For home surveillance, you can get really fancy and expensive but how simple and cheap can you get? Homeowners generally do not want to spend a lot of money on this and, often as important, dread having to figure out how to set up complex systems.

Last month, while at Costco, we saw a very cheap home monitoring kit, the Lorex LW32, which provides 2 wireless cameras and a hand held monitor. We picked it up for less than $100.

We've tested a lot of home/residential surveillance products like the D-Link DCS-920, Cisco WVC80N, the Lorex LNE10001, the Trendnet TV-IP110, etc.). Each of those cameras individually are essentially the price of the this entire kit.

The immediate question is: what type of quality and functionality can you get for such a low price? As we show in the test results, it's obvious that there are major limitations. However, this home monitoring kit was not junk and in some ways, it had clear advantages over the more sophisticated IP cameras.

The key decision making factor is understanding the tradeoffs between the home monitoring kit (no recording, no remote viewing vs simple setup, easy access, etc.). We explore this more inside the PRO section.