Swann Digital Private Eye: Hands on Product Review

Anyone who has ever seen the movie Meet The Parents, will remember the scene where Robert de Niro, a retired CIA operative, expounds upon his new business venture of "nanny-cams". The nanny-cams depicted in that comedy were motion activated, and designed for checking up on babysitters. As de Niro said, "we'll be watching you". He did that cool sign with the two fingers a little later.

I got a chance to try out the closest thing to a nanny-cam with the Swann Digital Private Eye. It came in one of those hard plastic packaging that surprisingly opened up quite easily. The Swann Digital Private Eye was also very easy to work.

The instructions really spell it out for you, and all I had to do was plug it in. From there, the green light on the front started blinking, which I can only imagine was a silent shutter of a camera. I left it on my desk as I read the instructions, and wondered what kind of pictures it was taking. I found out that I could push the button on the side and make it take a manual picture too.

I then took out the mini-CD and downloaded the software, which was a breeze to say the least. I found that once I connected it to my computer via USB to mini USB cable, it ran as if it was a webcam. To be honest, I was surprised that the Digital Private Eye could be used in such a manner, as this is not stated on the box anywhere. Not only was it a webcam, but a webcam that could take still shots as well.

The problem was that all I wanted to do is just look at my pictures. I then discovered that you had to turn the camera off before that happened, and then wait for the computer to recognize it. From there, it was just like viewing pictures stored on a flash drive, and I found multiple images of me looking at the Digital Private Eye instruction booklet and trying to figure out how it works. Now that I got over my residual awkwardness with this gadget, I find it to be quite cool.

According to the stats, the Swann Digital Private Eye is capable of taking 30,000 shots, which in turn stores them on a 1GB SD card. Fortunately, the SD card is included and I now wish I had an SD card reader on my computer.

The Swann Digital Private Eye is definitely an item that I would recommend to those who feel that they need an "extra set of eyes" for valid reasons. You can get it for less that $200 USD.