Are these BUDGET security cameras GOOD ENOUGH to protect your home?
🛒 Buy your WUUK Wireless Camera Pro kit: https://geni.us/WUUKWirelessCamPro
This is the WUUK Wireless Cam Pro kit, and it consists of two security cameras which you can easily fit yourself, at home, to be up and running in a matter of minutes. You might remember WUUK as I reviewed their first ever product, a smart doorbell, on the channel last year — and now they’ve come back with a security camera to add to their ecosystem — and make sure you watch to the end as I’m going to be giving away a couple of these kits, and I’ll tell you how you can win at the end of the video.
So it’s good to see WUUK back again with a new product and great to see the development of this company as we see the app become more mature and refined with each update. Setup of these cameras was really easy and everything paired straight away, you don’t even need to scan any barcodes or anything.
I like a couple of things about this camera kit — firstly, and most importantly, just like their doorbell it features local storage for your video recordings. So unlike with my (admittedly excellent) Nest cameras from Google, you don’t have to pay for cloud storage with these as the base station has built-in storage so all your footage is stored securely inside your house. That’s right, built-in storage you don’t even need to buy a memory card for it, you’re good to go right out of the box.
There’s no magnetic mounting option or stand with these cameras, they HAVE to be secured to a wall or post with the 3 supplied screws — there’s no other way, which could be a bit restrictive and means they’re not really designed to be used inside your house and placed on shelves or mantle pieces — they have to be screwed to a wall, internal or external.
I do like how the base station (which is almost entirely empty space) plugs into your router with a wired connection, not via WiFi, so performance will probably be better and more reliable, however that will also limit placement in many people’s homes. You can also have multiple base stations if you like, so for larger houses you could for instance have some outside at the front and some at the rear each with their own base station if you’ve got network sockets in those rooms. It’s also a nice touch that you can charge the cameras via usb from the base station itself, although only one at a time.
The cameras connect wirelessly to the base station, which then connects to your home network — it’s a shame the cameras can’t be just a little bit more independent so that if you have a mesh network they can hook onto that and then talk over your network to the base station. But despite that in my tests the wireless range was pretty good; I put the base station at the front of my house and could still put a camera outside in the back garden as long as I kept it fairly close to the house.
The second key feature of these cameras — and somewhere they excel against most Nest and Ring cameras — is that they feature a bright spotlight on the front meaning that as an alternative to infra-red mode, which will always be in black and white, you can turn the light on to illuminate the area around your camera and record events in colour.
To be fair to them, Nest does offer a camera with spotlights — but they’re designed like huge floppy ears, and although Ring does a similar floodlight one they also do a more compact spotlight version too.
Now, you might think that a camera kit that features two cameras and local storage all at this price point would have to have cut corners somewhere and therefore produce terrible picture quality, and whilst it’s fair to say that it’s certainly not a high quality video recording, it’s adequate for monitoring an area, seeing what’s going on and potentially recording a crime taking place.
WUKK describe the video on these as “2K Ultra Clear”. I don’t think the 2K resolution is really that important as sensor quality, bitrate and encoding is what really matters, and the video I pulled directly off the unit with a resolution of 2304x1296 had a bitrate of just under 1.2Mbps and only 15fps — so extremely low quality if you judge by the numbers. So extra resolution is a bit pointless at such a low bitrate as the video becomes blocky and full of artefacts. That said, it’s perfectly sufficient for what you need in a security camera, things like car number plates are clearly visible even at a bit of a distance from the camera, and the low bitrate creates really small files which are easily shareable so if you need to send them to police or anyone else that’s a good thing.
One thing I don’t like is that recording duration is fixed at whatever duration you set in the app — even if something is still going on, it splits it into separate videos which means important details and bits of evidence can be lost as the next clip seems to start a few seconds later. That duration time should be a minimum length, not a fixed length.
That leads me on to another great feature of this camera kit and that’s how it lets you define Detection Zones so that you’ll only be alerted of motion if it happens in these zones. It’s not as mature and advanced as the equivalent feature on the Nest ecosystem, for example I couldn’t draw diagonal lines to create my zone, just a square or rectangle, but it’s still good to see this feature included for no extra monthly cost and I hope it will develop and be improved over time.
So I’d say this is a pretty good little camera system, not at all bad for the price and of course if you’ve already got the smart doorbell from WUUK which also features a camera then it’ll slot into that ecosystem and work inside the same app.
If you want to pick one of these up for yourself there’s a link in the video description underneath the LIKE button and next up why not watch my review of WUUK’s first product, a smart video doorbell. I’ll see you in that one!
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Originally published at https://www.switchedonnetwork.com on July 13, 2022.
