Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat camera, no membership required
Reviewed in Canada on January 10, 2024
The photo you see is from the Tapo app, taken at night, during a fairly heavy snowstorm in Quebec Canada ey! The camera is setup in the bedroom, so picture is seen through a window, not bad ey! I also own an Ezviz indoor camera(CN6060 I believe) setup through a window also, but the light on the camera reflects in the window so I can't see anything at night.
Tapo says night vision extends to 30 ft, but as you can see, houses on the other side of the street are at least 75 feet away and you can still see them, although I am sure streetlights help a lot. Night detection is 30 feet, maybe more. I set up the camera to detect persons only, and it works fine as long as persons step on my property. It does detect some persons on the street, if they walk on my side of the street.
Audio is decent too, have not really used it, but did hear my wife that was standing at least 15 feet away from the camera. She made me turn audio off, camera is in the bedroom after all! :- I
Setup is very easy, done in 10-15 minutes on both iPad and iPhone. This thing is so light, I taped it to the top of the window, upside down, adjusted the angle, reversed the picture in the app and I was done.
You can view the camera feed on a computer through VLC media player (VideoLan, it's free to download). You need to setup a separate, free Tapo account account for this, I have read somewhere in the Tapo help that you can do everything with one account, but it did not work for me. Doc should be made clearer about this. After 3 days, the feed does not show on VLC anymore (still works fine on iPhone and iPad), but I will reboot eventually and it will probably work again. I need to input username and password in VLC everytime I want to see the feed, maybe I will dive into the VLC help and automate this.
I have bought a micro SD card (128Gb max for this model) and will install it soon. Doc says that if you put in a card, the feed to external device (VLC in this case) will not work. I hope this is not the case, will see.
Best part is that no membership is required. You get a 30-day free trial, but external feed will not work with membership or free trial, so I cancelled it before trying it out, so I can`t comment on membership.
There is a 2K and maybe even 4K model of this camera, but since I own over 20 smart devices, my Wifi is not as fast as it used to be, Full HD is enough for now.
This is a great camera, even more so if you're new to smart devices. I will probably buy a few more soon, especially if it stays or goes on sale again. ''Alexa, show me camera two''!
Update Jan 23rd: Viewing the camera stream through VLC Media player stopped working after 2-3 days, VLC cannot connect to the camera. I setup Agent DVR free software instead and it works OK, but the picture is a bit grainy, but it does record detected persons automatically.
Update Jan 28 2024: I have seen a review that says you have to pay the subscription fee for motion detection to work, this is not true. Motion detection (I set it to person detection only) works fine, I get a notification on my phone (see photo in french cause my iPhone is set to french) when a person is detected.