Great security camera with clear image day and night. Can limit the field of view to stop unnessessary alerts. Can pickup cars animals and people but we limit ours to people as too many cars getting spotted by the camera!

 

Not the easiest to install on uneven stone walls. Once installed it was easy to set up and the picture day or night is very very clear.
We luckily had a access point near to install position so have a great signal. Now I know why my outdoor lights come on at all hours
during the night. I live on a cat highway. With an occasional fox. Also the light is very bright but can be controlled via the app.

 

Great camera with high quality video, has proved very useful when delivery men are being planks

 

We have two Hive cameras (indoor and outdoor) and they useless compared to this Netatmo camera.

The motion sensitively is spot on and hasn’t given us any false alerts. Having onboard storage is a great idea although the security of the SD card is a slight concern. The LED light is very bright but can be adjusted if required.

The field of view could be slightly better as could the initial video quality. Not having two-way audio is a downside but not a deal breaker.

 

easy to install, the app however could provide more functionality but it does the basic job

 

Update: Having added two small rubber washers either side of the supporting bolts and the camera no longer slips down.

Installation was easy enough, the bracket isn’t the best design though, setup was easy. Cannot really fault that side of things. In use, it’s great but six months down the line and I have two niggles that are really annoying.

Niggle the first: the camera slides down everso slowly over time. Before anyone thinks “you’ve not tightened it up properly”, maybe I haven’t, but I’ve used a torque wrench to tighten the bolts to 7Nm which is way above what a bolt of that size should be torqued down to – at least from what I’ve been able to find. It definitely feels like I’m doing it too tight. The slippage is very gradual, over weeks, but it seems to be a feature? Maybe someone can tell me that I’m not being firm enough? The fix would seem to be a better bracket design, notches maybe?

The second gripe is how alert areas are defined. Why only rectangular areas? Surely the software is analysing the image all the time to detect motion. Where I have it installed it is on an angle both horizontally and vertically, and at the front of the house. So the alerting area really needs to be a triangle for proper coverage, otherwise to get full coverage of my drive/house entrance, I need to create a rectangle shape that spills into the street on the upper corner, meaning any alerting triggers whenever anyone, or a dog, walks down the street. Seems like a small thing to address, but it’d mean that anyone installing at any sort of angle would have full flexibility for defining the alerting area. Also, the behaviour when creating the areas is different between the mobile app and the web site – not a problem, just different.

 

This is a really good light and motion activated video camera in colour with sound. I’ve bought another two. The app is easy to use too!

 

This is a good camera and the light is very bright. The Presence has been reliable so far. It’s a bit of a faf to set up as it will not connect to routers that also use the 5Ghz band and most do! Needs a speaker.

 

Very nice quality camera and light. Well packaged with easy to follow instructions. Relatively easy to install, as long as you have some DIY skills, and very simple to set up using the app. I’m using mine via the android app and it works very well. The alerts are prompt, within 5 to 10 seconds of the motion being detected, the IR night vision is very effective as is the motion activated LED light. The picture quality is good and also has the benefit of sound. The app is straightforward and can save files direct to dropbox. I highly recommend this as a subscription free security solution and I’ll be adding to my camera coverage in the future.

 

I’ve had this product for 3 weeks now and it’s working perfectly. It replaces a simple motion detecting outdide light and even in this capacity it’s an improvement – very bright and clear. The camera is equally effective. It’s at its best in daytime (full colour) mode but at nighttime/infra red (black and white) it gives an adequate image. I receive alerts to my phone and a copy of the video recording on my home NAS (hard drive) whenever a person is detected; for my dogs and other animals/birds I get a video recording but no alert. There have been occasional false alerts when a dog looks vaguely humanoid – but probably less than 5% of the time so not really a problem. I’ve so far never had a person mistaken for an animal and as far as I’m aware I’ve never had a person missed entirely; i.e. all expected movements have been present as expected.

Installation was straightforward with very clear instructions. But a word of warning – read and follow the instructions to avoid disappointment. Don’t cut the cable tie before you’re told to – it’s there for a reason! Also use the supplied protective bag – it looks flimsy but it does the job and stops delicate corners getting damaged during installation.

It’s a bit frustrating that there is no easy way to test the field of view before you actually install the camera as you need a mains supply to get any output from the camera. So consider rigging up a temporary mains feed (live, neutral and earth) to the camera before you drill a hole through your wall just to check it’s in the right place. Be prepared to move the camera if you need to bacause it is important to get it right to avoid unwanted background activity.

The camera automatically records to an internal memory card and sends images to my phone. But it’s obviously much more secure to get the recording onto a remote hard drive so it won’t disappear if the camera is stolen/destroyed – and there are full instructions on how to do this if like me you have a home back-up hard drive (NAS) permanently running. I’m far from a technophile but with a bit of perseverence I’ve managed to get the video feeds to my NAS using FTP. No idea what this means but it works and the videos are there on my hard drive to prove it! Select “settings” on the app and then “cloud strorage”; choose “FTP” and when the app prompts you this is what it needs: – “Hostname” is the IP address of the NAS; “Port” defaults to 21 which worked for me; “User” and “password” are what you use to log on to your NAS; and I set up a directory called Netamo on the NAS and specified that as “Save to”. Note – be careful of capital letters in naming the destination drive as the naming is case sensitive.

So far so good. If it all goes horribly wrong I’ll update this review. But based on my positive experience I’m adding an internal Smart Netamo camera tomorrow. Fingers crossed it’s as good as this external version.

 

How does it work? As most cameras of this type, you connect it to a power supply (recommended to replace an outdoor light fixture) and then connect it to your WiFi (that has an internet connection). It will start transmitting images to the Netatmo servers (through the internet). Download the app on your phone (which again connects to the Netatmo servers through the internet) and see those images from anywhere in the world.

Why is it the best?
1)Only smart camera with NO subscription fees, most smart cameras like Ring or Nest will need a subscription to either store the images or even access your camera
2)It has internal memory (probably an SD card but not replacable) so if your internet connection is down it will still record events locally and synchronise them with the servers at Netatmo once the internet is back up
3)Even if your camera is damaged or stolen the event was synchronised with the servers at Netatmo
4)If that’s not enough for you, you can also set it up to additionally save images on a local NAS (Network Attached Storage) (if you know what a NAS is then you should have no problems setting it up) so even if its destroyed while the internet is down the images are still there
5)If that’s not enough for you, you can also set it up to save images on your Dropbox

But the best are still to come…
6)Why is it smart? It can actually tell appart humans from animals and cars so you can have it alert you accordingly. Too many alerts are a failure point in most securrity systems as you learn to ignore them. If your Presence says “Person Seen” then a person is standing in front of your camera (and not the shadow of a tree moving as with most cameras)
7) Extensive alert settings. Customisable alerts such as, record when there are animals, cars and people but only alert me if people are seen between 1900 and 0700
And…
8)It has a light thats also smart! Unlike a motion sensor light, you can set up the light to turn on only when people are seen, or people and animals or for any motion according to your needs!
Want more?
9)It also records sounds with all recordings (unlike some other brands that only record sound when you respond to an event). So when you see an event at a later stage with two suspicious characters snooping around you can hear if they said “check if there’s an alarm” or “we are at the wrong address”
10) If you need to, with a touch of the download icon you can instantly download on your device a video of a specific event and send it where you want through email or any other app you might have on your phone.
11)There’s also live view (that is 4-5 seconds behind because the signal has to travel through the internet as explained above)

 

Very good for family security or pet watch and support services excellent. Would be much better if it was more discreet so intruders couldn’t see and possibly disconnec

 

Set was easy and straight forward. There is however a live view delay which is quite frustrating if you want to see the feed in real time. Face recognition, once set has so far given no errors. Notifications are prompt. On the downside, I have had to position one of the cameras in a position that is not ideal as it picks up faces from the TV with no apparent way of preventing it. Waiting for the integration with Apple Home kit.

 

Needed to improve driveway security, this is perfect. The adjustable alert zones, notification times and ability to distinguish intrusions between people, animals and cars all work well together. I would like to be able to set a louder, more continuous alarm sent to the phone than the standard notification for any detected night-time incursions, but that is a only minor criticism.

 

The face recognition works well and is easy to teach, as it simply collates all the unknown faces and ask to confirm if it thinks it someone it knows or set up a new person or reject as not a face.

I was hoping to use with Smartthings as a kind of presence sensor. I think this can be done but the delay in the person arriving and the message being issued is a few seconds to minute so not that good a switch to do an action.

The motion sensor is useless, you cant digitally mask out areas like with most cameras so, if you have a road in top corner you will get lots of false alerts, the same with sunlight through windows, it simply cant face any window as clouds/ direct sunlight triggers a motion. Same as at night moths are attracted to the IR and set it off!

Handy it has a SD card slot so you can save locally and to Dropbox for free so no subscriptions to pay

 

Notifications are a bit hit and miss but otherwise does what it is supposed to.

 

After some initial troubles which seem to have been fixed with firmware updates this has operated flawlessly for coming up to a year. The detection features needed a bit of time invested to train the software but it’s been worth it. In fact it’s worked so well I’ve got a second one!

 

Really happy with the Netatmo camera. An electrician fitted ours and it has worked really well since installation. I did need to contact Netatmo support to help with a wifi connectivity issue but once I changed some settings it has been very reliable. The phone app with the camera is excellent and allows you to see old footage and a live feed (and a time lapse of the day).

 

Despite having quite an awkward fixing bracket once it was installed we were really impressed with this product. Easy to set up the features and quality of the camera and lighting are the best we have used.

 

I finally installed the Netatmo Prescence light and sensor looks funky and needs some fiddling with the app to get to work as it should but what a great device does what it says.

I have not tried other units but this does as much as i would expect.
Update I had IT issues which are now resolved, the camera maintains connection and reports in a timely manner.
There is a delay in reporting i imagine is due to your mobile phone coverage.
The only criticism i can level is the mobile notification beep which when you have workmen at the house goes off all the time, being able to change the tone or volume of the notification would be useful.
Camera quality is fabulous as is the sound quality when it records, the light is very bright, it looks modern and not obviously a camera.
All in all i would highly recommend, make sure you can get access to wifi at the point of camera mounting as it connects only with Wifi.

 

Firstly, let me state that I love this camera!!

I was looking for a security camera with very particular characteristics:
a) Something discrete and not overtly obvious (didn’t want criminals to see a security camera and wonder what its protecting)
b) Internet ready – I want to be able to see what’s going on, especially when I’m off-site, but I don’t want to pay through the nose for it either
c) Notifications of any activity
d) Long life – I can’t be dealing with battery swaps, etc, all the time

I tried a couple of other camera systems (one of which was over 3x the price), but they were really poor, disconnecting at inopportune times and generally useless for the sake of security. Reluctantly, I tried this, not expecting much. Wow, was I wrong!!

The camera is hard-wired to your power-supply, there’s no battery, so it’s always on. It’s quite generous in its range of movement so you can position and angle as you wish, and even mount it upside down (the s/w allows you to flip the image). It connects to the internet via wifi – signal is not the strongest, but that can be rectified with a booster nearby.

Once you’ve got it configured and set up, you’re done! It will now detect and monitor for people, cars, animals and other movement with a high degree of accuracy. You can set recording/alert levels for each (you might not want to record cats entering your yard, etc), and you’re given a really nice history of ‘events’ (categorised by type, i.e. people, vehicle, etc) that you can view on your mobile device at your leisure.

The records start a few seconds before the event itself (which suggests to me the camera is always recording, but just saves the recording when an event occurs), and is captured in very high resolution – crystal clear images. And as it doubles as a security light, even recordings at night are quite clear. You’ll also get a series of thumbnails with each event so you can see exactly what happened at a glance instead of remotely viewing the video itself.

There are no further fees, no online storage, etc, required. You pay for the camera, that’s it.

The software is a little clunky, but overall I’m just so impressed with the camera it’s something I’m willing to overlook. And besides, once you’ve set it up, you don’t need to manage it again.

The only real complaint I have is that you have to manage alerts on the camera itself, as opposed to the app on your device. I currently have the camera set to alert whenever a car or person is seen – my wife doesn’t care about the cars and wants to see the animals, but can’t switch the settings otherwise I don’t get the alerts I’m interested in. It would be really awesome if the app was able to filter out the alerts so that individual users can determine what they want to see.

A fun side-effect of having installed it now is seeing how many cats actually enter our yard, and their nocturnal activities whilst we’re asleep

 

This camera is easy to install, picture quality is excellent, ability to set alert zones is helpful, cloud/ FTP back-up works well, and so far has been very effective in alerting me to people. However it’s also been too effective in alerting me to my two cats, which it thinks are people, particularly at night. It allows you to give feedback that the cat is not in fact a person but having done that well over 200 times in a month and also having signed up to their product improvement program (which gives them access to all your images so they can fine-tune human/ cat/ animal recognition), it hasn’t made any difference, which is disappointing (normally if a customer informs a provider of a fault 200+ times (multiplied by thousands of other users doing the same), the provider should be expected to rectify the fault).

Overall an excellent camera, definitely needs work on the recognition technology. Having seen the Netatmo forums and Twitter accounts, I would also be very nervous buying this if I wasn’t technically minded. Their support seems pretty bad – perhaps a language barrier.

 

Very good product, does its job reliably, not excited about the animal car person recognition, gets it wrong often but thats not why i got it for. Would hope they planned it with the view to update its software and make it homekit compatible, after all, its the biggest flaw of the product. Not being able to communicate with the rest of the house when detecting unexpected movement is just a shame. My house is full of smart toys that would love to interact but the only french product i have is unwilling to play with the rest of them. Typical.

 

Update 21/01/2017
Well thanks to Netatmo support for sorting out my issue. In particular Florian who is very professional and a huge help. I now know what it is like to have a perfectly functioning device that stays connected and is working brilliantly. No disconnections, all correct notifications and generally just awesome. My home feels much more secure. Thanks for standing by your products Netatmo. folks grab one, when they work they are superb. Back to 5 stars.

Update 10/1/17

Unfortunately this is now a one star product. Constantly disconnects losing the live stream. This means I lose notifications. It is only fixed by a restart. Unfortunately today I missed the neighbours mailbox being vandalised as the camera went down immediately after a restart and as I was not home to do it again it stayed disconnected all day. My welcome is wonderful but this camera is just an expensive wall ornament. Really unhappy. Netatmo just don’t answer and when they do it is a week later and of no help at all. Too many faults like this in the forums for it to be anything but a bad fault or bug.

Original review

I ordered this from Amazon (wife account) and had it shipped to New Zealand via my in laws. It is available in Australia but not NZ yet. It arrived perfectly packaged and really quickly. I had been waiting a year for this camera and could not get my hands on it fast enough. I had an electrician in to run a 240 volt wire to the position on the wall I wanted it mounted. All my existing fittings hang from the eves and this must be mounted on a vertical wall. I watched the install video provided by Netatmo on you tube. I strongly suggest doing that as it is very clear and well made. The instructions in the box are pretty ordinary. I hardly referred to those.

Anyway mounting it was pretty straight forward. Took about an hour. The only issue is I have a brick house and the bricks have a wave surface so getting it to mount of a reasonably flat bit took a little longer. The wiring can be a touch hard to get in behind the base as you twist it into place but all in all it’s a clever way to mount with very little difficulty.

I then powered it on (took a few moments to power up which had me with my heart in my mouth briefly as I expected an immediate start). From there I just ensured I was connected to the network AP I wanted the camera to connect to and followed the app. I later set up dropbox and FTP to mirror the settings in my Netatmo Welcome camera. Incredibly easy and it was filming me in seconds. The next step was to set up the alert zones using the four available. Pretty easy and efficient however they can only be rectangular or square (regular shapes) and don’t go down as small as I’d like to focus on say just the mailbox in one zone. Not really a big deal though. I have found that I had to keep windows that were inside alert zones and reflected car lights at night out of the zone or it would register a car. My zones extend down the driveway to just short of the footpath. I have to say that it performs flawlessly in terms of identifying cars, humans and animals. our two cats are being picked up everytime without fail. It has been interesting to see where they sneak off to at night. The floodlight comes on for cars and humans but I leave it off with animals. The picture is arguably better with it off at night but I like it to make anyone walking on the property think twice as they get flooded in light, hence it is on for anything not an animal.

The footage on the live feed is crisp and clear but sometimes as it starts to buffer or begin playing it can get very pixelated. The FTP transfers and those on the SD card and dropbox are super super clear though. Amazing quality. Its an outstanding device and I would buy one again. I find myself sitting watching the live feed far too often. There is one MAJOY issue though that has to be worked out and soon. It is even answered in the help section of the Netatmo website which seems odd. Just fix it Netatmo.

That issue is that twice a day, without fail, normally as we go from dawn to daylight or daylight to dusk the live feed gets stuck. It either just goes black or freezes on the last image updated. Huge issue! I can’t change settings or flick the floodlight on or anything in an attempt get it back online. The only I can do is view the captured videos in the timeline. Obviously if it does this while I am away at work or on holiday and I am not at home to switch it off at its power source and then back on again it is a complete waste of space. I have a work around to fix while I am away in that today I installed a Wemo light switch that I can turn on and off remotely. That allows me to reboot the Presence when at work etc.

When in this state it doesn’t even register movement, of anything!. Basically when I get up in the morning and before dusk I have to “fix it” and power it off then back on. The onetime in the four days it has been going that it didn’t fail going into night (first day) the IR LED’s failed to come on. Hmmmm.

I have complete faith that Netatmo will fix this so therefore still love the Presence and would recommend it to anyone. I have the Welcome and it’s been superb and I will get a Home Coach as soon as I can. But be aware, the camera does have this quite bad issue…..for now.

I will update the review once Netatmo fix this issue. Just FYI, I have high speed broadband, really strong wifi (there presence runs off an extender that is full strength signal in and out which I installed just to make sure the Camera had the best signal). I know NZ is a long way away from any servers Netatmo run but the Welcome runs perfectly and is sold here, as is the Presence is Aussie. Basically it isa camera issue, not my setup. Netatmo Forums document it as well. Still love it though 🙂

Thanks Lance M

 

I’m pretty impressed by this camera. I installed it almost a month ago and I wanted to see how it performs before writing the review. It has some plusses (big ones) and some minuses, of course.

The first little problem came up during installation. The black box that functions as a base for the camera, although hallow in the back, does not have much free space in it. I installed the camera flash on a wooden pole. And I had to press the wires inside and then the base against the pole. Those wires are a tight fit behind the base if there’s no additional hole in the wall.

Then WiFi setup. After the initial installation, the camera would drop its connection a couple of times in a day. After the first 2-3 days or so, the connection seemed to stabilise. I would have expected this camera to get a better signal, being this big. But its wifi reception is weaker than my iPhone 6. The phone showed 2 bars right near the camera, while the camera showed just one (the dot). Drops in wifi connection does not affect recordings as those are stored on its internal SD card. It’s just annoying if you want to access your camera in that moment.

Storage. This comes with an SD card which is preinstalled. I don’t know if it’s 8 or 16GB and there is no mention of internal storage in the app. From what I saw in the app, the camera saves bits of videos on the card and then from the card they are uploaded to the cloud (and your additional storage, if you have one). If you setup FTP or Dropbox, the videos will be uploaded twice, so if you watch your bandwidth. I set up an FTP storage inside my home, on a Synology NAS.

Light. The light is very bright. I had a 100w lamp that had a similar brightness. But because on Netatmo the light can be used dimmed, I dimmed it at about 80%. Another nice feature to have. Plus these are leds, so should last quite a few good years, and you can’t beet that wattage. If with full brightness it has 12w, probably I have it now on 10w and it lights the whole front of my house at night.

Camera. The camera saves videos in 4 formats: 1080p, 720p, medium and low. I save them 1080p and a day takes around 3GB.

Detection. We’ll here Netatmo shines. It’s so good that you start to get annoying when it gets something wrong. I will post some pictures to see how it detects animals, people, cars. It can spot cars through my fence, it can spot them at night based only on the headlights, it spots my neighbours cars in his yard, when he starts to pull it out. It’s a marvel. It spots people from back, side, front. And again, it spots my neighbour from across the street when he gets out of the house 🙂

Two problems I had with detection:
1. The exhaust from my boiler is on the front on the house. It blows off burnt gases from the boiler. During daytime there’s no problem with this. On some foggy days I got some “Motion detection” alarms. But at night it’s a nightmare. I get tons of person detected from that smoke. You can see how the smoke looks in one of the night pictures of this review.
2. I tried setting the light to come on only for person detection at night. And although it says it detected a car, the light comes on as usual.

Overall I’m very impressed with the camera build quality and the work put in the software. I activated the netatmo learning option, maybe they get this fake detections and make the system better in a few months.

UPDATE. After a couple of snow storms I found the design to have a small flaw. Due to the small edge the camera tends to keep the snow, which builds up until there’s no image. I uploaded an image for this too. They should have made the camera casing flush with the housing to allow liquids to drain properly. Whenever it snowed, the black square where the camera is got filled up with snow which then froze. And it is difficult to clean it. You have to melt it somehow.