The First Years True Choice P400 Premium Digital Monitor, 2 Parent Unit Review

First off, I'll have to admit I did not use this as a "baby monitor", we used it to be able to hear our kids play in the basement and be able to talk to them. It's worked out just fine. I like the two way hear/talk aspect. I wish they would have had a monitor like this when my kids WERE babies...would have been nice to try to soothe from another room. I think I'll get this as a gift when I am invited to a baby shower. It's also great if you have a disabled parent/family member living with you and you need to "keep tabs" on their sleeping habits (ie: they fall...you hear it).
With our first child, my wife and I went through 3 different baby monitor brands before we finally found an acceptable model--a Sony that we use presently. The First Years model I am reviewing here is for our twin girls, who will be arriving soon. However, we tried out the monitor right away to ensure that it meets our expectations.



First of all, we live in a 3-story home, and our son's room is on the top floor. We wanted a monitor that would have clear reception on both of the lower floors--no crackling, static, or other annoying noises, like we have gotten with other monitors. We were very pleased to find that extraneous noises from this monitor are virtually nonexistent, which is amazing, given our past experience with baby monitors in our home. In addition to having no extraneous noises, the signal quality is remarkable. The sound coming out of the roving monitors clipped to our belts was crystal clear--as if we were standing in our son's room. Very impressive!



In addition to the #1 priority of clear reception 1 or 2 floor away, we wanted a monitor with plug-in recharge options for all 3 pieces--the stationary monitor in the nursery and the 2 roving monitors. This unit comes with all 3 plug-in options (actually, the stationary monitor is always plugged in, which is typical).



Surprisingly, we have found the communication between the roving monitors to be pretty neat. We can speak with one another in different parts of the house with these monitors. We could also speak with our son in the nursery (that is a different button than the one used to communicate between roving monitors), but that just seems too weird. We are concerned that our son would grow up thinking there are mysterious voices coming from his walls or ceiling. Therefore, we have not tried that feature. For those who want to terrorize your kids with exorcist-like ramblings, proceed at your own risk.



The only drawback we have found is the limited battery life of the roving monitors. By this, I can honestly say that the monitors would not make it through the night unplugged. We do not use the monitors at night, but we would plug them in if we did. We have found ourselves charging the roving monitors daily, due to their limited life.



In summary, these are nice baby monitors that I would recommend to any parent or prospective parent. We know from experience that there is a lot of junk out there on the market, and these are the best we have tried out of 4 total models from 4 different manufacturers.
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