Maxi-Cosi See Baby Pro Baby Monitor

This feature-packed baby monitor from industry giant Maxi-Cosi offers a high-tech way to keep an eye on your little one - so you can get the most out of the precious moments they are asleep.

The See Pro (the newest version following the Maxi-Cosi See) is very easy to set up and can be moved quickly from room to room so wherever you put your baby down, it can keep a watchful eye. And once you’ve downloaded the app, you can get cry notifications buzzed straight to your pocket in case you’re out of earshot of the parent unit.

At £169.99 for a single camera and screen, the See Pro is far from the cheapest option on the market but the 2K UHD image quality (twice as detailed as 1080p HD) and a spec sheet as long as your arm, the higher price doesn’t mean poor value.

Many of the cheaper options on the market lack the features list and spec of the Maxi-Cosi, but the VTECH RM7766HD is a closely spec’d rival and costs exactly the same.

Scroll down to find out how first-time dad Ben got on with the Maxi-Cosi See Baby Pro.

Testing the Maxi-Cosi See Pro baby monitor

The Maxi-Cosi See Pro comes with a single camera and a parent unit, charger cables and plugs for each, an angled wedge stand to help the camera peer into cribs or baskets and a wall mount with all the fixings.

You don’t get a micro SD card for recording or image capture, although you can still do this in the app using cloud storage if you subscribe. We have bought a cheap memory card and put it in the camera end so that we can record through the app but if you want to be able to record through the parent unit, you’ll need to put the card in at that end.

The set-up process is intuitive and easy to follow, it doesn’t take long but once you connect to Wi-Fi there will be some firmware updates to complete before you can get going.

The wide-angle camera means you don’t have to be too accurate with your placement and it will automatically track your little one if they move around in the cot.

The image quality is excellent, it’s so clear that you can see your baby’s chest rise and fall as they breathe (which is handy for first-time parents like us) and there’s a night vision mode for when the room is dark, too.

The parent unit’s 5” LCD screen is clear to see and you navigate the functions and settings in a simple navigation menu controlled by intuitive buttons. There is a baffling range of options for the various settings, sensitivities and features but once you’ve picked a base setting you quickly work out what needs tweaking or switching on or off.

We use the monitor in standby mode, which automatically switches off the display to save battery if your baby is asleep. You can wake it up manually (the screen, not the child) by quickly pushing the power button or rely on the auto-detection to switch it on for you. A word of warning, if you use the power button to take a reassuring peek, the image will display the last thing it saw for a second before glitching to the live view. This can mean seeing yourself in the room briefly, which will frighten the living daylights out of you.

Standby mode will extend the battery life of the unit but if your baby stirs as often as ours (or more to the point, you need reassurance as much as us as she’s a quiet sleeper really) you don’t get anywhere near the 72-96 hours claimed by the manufacturer. The good news is that the charger cable supplied is really long so you can use it while it's charging easily.

Another of Maxi-Cosi’s bold tech claims is the cry translation function. We’ve given this a good go but found it to be a useless gimmick. We’ve had the baby wake from a long nap starving hungry to be told that she “sounds fussy” by the monitor. Conversely, she apparently “sounds hungry” occasionally when she is gurgling away happily after a feed in the morning.

My partner and I are divided on the camera’s looks – it resembles BB-8 from the Star Wars franchise – but from a more practical design point of view, the USB-C power input is in a very awkward to get to place and is easily knocked out if you catch the cable. It’s also a shame that the camera doesn’t have a small battery as a back-up in case the cable comes out or there’s a power cut.

Final verdict

The Maxi-Cosi See Pro may not be perfect, but it’s still very good indeed. The image quality, cry detection, ease of use and long feature list make it an excellent choice for a parent.

We regularly use the lullaby and white noise features and the standby mode not only preserves the battery but reduces the temptation to stare eagle-eyed at your sleeping baby in case something happens (first-time parents will relate).

It may not be the cheapest option on the market, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the money. We would certainly spend our own money on one.

Ben Clarke works as assistant editor (motorcycling) across Mother&Baby’s biking sister brands – Motorcycle News, Bike, RiDE Magazine and Classic Bike. As such, he's usually more concerned with impact or abrasion resistance and head protection than cry-detection and white noise generation but after he welcomed his first baby in November 2023, it created an opportunity to transfer his analytical skills to a different range of products.