Amazon Gadget Haul 14 ! Some Budget Price Hits and a Few Misses...

Hey everybody, it's Lon Cy and it is time for another Amazon haul video. I've got five more items that came in recently that I thought I would check out. Two of them ended up being a bit of a disappointment, but I was already halfway through the video. So, I'm going to include them and tell you why they didn't quite work out. Not everything is going to be a hidden gem, but three of the items we have, I think, are very good and two of them are very affordable. So, I think you might find something of interest in this one. Now, I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that some of the items I purchased with my own funds. Some came in free of charge from the manufacturer. I'll tell you which ones are which as we're working our way through the review here, but no other compensation was received. No one has reviewed or approved what you're about to see before it was uploaded, and all opinions are my own. So, why don't we get into it now and see what is in this

week's haul. Now, if you're a video nerd like me, you've probably seen this brand before, Orai. They make all sorts of useful little HDMI connectors for routing video to different places. And this one can take four different HDMI sources in and you can switch between them very quickly here on the front of the panel. They also have a remote control that it came with that I can't seem to find at the moment. And as I switch through these sources here, you can see how cleanly everything switches. I'll give you the capture here and you can see just how quick it brings in all of this stuff. And what you can do with this though is hit the mode button and get a four-way split here. So if you were looking for an inexpensive way to have all of your March Madness games running on a single screen at the same time, this might be an inexpensive way to get there. You can switch audio sources with the remote control, or you can push the front panel buttons here, and that will change the audio focus. If you hit the button more than once, it'll switch the source. So you can even have the same thing on two different squares if you want. They have a few other modes with this. So, you can hit the mode button here. The problem is everything gets squished, as you can see. Um, so it doesn't scale the video properly, but I found the four-way split here to be the most useful, and I think that's what the value proposition is of this device. So, nothing spectacular here, but it is very useful if you are trying to find an inexpensive way to get four things up on your screen at the same time. This will support 1080p 60. It also supports HDCP for 1080p content. So, I was able to get Netflix to play uh content without any copyright issues. So, this is a pretty useful little device here and not very expensive. And I paid for the box here with my own funds. Now, let's take a look at the monitor that it's plugged into because that's our next item. All

right. Next up, we've got a super affordable display from Dell. This is $110. 240 Hz, 1080p, 23. 8 8 in here IPS. The only thing you're really giving up with this is brightness. It's only about 300 nits, but if you don't need that much brightness, I think it's going to be a pretty good deal, especially if you're hooking up a PlayStation or an Xbox and maybe a PC. Also, there are three inputs on the back, two HDMI and one display port. It also supports AMD Freync. I've got an AMD Freync compatible PC here plugged in. And we are able to get to 240 hertz over display port without issue. And I can pull up our AMD settings here and make sure adaptive sync is turned on. It supports all of this stuff. And it's been a pretty good display overall, minus the brightness issues here. Now, the display has a response time of 0. 5 milliseconds in its extreme mode, and I found there's very little motion blur when you've got this enabled. It looks pretty good for a budget display here. Really good if you've got a mister hooked up to it like I do here. And unfortunately, my camera here shooting at 30 frames per second won't do this justice, but I am not seeing much blur here or any kind of screen tearing even with a MR device playing an old Nintendo game here. So, this looks pretty good from a response rate perspective. and modern stuff looks really nice on this. I've got the 3D Mark Wildlife benchmark test running on here. And this, of course, runs at all sorts of different frame rates as the test goes on. And I have the display at 240 Hz. I've got FreeSync enabled. I'm not seeing any screen tearing. Everything looks nice and sharp. The color actually looks pretty good on this, too. And I checked the specs, and this is running at 99% of sRGB, so the color accuracy is pretty nice on it, too. So, it makes for a decent modern uh gaming display as well. Now, the stand that it comes with is about what you would expect for the price point, so keep your expectations in check. It's not all that wobbly. It doesn't go up or down, though. It can only tilt up and down like this. So, that's about the only adjustment you'll get. But, the monitor does have a visa mount on the back, so you could get a secondary stand that might offer you a little more flexibility in screen position. Now, I also did an input lag test on the display. What I do is shoot the screen at 240 frames per second with my iPhone here and I see how long it takes for a button push to register on screen. So, here is the result. 1 2 3 4 5 6 and seven. You'll see that green button there light up yellow. And this is every bit as good as the more expensive gaming displays I've looked at recently. So, this is performing quite well for a very budget display. Now, there's not much in the way of bells and whistles on this display, but it does have a nice menu system here that's pretty easy to navigate. And I also like that you've got all of your info right up top here, so you know what refresh rate your computer is sending it and what resolution. So, all in, I think it's a pretty nice display for the money, and I paid for this one with my own funds.

Now, unfortunately, I've got a couple of duds to talk about next. This is the Abbex Loot M4 MagSafe mobile controller. This looked interesting to me because it does use MagSafe to connect your phone. But here's the problem. Number one is that when you want to use the phone vertically, you can't because the phone covers it up. It is designed to work in this horizontal orientation. And as a result here, it's very topheavy because there's nothing really to grab onto to counter the weight. And the controls are scrunched together. The D-pad is terrible. This feels like a cheap knockoff Chinese controller. It just doesn't work well at all. The buttons are tiny here. I don't have huge hands, but I'm having a hard time getting my hands wrapped around this. And as I was playing with this, I was wondering why even make it this small if it's designed to work when the phone is in its landscape orientation. You got all this extra room here. They could have spread things out a little bit. It does have analog controls, but you can't click the analog sticks here. And this one feels like it gets stuck. It just doesn't move as freely as the one on the left here does. So, this is just one of these products that just feels halfbaked. You do have some small buttons up top here for your shoulders and triggers, but again, it's just not good. So, this is something that I would advise avoiding. It looks cooler uh than it is. They've got some cool color concepts with it, but the controller itself is pretty trash. So, I would avoid this one. Now

this next one isn't quite a dud because it does work, but it doesn't work as well as I thought it should. This is the USBC phone drive from SanDisk. And for the most part, it's like your standard run-of-the-mill USB memory stick. And I've been buying SanDisk products for the better part of 30 years at this point. I'm always very pleased with them. And this one works okay as a basic USB stick, but they were advertising 149 megabytes per second of transfer rates. And a little earlier, I did run a test on it. And if you look on the right hand side of the screen there, you can see that it is achieving close to the advertised speeds when it is reading. But the right speeds, as you can see on the left, are far below that. Only about 35 megabytes per second. And when I wrote to the drive with a big file, it was writing in chunks. It was kind of getting stuck and then waiting for the cache to catch up and then it would start again. So, it doesn't have very fast write speeds, although the read speeds are quite good. So, this is really just a basic USB stick. not something I would recommend if you have a large volume of data to transfer. Now, with this being called a phone drive, I was curious to see how it would work when I plugged it into a phone. So, here on my iPhone, it will work like any USB stick works. We'll see it popping up here on my list of locations here in a second once it gets registered with the system. And I can browse the file system, move files onto it manually and all that kind of stuff. There are apps for the iPhone and for Android that do offer some utility functions if you wanted something a little more automatic. I did not install the app on my iPhone. I did get bugged a couple of times initially about it and now it doesn't bug me anymore. Uh then I've got the app actually running on my Android phone here. So if we jump over to my Android phone and we plug in the device, I do have the app already loaded here. I did find on Android that it's always prompting me to load the app up even when the app is loaded here. Um, but once you have it up and running, you can copy items from your phone, you can back up your photos, you can do all the sorts of basic file transfers that you might want to do, and the app does make it a little bit easier. U, but again, I was not pleased with the right speeds on this. It was definitely nowhere near where the marketing said it would be. So, probably good for doing backups of your phone or doing small file transfers or maybe using it as a boot drive or something, but for big rights, it's probably not going to be the best choice. And in full disclosure, the drive here came in from SanDisk free of charge. Now, this next one is not a dud. This is from Yui, and this is their Yui Cam S4. In full disclosure, this came in free of charge. And I've been using

these Yui cameras now for quite a while. They've got a bunch of different security cameras in their lineup. A few of them they've sent to me over the years, but I've also bought a lot of them because I like them so much. And one of the advantages of the UI system is that you can use it without a subscription. And there really isn't any reduction in features if you choose not to use their subscription, which is available but optional. So all of these cameras have onboard storage. You can put an SD card in them or you can get their base unit and have everything recorded centrally in a portion of your home somewhere. Uh so what's great about these is flexibility. And this is like their creme de la creme camera here. So, this one incorporates a wide angle 4K lens, and it also has a 360 degree PTZ camera as well, and you can set it up so that the PTZ is looking in a different spot than the bullet camera is. And then if either of the cameras pick up something, then it will start tracking. So, a little earlier I was out uh in the garden where I had this thing mounted for the last couple of days. And as I walked by the bullet camera, the PTZ camera then takes charge and starts following things around. And this, of course, was a night shot. It does record audio. So, all of that was good on there and you can talk through it as well. It's also pretty good at picking up some chaos. So, here's another shot of my wife coming home and I was out walking the dog when she arrived and the camera switched over to me and the dog once the car got in the garage. So, it's doing a pretty good job of keeping track of everything. It even tracked the Amazon guy when he was dropping stuff off the other day. Now, the bullet cam portion has some adjustments to it. So, you can have it look straight ahead or down if you've got it mounted up high. So, that's nice to have on there. You can also adjust where the whole situation is pointed here uh just by moving it before you mount it. So, if you have it on the corner of a wall somewhere, you can uh get that dialed in to what works best for your particular situation. On the PTZ camera here, you can see it's actually two cameras. So, one is a telephoto lens that's like a 3x zoom, and the other is a similar uh field of view as the bullet camera. These are only 2K, so it's a little lower resolution. And what you get, as you saw earlier, is both images stacked together. So, it looks pretty good. I think you can definitely identify people from that. And it zooms in pretty nicely as well. But, I didn't see a way to select which of these lenses are used. I think it's just dynamically choosing which one is best for the particular situation. It does come with a solar panel which I have mounted on the top here. This is a 5 and a half watt solar panel and what it charges is this battery that's replaceable and removable. It goes into the bottom here and the batteries can be charged over USBC. Now, I've had this outside for the better part of a week, and I'll show you the app in a few minutes. Uh, so far the sun has been able to keep this thing fully charged, but I have it mounted on my wife's garden. uh where it is in direct sunlight, but you can detach the solar panel and put it anywhere you want. So, if you had it kind of underneath your gutters or something on the side of your house, you can then take the solar panel and mount it up higher. They even give you a longer cable in the box that's waterproof with a gasket so you can uh get the solar panel positioned in a way that it gets adequate sun. And so far, uh this thing has been able to power itself and the battery was at 100% when I uh pulled it

off the garden a little while ago. So, here is the app's interface. I'm not going to dive too deep into all of the different features, but I'll show you a few of the more notable ones. Here's how you can control the camera. I did find that there was a little bit of a delay when you push down versus when something actually happens. But, uh, beyond that, you can get access to the camera and move the PTZ around here if you want to have a closer look at things. And it seems to work like other cameras in its space work. You can also hit the zoom here manually if you want, and it will uh do a nice little zoom there that you can get closer in on something with. So, pretty cool. Seems to work as you would expect. If I hit the gear icon here, you can get at some of the other features. You can see my batter is at 100%. So, it's been able to charge up. They do have a good dashboard for figuring out how well your solar panel is placed and what it's producing. So, here you've got a chart that shows you all of the solar activity, how much energy it has been generating, and if it's running behind, it'll give you some recommendations as to how to get that solar panel better positioned. Now, like other UI devices, it does have some AI detection for determining what's in the image. And that AI feature does not require a subscription to use. And so on mine here, it will detect humans, vehicles, and pets and notify me. I can also have it recognize faces if I want to tell me who it was that walked in front of the camera if I have labeled that face in the past. So, it is a little more effective to use the AI for notification versus just simple motion notifications. But these have been pretty good at not doing uh false notifications. The pet one is kind of fun because it picks up all the creatures that roam around my house at night. One other thing that I found of interest on this is that unlike other UI cameras that I have tested

there is an option for using this with your NAS device over RTSP. In fact, it says specifically that it works with Synology NAS devices, but really anything that can support the protocol will work. So, for example, I was able to connect up VLC to my camera and here you go. You can see what's going on outside. Now, this is going to drain power out of your device significantly. Um, so this is something that you probably need to engineer a different power solution around. Typically, these types of connections with cameras use power over Ethernet. This camera doesn't support that. So, you will have to rig up some kind of additional USB power to give that camera the power it needs to make it through the night. You might night on the battery, but if you have a cloudy day the next day, you may not have enough sun to charge it. So, you'll definitely need to think about that if you wanted to use this more as a long-term solution. But these cameras generally are designed as notification cameras, not so much as 247 security. But if you had power out there, you could uh run this one and integrate it into the rest of your environment and have that PTZ automatically track uh whoever walks in front of it, but get the stuff brought over to your private NAS if you want, but it still needs the UI app to operate fully. Now again, if you are not using the UI subscription service, you do need to have an SD card installed on the camera or purchase one of their HomeHub devices like I have here, uh, which will store everything centrally on a single unit. So, all in a pretty robust camera from Yuthi. So, that will do it for this Amazon haul. Sometimes we get five good things and sometimes we get three good things like we did today. But hopefully you found this of interest. As always, if you have stuff that you think might work in this show, let me know down in the comments section because I am always on the lookout and I'd rather have five great things versus three when I do one of these videos. That will do it for this one. Until next time, this is Lon Cibin. Thanks for watching.