EZVIZ Wireless Indoor Security Camera, 1080P, Night Vision

 

In the quest to find a decent home security camera below 50, and trying to avoid the stuff that’s just not worth 5, I was directed to the EZVIZ range, and I’m fairly impressed.

I decided to use this as a baby monitor since in the description, this was one of the uses it mentioned. I’ll touch on what it does well here, and also why it makes a better general security camera than a baby monitor.

Setting up the camera is really easy. In the box you get everything you need, and all you have to do is download the app, plug it in and follow the instructions to set it up on your wifi. It’s mentioned in the instructions, but I’ll mention it again as I always see this come up in comments, this is a 2.4Ghz wifi camera, there’s no 5Ghz here, and that’s just fine. If you’ve got wifi, you’ve got 2.4ghz wifi, you just need to make sure you’re not trying to connect this to 5ghz wifi, it won’t go.

The app is good, but not great. There’s a couple of things that could use some work, but it works really well and is reliable. One of the things that stood out as a positive here was that while there is a cloud service available with some extra features, the camera and app function well without this, and the app doesn’t push this service on you at all. If you pop an SD card into the device, you’ll still get notifications for motion and recordings are saved to the device instead of the cloud. The EZVIZ camera will also let you stream the videos from the SD card wirelessly to your phone, so you don’t have to take the SD card out to view what’s saved. I’ve got a good couple of weeks of motion recorded events on the 64GB card I put in, and there’s no sign of it running out yet. There’s also an always on recording function, however it’s disabled by default and gives a nice warning against using that since it can destroy flash memory.
The main page on the app gives you an overview of all your cameras and a thumbnail of each video feed. This update periodically with the latest thing the cameras have seen. The next page shows your messages, and this is where your alerts such as motion events are saved. From here you can shortcut directly to the video clip that corresponds with that alert. The last page give you access to your account and app settings. You can set up shared access from here so that you can let family members access the video feeds, and you can determine what level of access they have. Live view is on by default, but you can optionally enable playback of saved recordings and motion events, let alarms notify that user, enable or disable 2 way audio, and allow or lock control of camera pan and tilt. Pretty cool. The camera has a privacy mode, but the shared user can’t control this feature at all.
A small issue with the app is the camera quality settings. There’s basic, standard, hi-def and Ultra HD. Ultra HD is usually a term reserved for 4K video, which this camera doesn’t have. It would make more sense to have these resolutions just shown as actual resolutions, 480p, 720p, 1080p etc.

The video quality is pretty good. I wish it could be a little sharper and clearer, but it’s good for the price point, and I haven’t seen any cameras like these ones at this price point that have superior quality. It’s got a nice wife field of view, and since it’s able to move, you can pretty much get coverage of an entire room. You can also enable motion tracking in settings, this will have the camera track someone who is walking about when they start to reach the edge of the camera’s field of view. There’s zones you can select for motion detection as well, so if you’ve got the camera pointing into a space where there’s a lit of movement, and you don’t want that triggering the notifications, you can select that area and the camera will ignore that, while still paying attention to the other areas. There’s a feature in the app that will let the camera take a full 360 snapshot once you set it down, then from within the app, you can view that image and tap on any area of the image to have the camera quickly snap to that position.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m using this as baby monitor at the moment. I can see and hear the little one regardless of where I am in the house, and my partner can even have a little peak in on her when she’s at work. There is a video delay of just under 1 second most of the time, so it’s really quick. Once exception here is that when I streamed the video footage onto a chrome cast, or smart display, there was a delay of around 10 seconds, which is a bit much. One of the areas where the camera comes up short as a baby monitor is that it can’t give notifications for crying, so unless you’re actively streaming the video feed, you can’t hear anything, and you won’t get notified regardless of how loud your kid cries. As far as baby monitors go, audio is usually the first thing I’m looking for. It would be nice to see some kind of update that adds noise detection, and perhaps a audio only mode so that you can have the audio from the camera streamed to devices such as smart speakers. The 2nd thing that was a bit of an intermittent annoyance was that sometimes when streaming the video feed, it’ll simply stop streaming out, and you need to press play again on your phone/tablet. I haven’t been able to figure out why this happens because it’s so intermittent. Sometimes it will do it after a few minutes, other times I’ve had the stream run for hours without issue. It doesn’t happen all the time though, and I hope it’s something that irons it’s self out over time.

The night vision is fairly good, and will fill a small to medium sized room with IR light. Larger rooms will still be visible, but you start to lose light in places further out.

It’s powered by USB, and I found that some of the normal USB ports in my house supplied enough power to use it, meaning you can shift if around really easily, and when powering the camera up again, it just sets it’s self back up again automatically and resumes doing what it does.

I’ve also noticed that it will use your local network whenever possible (when your on the same wifi network). This means you are not sending any video over the internet, and you’ll still be able to view a stable stream even if your internet’s a bit slow. The exception here would be when you stream to a chromecast or smart display, for some reason the video get’s passed out to the internet and then back whenever you use one of these.

I’m quite happy with this camera. There’s a few small flaws, but they are not deal breakers, and it’s still one of the better camera’s you can get at the sub 50 price point.