Hardware advice sought

[therealjrd]

Hi all. New to ZM here, and hoping this doesn't qualify as a Dumb Newb Question (tm). I have dug through the wiki and hardware sections, but didn't see anything that quite captured what I'm after.

I'm looking at a new ZM setup for my house and surrounding yard. Probably 4-8 cameras total. I want to put several cameras in the house, and at least one outdoors, roughly 100 feet away from the main part of the house. I have wifi in the house already, with decent signal coverage out to the perimeter I care about. I'd like record capability, as well as remote streaming, so that when I'm at work or wherever, I can see what's going on in and around the house.

I've seen assorted systems for sale which support multi-channel surveillance, for instance by Q-SEE or Defender, but it looks like all those things do all the recording and stuff in a self-contained unit. And as near as I can tell, most of them are not set up to remotely access or control the unit. Thus I'm looking at doing something equivalent with ZM.

The ideal, from my point of view, would be a handful of wireless remote cameras, some outdoors. From other posts, I gather that usb cameras are not regarded well. So it seems I should be looking at IP cameras. I see some amount of positive feedback on Foscam units, and there seem to be similar ones available.

So the advice I'm after: Does my reasoning above make sense, or are there other things I should be looking at? Assuming I'm on the right track, are the foscam cameras a decent place to start? If you were starting from scratch with similar goals, how would *you* do it?

Thanks in advance for advice and hints.