I have a slew of the Kasa smart outlets and they’re excellent. Cheap and just work.
I watched these cameras for a long time before trying a couple. I’m glad I did. I got them on a good sale, around 42$ each.
My buddy who is a professional security camera installer is blown away at their picture for a camera at 1/4 of his pro cam cost.
Picture quality:
The night vision is incredible. That’s usually where the picture quality lacks. Picture is crisp and clean when night vision is on.
What is even more impressive is the cameras ability to use what light it can pickup at night and keep color and clarity. I have a streetlight that is in my neighbors yard and I don’t use night vision on 2 of my cameras because it can use the available light very well.
I will say, I run these on 1080 as I don’t see any real difference at 2k. But just remember, it depends on the screen you’re viewing it on.
For me, 1080 is plenty.
Spot light:
It’s pretty good. Not “impressive” but impressive for something that is running on 5V USB.
Siren:
Yup, it makes noise. You can even set it to initiate all sirens on your network at once.
Siren and Alert settings.
YES you can turn both off when motion is sensed. I don’t know what people are doing where they can’t turn that off.
Motion sensing:
Pretty slick, you can set a irregular squares to areas of interest you want notifications. For example. One cam captures the street, but I only want my walkway. So I set that section to only alert if movement is noticed in that area. Even nicer, you can set up to 4 different sections.
Noise sensing/notification:
Far too sensitive even on the lowest setting. A good gust of wind will set it off.
This is nitpicking, but wanted to address it. All my noise sensing is turned off.
2 way communication.
It’s OK. Not great. You can hear the people through the camera OK, but the speaker to them is not that great, but again. 42-50$ it’s very good.
I will say, it’s possible that when you’re talking through the camera you mouth is far away from the mic on your phone because you’re also watching the video feed.
Install is straight forward. Mount anywhere 110v is within the 10’ reach of the cord.
I bought a 50’ USB extension cable to power one of these cameras where 110v is not nearby and it’s flawless.
Can probably power sufficiently with even longer USB extension.
Micro SD card storage:
It’s ridiculous that TP-Link hasn’t accurately answered this question.
At 1080, the 24/7 recording is approx 12gb a day. So a 256gb card formats at 219gb. Which translates to 18 days of 24/7 recording.
The takeaway, at 1080 it takes 12gb a day. Different picture quality will increase or decrease the storage requirement.
Saving from SD card.
Again. I don’t know where the issue is.
When a notification is received the on screen prompts shows you if it was a person or movement.
Touch one off them and the software jumps to that event and starts playing.
On the screen you’re watching there’s a “RED RECORD BUTTON” touch that, and it starts to record that selection of video to your phone.
You can record anything, not just an event. But the event notification just helps locate the times something happens.
Easy. No problem. Stop whining!
For those that can’t figure that out, if you need to pull the SD card for insurance or police, you have a legit reason! You won’t be pulling the card daily.
Ending thoughts.
If you’re interesting in an inexpensive but high quality camera, look no further.
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