Hasta La Gadget!

Two new products from Lorex bring peace of mind to your home and business, and help prevent theft. The $270 Lorex Portable Color LCD Digital Wireless Monitoring System is a handheld baby monitor, which broadcasts video and audio from a wireless camera to a portable video monitor. If you’re not within range (even on the other side of the globe), the $300 LNE3003 Remote Surveillance Camera can stream video to your iPhone or any device with a Web browser.

We tried it at close range, and the Lorex baby monitor product worked well. It was able to broadcast audio and video across the PCMag Labs–an environment with far more interference-causing gadgets than you’d likely have at home or work. Lorex suggests a range of up to 450 feet at home.

Setup required very little work (no need to even read the instruction manual), and took only a few minutes to complete. The wireless camera isn’t completely wireless–you’ll need to plug in its AC adapter–but the portable monitor includes a belt clip and rechargeable battery as well as a dock for charging the device.

The Monitoring System will prove useful outside of the home as well, and includes an A/V-out jack (with cables) for connecting to a TV or recording device. The color camera’s image quality is more than sufficient for use as a baby monitor, and audio pickup was fine for occasional monitoring, but listening in to employee conversations might prove difficult with the receiver’s built-in speaker. The receiver also includes an audio level indicator. The device cannot send video to the Web or connect to your computer, though other offerings from Lorex help fill this gap.