Is 2MP a whole lot better then 1MP? Would like something with a decent picture.
What does FPS have to do with picture quality?
Can most cams offer a time lapse feature or is this done with extra software?
So understand that the camera you choose can be used to stream live, or to take a repeating snapshot, or both at the same time. There are different additional specifications for streaming beyond those for baseline picture quality that you would see in a snapshot.
So yes a 2MP camera will have effectively twice the picture quality of a 1MP camera and will render nicer snapshots and nicer streams. FPS (frames per second) is a specification only for streaming mode, and a higher frame rate will make the stream appear more "live" and less jumpy.
However, a 2MP camera at a high frame rate will consume alot of your WiFi bandwidth, and really will only be useful for you personally. Thats because your internet connection is not as fast as your WiFi connection, and if you spend a lot more for high resolution and fast streaming, well all those expensive extras are not going to make it through the internet connection at full rate.
So you really need to first decide what you intend to use the weather camera for, and how you plan to use it personally. Is it just for your personal use (then buy the best you can), or do you plan to make it public? If public, are you going to let access to the stream be public, or just snapshots like as is sent to Weather Underground? (then spending for a high-end camera will therefore be a waste of money over your internet connection)
Also, consider security, since these types of cameras were hijacked and used to bring down Twitter, etc last week. If you allow the public direct access to your stream over the internet (since you'd have to create a port forwarding through your router), then your camera can therefore also be attacked over the internet. Same if you let a PTZ function be directly accessible to the public; your camera can be attacked and many cameras (including Foscam's) have flaws and backdoors.
You may think: "well how can they find my camera at my IP address? ... there are so many of them." There is a "google"-like search engine web site that literally repeated scans EVERY IP address (all 4 billion of them), and records information about everything that is publicly accessible at each IP Address. For example (and this has been done already), you can search this site for all IP addresses that have publicly attached to them a specific make and model of a baby monitor that has a flawed fixed-password backdoor; then voila, you can log into each of those baby monitors and well watch the baby (or sometimes quite a bit of adult activity since a lot of baby monitors are not used to monitor babies). If you have a camera or anything else that is not "stealthed" behind your router, you are already in this search engine.
There are online services that can let the public have access to your stream or snapshots from the camera because they act as a go-between the public and your camera. Thus attackers would have to break into that online service first to eventually get to your camera. But that extra safety usually comes at a monthly cost.
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In my personal weather station gear, I have my local Meteobridge "sample" my AmbientCamHD image every 30 seconds and send the resultant JPG to the Weather Underground every 30 seconds. (The Meteobridge has a built-in feature for that.) Thus my AmbientCamHD is not on the internet itself and cannot be attacked from the internet; nor does my camera even connect via FTP to any sites over the internet. Attackers would have to first break into my local Meteobridge (but it too is not port-forwarded on my router and cannot be directly attacked).
But since my AmbientCamHD on my personal encrypted local WiFi, I can use the Foscam App on Android and iOS and personally view the live stream at full rate and quality.
