Panasonic KX-TG 9142 Dect Twin with Room

The important requirements are covered very well – the sound is very clear, contact details can be stored and shared with other handsets (although you can’t label numbers as “mobile”, “home” and “work” etc.). The ergonomics are good and so on. So, this is a great improvement on my previous phone and that’s great.

I did succumb, however, to the temptation to buy the camera / monitor. Two things you should know: first, you will not see moving images but snapshots every couple of seconds; secondly, and less foreseeably, when it is triggered (by baby crying), there is no way to control the volume or ring tone on any handsets – they all ring (quite loudly). So, if one of your handsets is upstairs, but you are trying to monitor the baby from downstairs, you end up just waking up the whole household.

To continue the theme (for those interested), each handset allows you to set a ring tone for intercom calls and external calls independently of one another but not the ring volume. To avoid hearing an intercom call, then, you can import a silent recording and use that as a “custom” ring tone. If you are using another handset as a baby monitor, the silent ring tone (or whichever you select) will be used (although you actually assign a single handset to monitor from, so this trick would be unnecessary). However, this trick does not work with the camera / monitor and a default tone and volume will be heard from every handset. Had I known, I would have bought a third handset (similar price) or, more likely, just stuck with the two.
Regards Mark