At a look
Professional’s Ranking
Execs
- Extremely versatile: indoors, outdoor, and fully wire free
- Nice video high quality, day or evening
- Very inexpensive in comparison with the competitors
Cons
- Some options had been nonetheless in growth at press time
- Enabling all its options will actually eat away at battery life
Our Verdict
A chargeable battery makes the Battery Cam Professional Wyze’s most versatile low-priced house safety digital camera up to now.
Worth When Reviewed
$93.99
Greatest Costs At the moment: Wyze Battery Cam Professional
$99.98
Indoor? Outside? Each? For its newest house safety digital camera, Wyze dispenses with labels and focuses as a substitute on its freedom from wires. Outfitted with a beefy 6200mAh rechargeable battery, this pint-sized gadget is prepared for deployment in any surroundings.
The blockish digital camera suits in nicely with Wyze’s lengthy legacy of diminutive surveillance cams, an upright rectangle measuring 3.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 inches (HxWxD). The digital camera can sit on its base on a bookshelf or be mounted to a wall with the included {hardware}. The default mounting {hardware}, nevertheless, solely works for wall installations, not ceilings. If you wish to dangle the digital camera out of your roof eaves or ceiling, you’ll want so as to add the $10 Wyze Common Mount to your procuring cart.
The Wyze Battery Cam Professional is nice worth given its in depth vary of options, superb flexibility, and low price ticket.
Wyze Battery Cam Professional design and construct high quality
Wyze has assigned an IP65 weatherization score to the Battery Cam Professional, which suggests it’s dustproof and that it’s protected against water jets coming at it from any course. Truthfully, the digital camera simply doesn’t look all that rugged, having what seems to be an open speaker grille on its bottom. Mud may not get all the best way contained in the unit and trigger it to fail, however the tiny holes certain appear to be they’ll get clogged with grime if left exterior.
Inside or out, the Battery Cam Professional boasts loads of different stable specs along with that IP score: Most decision is 2560 x 1440 pixels, with a 134-degree diagonal viewing angle. That decision might be dropped down a tick if that you must save space for storing and cut back the digital camera’s bandwidth consumption. Two-way audio, together with a 100dB siren, can be included.
The standard infrared evening imaginative and prescient is onboard, however the unit additionally consists of two small LEDs that may present a modest stage of highlight illumination. These are triggered when movement is detected, however don’t consider them as substitution for a porch mild. Their main mission is to supply a level of colour evening imaginative and prescient, at the least inside a couple of yards of the digital camera’s lens.
All of the Wyze Battery Cam Professional’s settings (left and proper) are simple to seek out, as is the historical past of recorded clips beneath the digital camera’s reside view window.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Talking of movement detection, the Wyze Battery Cam Professional is outfitted with two movement sensors: a regular passive infrared sensor augmented by radar, which isn’t one thing you sometimes discover in a consumer-grade safety digital camera.
I discovered the unit very correct at catching motion, and the Wyze app categorizes movement into 5 sorts: particular person, pet, car, package deal, or one thing else. This function appears to be evolving within the app; it had about 90 % accuracy in my testing (and by no means correctly categorized sightings of my cat as “pet” movement).
The Wyze Battery Cam Professional is simple to arrange
Setup begins with the charging of your battery through USB-C cable. As has turn into annoyingly frequent, Wyze consists of the cable within the package, however not an A/C adapter. A full cost can take 9 hours to finish, after which Wyze suggests a most 6 months of operating time.
My expertise, nevertheless, noticed the battery drain by half after simply 8 days of admittedly heavy testing; so, 6 months appears awfully optimistic to me, even in low-usage situations. You’d most likely be good to spring for a spare battery ($29), charging dock ($18), and/or photo voltaic panel ($25) to assist keep away from downtime.
Wyze’s setup has at all times been streamlined, and dual-band Wi-Fi assist (2.4GHz and 5GHz) ostensibly makes that even simpler for the Battery Cam Professional. The digital camera connects on to the community, with no bridge required, so setup must be so simple as it will get. Sadly, I examined this digital camera simply because it was coming into the market, nevertheless, and some kinks had been clearly nonetheless being labored out of the system.
My digital camera wouldn’t stream reside video for the primary few days, for instance, and native recording to an onboard microSD card was and remains to be listed as “coming quickly” at press time. With out native recording, you’ll must improve to Wyze’s Cam Plus subscription service if you wish to retailer and stream recorded video and allow key options like particular person and different forms of detection. Happily, Wyze Cam Plus stays low-cost, at $20/12 months or $3/month for one digital camera, or $99/12 months or $10/month for limitless cameras.
The Battery Cam Professional isn’t essentially the most elegant digital camera Wyze has each provided, but it surely wants its plus-sized proportions to accommodate its ginormous Li-Ion battery.
Christopher Null/Foundry
As soon as Wyze squashed among the preliminary bugs, I discovered the digital camera labored remarkably nicely. Video is crisp and clear, notifications arrive promptly, and recorded clips are simple to seek out by merely scrolling down under the reside view feed. If that you must go additional again, the “all occasions” button will take you to a thumbnail-enabled timeline sorted by date and hour of the day. Evening imaginative and prescient high quality is great, with a variety of at the least 40 ft. Interacting with the digital camera was fast and playback is responsive, normally taking solely a few seconds to buffer earlier than video begins rolling.
Even higher, every little thing will not be solely configurable, however all these settings are simple to seek out. Sensible detections might be individually enabled, and you may choose whether or not you wish to obtain notifications for every sort of detection. Cooldown between clips is configurable—from none in any respect to five minutes—and most video size is configurable from 12 seconds to five minutes. (Recording will finish earlier if movement stops, and Wyze’s firmware is aggressive about figuring out what constitutes a “cease.”) All these settings have an effect on battery life, so preserve that in thoughts when making your choices.
Must you purchase a Wyze Battery Cam Professional?
The $94 asking value makes this decidedly the costliest standalone digital camera Wyze sells (examine to the Wyze Cam v3 at simply $36), but it surely’s an amazing worth given its in depth vary of options and superb flexibility. Give it a couple of weeks of app and firmware updates for those who don’t wish to cope with rising pains; come September, this will likely be a no brainer purchase for those who’re on the lookout for a battery-powered indoor/out of doors safety digital camera.