Your budget may not be enough to get a good high definition IP camera. For some reason the price has stayed fairly high on the name brand high resolution models.
Granted, I've only worked with a few IP cameras.
I have worked with three different axis cameras, two Toshibas, and on the other end of the spectrum, one low cost IP Kamera $99 camera.
The Toshiba cams have neat automatic panning features, but in my experience, the software was more difficult to deal with and less flexible (and less documentation.)
The Axis cameras have far more flexible and powerful software installed that I've found easier to deal with.
One Toshiba camera died after ~5 years, and one Axis camera died after ~6-7 years. The one Axis camera developed some odd behavior in that its scheduler would stop working about once a month and we never could get to the bottom of what caused it or why it needed to be jogged every so often to keep sending the image to a remote server (the camera itself could still be viewed but the scheduler would intermittently silently stop and need to be jogged and would then work fine again for some time.) Overall though my vote would be for an Axis camera. These are all in the $750-$2000 range.
The tiny IP Kamera in the $99 range is much more limited and doesn't have as good an image quality (much more noise).
