Generally, the basics on most cameras today are a video output of 720p, night vision, digital zoom (sometimes pan/tilt), one-way microphone, and a free app to access the video from your phone. Expense increases when you start looking at cameras with 1080p, optical zoom, two-way microphone, and cloud storage. Review wise, I’ve read good things about Petcube, NestCam, and Canary, and mixed reviews for Zmodo and D-Link.

From my own experience, there is a negligible difference between 720p and 1080p in a well lit room. I’ve only had cameras with digital zoom, as not many cameras have optical zoom and the ones that do are pretty expensive. For cameras with digital zoom, as you zoom in, the quality of the picture will slightly decrease (blur/pixelate) the more you zoom in. For cameras with optical zoom, the quality of the picture will remain the same as you zoom in.

I’ve used D-Link DCS 933L in the past, and currently have NestCam. The only negatives I experienced with D-Link was that it was ridiculously hard to setup (the setup is different than the instructions), the angle view was really small, and there was a tiny bit of lag time that happened every so often. The only negative I have with NestCam is that I thought the 1080p would be more impressive than it turned out to be.