Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsI love this doorbell!
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2024
This thing is awesome. This is going to be long. Our old doorbell was a SkyBell slimline 2 which they so nicely decided out of nowhere they would discontinue the old app on June 30th and not bring that model to their new app after saying all their devices would move to the new app. It’s fine, I was fed up with it anyway. Grainy picture, never dang connecting when you try, always telling you to try again later, always saying it wasn’t connected to the internet, not picking up on motion even when someone rang the doorbell, missing video that should have been recorded but never was🙄 do NOT recommend that crap. So it led me to research what other kind of video doorbells were out there. I like ring and it’s quality but I don’t like that I would have to purchase a plan to access the doorbell and videos and that after a year or two it would cost more than the doorbell did! I don’t need yet another subscription service so I focused on video doorbells that didn’t force you into subscriptions. This was surprisingly not the highest on the lists I found, you can do your own research and see where it falls, you don’t have to take my word for it, but I liked the features it offered including ai learning faces. It seemed easy enough to install and the app even walks you through it. It comes with a wedge and a flat backplate in case you need to angle it away from anything. We had a minor wrinkle when the app said our existing transformer was capable and then crapped out a few hours later and it took a minute to figure out why the doorbell wasn’t working. I had a suspicion it would considering it was buzzing before this. NONSTOP. Since replacing the transformer with a more powerful one, haven’t had a single problem, or any buzzing 😁 There is no battery to take out and charge, this hardwired directly into our existing power from the SkyBell. It does not work with the large chime on the wall like SkyBell did, but it comes with a jumper so bypass it, the little chime this bundle came with is fairly loud, plus it dings your phone if you have that notification set up and it rings outside through the doorbell so the person knows it worked when they pushed the button and they don’t smash it to pieces. If you didn’t buy the chime with the doorbell, you will need to buy one if you want it to chime in your house. It’s a nicer chime, it’s one of those song ones not just a ding dong. It says you can connect with echo dots to play the chime other places in your house but I don’t feel that’s necessary for us. It’s a nice feature, just one I don’t use. You do have to plug the wall part into the chime box, it’s probably just so it can be put in a smaller package. In the app you can turn on a preprogram auto responses option for when the doorbell is pushed. You can set any time when it does it like if you’re at work, you can set it to anyone ringing it. It comes with three but you can change them. The picture quality is excellent and the motion detection is amazing. I think maybe a little too great. My plants out front keep setting it off every time there is a light breeze which is great it clearly works but getting 100 notifications in 5 minutes is a bit excessive. It’s a learning curve, I have been playing around with the sensitivity to see what works best and it’s on the highest when it sends so many notifications about every little leaf that moves. You can set it to pick up any motion or just humans, I have it set to both which again, is why I get so many notifications but I’m learning where I like it to be set at. It also has a customizable zone in the app you can tell it to ignore a certain part and have a pick up path where it will only focus on motion in that area. You can even snooze notifications motion or chime and you can pick a snooze time of 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 6 hours or 12 hours. That’s pretty neat too. I absolutely love the dual cameras. I thought it would bother me having a black line across my screen or seeing double but it really doesn’t. I love that I can see the actual front porch where packages are left now where as before I could only see them if they were put far enough away from the front door or if they were a very large size. You can also change how the camera looks to you if you don’t like seeing the split screen, there is a Picture in Picture option. A very minor downside is that there is a more narrow field of vision than with SkyBell. I don’t know the degrees but I know looking out at SkyBell which neighbors house I could see down to, and with the eufy it stops short by a house or two. Do I really need to see that far though? I don’t know, maybe. Right now it seems like a very minor con compared to the many many pros of this doorbell. If anything, there are additional cameras that eufy offers that all connect to one app and hub and would increase the field of vision so it’s not all on just one camera to pick up everything. We didn’t need a camera on that side before but based on their doorbell it would be an upgrade to get more of their security system. Second minor con is the app is basically full of ads to get you to buy more. They offer security monitoring, more bases, cameras, sensors etc. They are not pop up ads so they get points for that, it’s tabs to navigate to for more information. A little annoying but a minor inconvenience. Package detection is interesting it definitely identifies packages but it also identifies my bag of garden soil as a package so I moved it. I’m not sure how it does with package theft but I had a package on the porch, it detected it and then it didn’t do anything when I brought the package inside. I even came around front so it picked me up picking the package up and it just told me human alert. That may have been the ai and it already learned I live here or I’m a familiar face so there’s no reason to think I stole the package but if it was supposed to notify me that package was picked up or gone, it did not. The ai familiar faces thing is part of the app. You can add tags to people that show up frequently and nicknames so it “learns” who lives there or who is a frequent visitor. Night vision is more impressive than I thought it would be. I watched many videos and read many reviews complaining this camera is black at night, it’s useless unless you’re right up on it and I don’t know what those circumstances were but I live in a neighborhood with street lights so it’s not very dark to begin with and this has no problem picking up anything at night. I do get less notifications about plants moving but the notifications I do get are cars driving by, stray animals walking in front and once what I think was a bug. So it’s working and picking up more than SkyBell did. The only dark park is right up front by the front door where it’s harder to see but not impossible. I think SkyBell had worse night vision than this one. SkyBell was grey scale at night, this one is color. I saw lights on the bottom camera when I flipped it over before installing, it was plugged in on the counter, but I don’t think it’s dark enough outside for the lights to turn on. I’m also not having the latency issues that seemed to be one of the other big downsides to this doorbell. One of the default settings is send you a notification and take you to the recording instead of the live view, you can change that to go to live view when you tap the notification. I find that it’s pretty instant connecting to the live from tapping the notification. Sometimes I miss the initial movement that triggered the notification if it’s something like a car driving by but if it’s a person it depends on if they’re sticking around or pressed the bell and left like a delivery driver, I usually catch the driver as they’re walking away. The doorbell did record whatever happened though and if you don’t see anything in the live view you can go check your videos. That’s pretty standard though for a video doorbell and it is faster than SkyBell which would take 15 tries or more sometimes to get the live view to load. Maybe there are faster ones out there, I don’t know. I didn’t come across one in any of my research. I had one issue where the app said it couldn’t connect to the live feed and I’m pretty sure that was an internet problem because nothing would load on my phone, I had to turn everything off and back on and it hasn’t happened since. I will edit this to add some photos of the camera in use. So far I am loving this video doorbell, the app and am looking into buying more things from eufy if they’re all this quality and easy to use. It was a fantastic purchase. I’m still learning how to use some features so I’ll update if anything changes.