My neighborhood as had some suspicious activity taking place here and there, so I was looking for a camera that had a light to hopefully somewhat deter suspicious characters and offer light in those dark corners of the property.
I checked the reviews on these cameras, and everyone left very high reviews, saying how easy it is to install and something about the technology… Blah blah blah. I don’t know all of the techie stuff people had mentioned, but here is my “good“ and “bad“ Reviews for the regular person who’s never had a camera like this before.
GOOD: It was very easy to install the app and camera. The app pretty much walks you through everything and you can start looking at the live view immediately.
GOOD: Each camera comes with 2 sets of screws and its own charging cord, BUT you will have to have your own base charger for each to plug into the outlet. If that’s an issue for you, then consider buying them. They’re pretty much charged at delivery, but I plugged them in just in case.
BAD: The quality is okay. You can even zoom in, but the picture will be blurry. For example, if a car pulls up to my driveway, I will be able to identify the appearance of the vehicle, but if I have to zoom in for a license plate, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it out.
BAD: I kind of thought you would be able to rewind the camera to see any video of the day you want.. nope. It will take a picture of something it caught in action (blurry or clear depending on when the picture was taken). That’s it.. UNLESS you pay for their subscription. It’s not super expensive, so that’s KIND OF A PLUS. You can purchase on a monthly or yearly basis and there’s different options. I just got the basic and it’s fine for me.
GOOD: The basic subscription will take a short video of what it catches and a picture will appear on the alerts. You can review or download any of the videos/pictures to your phone if you want. It will stay on the cloud for 7 days, and then it will start all over again. So you have access for 7 days and then it will record over the previous ones.
BAD: It only captures movements based on your settings, but you still can’t review the 24/7 video. It will only capture what it does. So if something happens across the street at my neighbors house, it may be too far off to capture anything and I can’t review the video to see who or how many, is that makes sense.
KEEP IN MIND: You have to adjust the settings of your cameras individually. Like how far off into the distance you’d want to be alerted and how sensitive you want the capture to take place and how often you want it to take a picture/video of it and if you want the light to come on all night or just when the movements happen and how long you want the light to stay on.
GOOD/BAD: I obviously wanted it to be sensitive enough to where it captures any kind of suspicious activity. But if it’s windy, or you have a flag on your porch, it will start taking pictures every few minutes because the shadows are moving or the flag is moving, and that’s kind of annoying because you get a lot of alerts and you have to go through all the pictures or videos to see that it was just that. But at least I know it’s working. And it’s just trial and error from there to adjust the sensitivity.
GOOD/BAD: the battery life. Depending on how sensitive you make it, it will drain your battery faster. Since I have my cameras set at a medium to high sensitivity rate, the battery does go down a little faster, but I will say that it does last a long time. For example, after setting it up and having it capture movements for a week, it went down from 100% to about 66% so my estimate is that I’ll probably have to re-charge each of them every two weeks just to be on the safe side. And that may be an issue to some because you will have to get your ladder to reach those cameras to charge. The good thing is you don’t have to take everything out of the wall. The camera itself is screwed onto the mount, so you just have to twist the camera off, charge it, and then put it back on. But you will have to probably check the camera angle again to make sure it’s where it was before.
GOOD: the light is good for a short distance and it has an alarm sound component too. It also has voice control, so you can talk into it. I didn’t mention this before, but you can hear the sounds on the live feed, and in the videos that it captures. You can set up the alarm and light function, so where you can turn it on and off like a switch or there’s an option on the settings where it can go off, if you wanted to if there’s ever any movement. The light feature can be turned on all night so that it gives you a better night view if it captures anything, or as I mentioned before, you can leave it set up so that it only turns on when there’s movement for up to 30 seconds, and then it turns off.
OVERALL: these are good cameras for basic surveillance. I saw some reviews saying that it works great indoors, and I think they’re absolutely right because you would be able to see everything and everyone more clearly in a smaller space, but for outside I feel like it’s more basic. Like I said, if the thing that it captures is close by you might get a greater detail. If it’s farther away, it might be a little bit blurry, but I appreciate the ability to zoom in if I want to I think it’s worth it if you are a beginner, but if you’re more of an advanced techie person who wants all the bells and whistles, then maybe this one isn’t for you. This is more for the every day person , who doesn’t live in constant danger, but wants a little bit of reassurance to see what’s happening around their home.