get you through a regular night's sleep at least.

Features

The Project Nursery earned a 4 of 10 for features, which is below the average of 5. This monitor comes with everything you need to use the monitor including a mini parent unit you can wear as a watch or clip on with a carabiner or belt clip. Unfortunately, you CANNOT use both parent units at the same time, so mom and dad cannot both watch baby from different rooms. The Nursery standard parent unit has a 4.3 in screen and will work paired with up to 4 Project Nursery cameras.

While the idea of the mini monitor is fun, we didn't think it was very easy to use and the smaller size isn't worth sacrificing image quality. During daylight (above left) the baby has all but lost his face on this small image, and even using zoom at night (above right) his mouth is missing and you won't be able to tell if he has his eyes open or not.

This camera offers a temperature sensor, but in our tests it reported a temperature 4 degrees cooler than the room actually was, which can be concerning if you are trying to create the optimum temperature suggested to avoid SIDS.

This monitor also features:

• Two-way talk to baby

• Sound / motion activation

• Auto screen wake up / sleep

• 2X zoom

• True camera pan and tilt

• Night vision

• Recording on micro SD

• 3 lullabies

Electromagnetic Field (EMF) Levels

The Project Nursery does have the lowest average EMF readings for a dedicated monitor, but the readings were not as good as the Wi-Fi monitors. With the camera about 6 ft from baby, the read out was 1.93. The parent unit will need to be closer as most parents set this by their bed at night, but many parents have fewer concerns for themselves than baby. With the parent unit 3 ft from the reader the average EMF was 1.24, and over 6 with the unit within 6 inches.

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