VAVA baby monitor review

Our verdict, if you don’t read another word: the VAVA 720P earns a 4.5 out of 5 and it is our runner-up out of the four we own, half a point behind the Infant Optics. The screen is the one thing here nothing else beats, big enough to read from a bed, the picture holds together once night vision kicks in, the camera steers from a button on the handset, and the room temperature sits on screen without you asking for it. One thing stops it being a 5, and it is the battery.

One note on scope. We cover this as gear. A baby monitor is a convenience device and not a safety one, and nothing here is a medical device. Anything touching safe sleep is a question for the AAP and the CPSC rather than a blog, including this one. What we can tell you is what it is like to own.

If you want to see it lined up against the other two monitors in the house, that comparison lives in our best baby monitor roundup. This page is about the VAVA on its own.

What the VAVA is, and what it claims

4.5 / 5our rating

It is a dedicated video monitor, sold as model VA-IH006: a white dome camera that mounts on a wall or stands on a shelf, paired with a large handheld screen. Not an app on your phone, and not a camera that needs an account to work.

The published numbers are a 720p sensor, infrared night vision, digital zoom with auto focus, a 4500 mAh battery rated at about 5 hours, and support for up to four camera channels, so it can grow past the one camera it ships with. It records in MPEG-4. The camera steers remotely.

The screen is just under 6 inches, which the listing never tells you. That is the second largest of the four monitors we own, and given that the screen is most of the reason to buy this thing, leaving it off the spec sheet is a genuinely odd decision.

The screen is the reason to buy it

Resolution is close to the least useful number on a baby monitor box, and this is the monitor that proves it. At 720p the VAVA is the lowest-resolution unit we own after the HelloBaby, and it is the one we find easiest to actually use.

What matters is that the panel is big and that the night picture is clean. You look at a monitor from four feet away, half asleep, for about two seconds. Under those conditions a large slightly soft image beats a small sharp one every time. The infrared night vision produces something you can read rather than the grey soup a lot of cheap cameras give you after dark, and that is the moment most monitors fall apart.

The sound deserves as much credit. It goes properly loud, which matters more than it reads on paper: a monitor you have to strain to hear is a monitor you quietly stop trusting, and then you are getting up to check anyway.

Steering the camera is the feature we use most

The single button that swings the camera side to side gets more use than anything else on the handset. A baby who has rolled to the far end of the cot goes from invisible to visible without you opening a door and undoing twenty minutes of settling.

It matters more again if your children share a room. One camera that steers will cover two cots, which is the cheap version of the two-camera setups we cover in our VTech review and our HelloBaby review. It is not as good as a camera each, because you are choosing which child to look at rather than seeing both, but it is a real answer rather than a compromise you resent.

There is digital zoom as well. It is fine. It is not the reason to buy the monitor.

The temperature readout earns its place

The room temperature sits on the screen alongside the picture. It sounds like the sort of throwaway feature that pads a listing, and it is the thing we mention to other parents first.

The reason is that it turns a guess into a number. In the middle of a warm spell you want to know what the room is actually doing rather than judging it by how the hallway feels. We are not going to tell you what temperature to keep a nursery at, because that is exactly the kind of advice that belongs with the AAP and your own pediatrician rather than a gear blog. What the monitor does is give you the number.

The battery is the real limit

VAVA rates the handset at about 5 hours from its 4500 mAh cell. That is an evening, not a night.

In practice this shapes how you use it. The VAVA is a monitor that lives on its charger next to the bed and gets picked up, rather than one you carry around the house all day. That suits us, because that is how we use it anyway. It will not suit you if you want a screen that follows you from the kitchen to the garden and back without a thought.

For contrast, the HelloBaby in the same house is rated at 16 to 30 hours depending on mode, and that is not a small difference in degree, it is a different device. If untethered all-day use is what you are buying for, our HelloBaby monitor review is the one to read.

What the listing gets wrong

Two things, and both are worth knowing before you order.

The connectivity fields say WiFi, while the rest of the listing reads like a self-contained camera and handset pair. We cannot reconcile those from the outside and we are not going to declare which it is when we cannot verify it. If a monitor that never touches your router is the entire reason you are shopping, confirm it with the seller first. A monitor with no internet connection cannot be reached over the internet, which is the whole argument for that category, and it is not a claim to take on trust from a spec table.

The same listing also describes the unit as for outdoor use and gives it an IP54 weather rating. Nobody is buying a nursery camera to leave out in the rain. Baby gear listings are full of copied and pasted attribute fields, and this is a good reminder to read them as marketing rather than fact.

Who it’s for

Buy it if you have one room to watch and you want the monitor to be easy at 3 a.m. rather than impressive on a spec sheet, and you want the largest readable screen in this comparison. That is most families, and it is why this sat at the top of our roundup until the Infant Optics took it.

Buy something else if you need the screen to run all day away from a charger, or if you have two cots and want to see both at once rather than steering between them. Those are the two jobs this monitor does not do, and both have an answer elsewhere in the house.

The bottom line

A 4.5 out of 5. The VAVA gets the things right that you actually use every night: a screen you can read, sound you can hear, and a camera you can point without getting up. It gives up half a point for a battery that ties it to a charger, and it asks you to do one piece of homework on the WiFi question that the listing should have answered itself.

If you are still deciding between this and the other three we own, the best baby monitor roundup puts all four side by side, and the one that edges it out is in our Infant Optics baby monitor review. If you are kitting out the room around it, our registry checklist covers what actually gets used daily.