The best smart home security cameras – reviewed
Make sure that teenagers are the only insecure things in your house with these digital guard dogs
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU
George Orwell’s 1984 had it right when it talked about Face Crime: allow your mind to wander and they will find out! OK, so we’re not quite there with the whole thought-scanning tech just yet (despite what Zuckerburg might think) but we can now lock down every inch of our home – covering all conceivable angles, detecting every cough or hasty movement, even recognising faces and learning your daily routines.
Scary stuff or just a webcam with added smarts? We’ve put seven of the latest home monitoring systems to the test to see if they deliver peace of mind or Orwellian dreams.
WITHINGS HOME
While the 135-degree lens captures plenty and infra-red works well when things get dark, the Home is let down by a slightly shonky app. The camera starts recording when it senses something, but it’s frequently too tardy to capture the key action. This isn’t necessarily an issue exclusive to the Home, though, and HD image quality is otherwise impressive. ‘Events’ are collated in a Home Diary that’s strangely addictive, but you only get two days’ cloud storage as standard and adding more will cost you each month. Setup takes seconds and the multi-coloured LED is a welcome touch, especially as a nightlight; but while this is a very neat baby monitor, others here are better security cameras.
NEST CAM
Nest’s app is as simple as they come, showing live previews and a three-hour snapshot of everything the Cam has spotted just a few taps away. Setup takes less than two minutes using your phone, and picture quality is top-notch – both during the day and at nighttime. Schedules mean you won’t be constantly recording yourself while you’re at home, and it does a pretty good job at recognising faces, too. No, you’re not paranoid, and yes, your neighbour is definitely stealing your morning paper.
D-LINK OMNA 180 CAM HD
The fact that there’s no bundled SD card feels a bit cheap, but more concerning is the lack of cloud backup for your captured videos, which means that if the person stealing your telly also steals the D-Link you’ll have no video of them doing it. The D-Link also requires that you have an Apple TV or homebound iPad if you want to get notifications or watch footage remotely, and the lack of face recognition means you have to turn the thing off when you’re home if you don’t want to be constantly badgered about your own movements.
NETATMO WELCOME
Setting up the Welcome is an absolute breeze thanks to Netatmo’s excellent app and web interface. The camera automatically starts recording clips to the included microSD card, which you can then back up to your computer or phone. Dropbox/FTP setup is also simple, even though we’d have liked support for other cloud storage services. Facial recognition is good, but you have to manually identify family members at first, as the camera learns. We also liked the intelligent alarm monitoring, which will send you an alert if it hears a smoke or security alarms.
NETGEAR ARLO Q
Video footage is excellent, with the night mode particularly impressive; even in a near-dark room it’s easy to make out exactly what’s going on. Sadly, Wi-Fi coverage isn’t so hot – the Arlo Pro we tested at the same time was placed far further away from the router but never lost signal, whereas the Q kept cutting out. Nor is it the smartest out there. You can set up geofencing so it arms/disarms when you leave/enter the area, and link it with other smart devices via If This Then That (IFTTT), but that’s about it. There’s no face recognition or anything truly impressive. Overall, the Q is a bit of a mixed bag.
CANARY
Canary’s wide-angle camera serves up excellent video quality even at night, and the manually controlled 90dB siren capable of rattling your windows. Its app is also nicely designed, with quick access to your timeline of motion-triggered events. The only downside is that, without anything clever like face recognition, the Canary will frequently send alerts about innocuous events like the sun going in.
Y-CAM EVO
We pointed the Evo at a catflap in an attempt to catch out a nightly intruder with a bad scent-marking habit. The camera was easily set up in a discreet corner, and we soon had our motion zone selected. The good news is, it worked. We got plenty of footage of a brazen tabby sauntering in and out at will, and the pictures were as vivid as the smell of his indiscriminate wee. The bad news is, flaky notifications and sluggish playback from the cloud meant we never knew about it in time to surprise the little delinquent with a jug of cold water.
PANASONIC KX-HNC800EW
Setup was not a simple affair – it should have been, but the iOS version of the app failed to even give an option to set up a camera, offering only a setup wizard for the hub. Even our Android phone struggled to connect to the camera, but after a few unsuccessful tries, it locked onto the camera, and the signal has been robust ever since – over the same Wi-Fi, over data, and over a separate Wi-Fi network. You might be lucky and get a clean install first time, but if not, keep persevering as this Panny is otherwise worth the effort.
