- The Logitech circle view doorbell is the first doorbell to
integrate with Apple's home kit secure video.
Now that right there is a pretty big accomplishment,
but there's so much more to this doorbell on that is what
we're going to be taking a look at in today's video.
So stay tuned.
(energetic music)
Hey everybody! Welcome back to another video.
My name is Steve from the YouTube channel, Steve does and
I want to thank you for joining me here at reviews.org.
So, today we're taking a look at this circle view.
This is a video doorbell, by Logitech
and it is actually the first doorbell that was created with
Apple's home kit, secure video in mind.
Now, if you are not familiar with secure video,
let's break it down quickly. With a normal video doorbell,
what happens is that any time it records something,
it's going to send it up to the cloud to be analyzed from
there it's stored wherever it needs to be encrypted,
or maybe not. If people can look at it, whatever.
With apple secure video, your video is actually processed
on your local hub in your house.
Whether that is going to be an apple TV or maybe a home pod
mini, whatever is your home kit hub is
actually going to do all the processing
locally on that device.
It is then going to encrypt it and then it's going to send
it up to the cloud. That way, once it's in the cloud,
nobody can look at it because the encryption is actually
going to be on the device that is in your house.
So it is the most secure out of any video out there.
I'm actually going to be doing a dedicated video on that.
If you guys want to check it out,
make sure you subscribe and stay tuned for that one.
But as far as Apple home kit goes,
this is the first doorbell that has that feature with it.
So we will be taking a look at that during this video.
Now, before we get started,
don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell.
So you don't miss out on future videos, like this one.
And with that said, let's get started.
So I want to start by talking about the installation
requirements for this doorbell.
Now, if you take a look at the side of the box,
we see that you do need to have at least an 8 to 24 volt
connection to wire this thing up,
you have to have a high-speed internet and we also need
Apple's home kit secure video compatible device.
So that's going to be some kind of home kit hub,
whether it's, you know, the apple TV or the home pod minis.
Now, if you currently don't have a doorbell
on the front of your house,
you can jump on Amazon and pick up kind of a converter kit.
We're going to need an outlet to plug it inside of your
house. And then you could run the wires outside,
whether that's drilling a hole through your wall,
maybe you're running the wires under your door to get those
wires outside, to wire it up to your doorbell.
Now, once you get it all wired up,
you can actually use your home pod or home pod minis as door
chimes. So you don't need a wired chime within your house.
You can kind of MacGyver it to get by that if you need to.
But if we take a look at some more features on the back of
the box, we've got face recognition,
you can set up activities zones.
We have also got live view and two-way audio.
We've got the end-to-end encryption,
10 days of motion based recording history.
You do need to sign up for one of the Apple storage
accounts, the 200 gig or the 2TB
to store those clips up in the cloud.
And then lastly, we've got rich notifications
across all of your Apple devices.
Over here on the left side,
we see that it says you can see clearly in sunlight, shadows
with true HDR.
We've also got colored night vision up to 6 feet away with
an led nightlight.
We'll be taking a look at some of those demos later,
and I'll show you guys what that actually looks like.
Okay, so now that I have the camera set up and installed,
let's take a look at some of the features in the app.
I've got the home app loaded up right here.
And if I scroll all the way down to the bottom,
I can see my doorbell down there.
I'm gonna go ahead and tap on that to load up the doorbell.
So up at the very top,
we've got a little dropdown next to the doorbell name.
I can tap on that to bring up a different camera,
if I want to. Right above that,
I can tap on the little speaker to mute and unmute the
speaker right there.
We've got also options for getting into settings,
different things like that. If we take a look at the bottom,
this is going to be all of the recordings.
So you can see the different people going through them.
Now, if I pinch and expand,
I can actually zoom in on each one of these.
So if I want to really get fine in there of what's
happening, you can do that.
So I'm gonna go ahead and pinch and zoom all the way out
here. I can also hit live at the annual,
bring me to a live view of what is going on.
If you notice we've got the push to talk right there,
but let's go into settings.
I'm gonna show you guys what we have in settings. Here,
here, you can either rename your camera.
We've got the room that it is in for me, it's front door.
We've also got accessories.
So these are other accessories built in that you can use for
automations. We've got light sensor.
So it's going to tell you essentially how much light is out
there. And then we've also got the motion sensor.
So those are essentially things that you can use in
automations.
I'm going to back out there so we can go ahead and click on
add automation.
If we want to set something up using our doorbell,
we've got our notifications here.
So you can select the chimes that you want to use.
For me, I've got two iPod minis
so I can select which one I want.
So say if I have one in the kid's room and I don't want that
one Chi-Ming I can turn that off,
but we've got those options there.
We can allow snap snapshot notifications.
So that's going to give you a snapshot with what's going on
with the door, when it sends you a notification.
Anytime this status changes on your doorbell,
you can get notification for that.
Notify when the camera goes offline,
helpful one right there.
And then I'm going to turn that one off,
but we've got notifications for this iPhone.
So if I turn that on, we've got options for different times.
So we can do it any time. During the day, at night,
specific times, so you can set up a schedule there
and then we've got people off.
So we've got the option to set up notifications.
If I want to get them when I'm home or I'm away,
or it could just turn that off altogether.
So wanna close that we've got doorbell notifications,
activity notifications,
and then we've got received activity notifications.
When a clip is recorded and emotion is detected.
I kind of like it when it's just a clip is recorded,
but if you want to get a notification, anytime,
just something is detected at the front door,
then that is always an option too.
So if we back out of there, we've got options for the door
chime. If you want to turn that on and off, we've got
some recording options,
so you can do it stream and allow recording.
Now, these are going to be options,
if you have the iCloud 200 gig or the 2TB
otherwise it's just going to say streaming only, but there,
those are your options in those.
So when you're home and away,
and then we've got some more options here,
these are going to be, if you want to set it up to record,
people are detected animals, vehicles,
you can also record audio.
Those settings are going to be in here.
So backing out of there,
we can set up different activities zones right here.
So we're going to tap on the screen and that is going to
allow us to do a different activity zones.
So you can kind of tap in the area that you want and then
create your zones right there.
And those zones cannot overlap each other,
but that is the way that you can set up zones.
Let's go ahead and cancel out of that.
So in addition to the activities zones,
we've also got to the camera status lights,
and then we've got the night vision light.
So that's going to be the light on the front.
That's going to give us our colored night vision.
Okay, now that we've gone over some of the features
within the app,
let's go ahead and take a look at some of the demos of what
the doorbell is capable of.
All right,
we're doing an audio and video test with the Logitech
circle view doorbell about 5 feet away from the doorbell
right now.
But this is what it looks and sounds like with the HDR on
how well can you see the sky behind me in comparison,
to me being more in the shade,
what do you guys think?
Let's take a look at a night shot next.
All right, we are testing out to the camera now at night
and I see the three lights that are on there.
It's kind of interesting because these lights were on as I
walked up to it.
So I'm curious to see if the lights are going to be on all
the time. I'll be checking that in a few minutes.
I'll let you guys know,
but this is what the camera looks like at nighttime with the
colored at night vision. What do you guys think?
All right, now I turned off those colors,
that night vision lights.
Just to give you guys an idea in case you don't want to
leave those on what the night vision looks like with this
camera. So what do you guys think?
Oh boy.
Okay, the footage was interesting
looking at the daytime footage.
I mean, I could easily see the sky and everything behind me,
but personally, do I care about that?
Not really. It's a nice to have.
I mean,
it's nice to be able to see things that are behind the
person that I want to see as they're walking up to my front
door. But overall,
I thought that the quality of the video was kind of grainy.
It wasn't really that good.
If you take a look at the night shots with the nightlights
on with me walking up to it, same thing with that footage.
I did like that.
It started recording well before I walked up to the door.
So I got to cover everything in there,
but also the quality of that footage.
Wasn't very good either. Now,
when I turned off those nightlights,
there were no infrared lights.
So when I walked up with those nightlights off,
you couldn't see anything.
I was just a big black object on the screen.
You can see everything behind me. And in fact,
you could see the streetlights, fantastic.
I mean, it looked like there was a giant spotlight
on outside.
He got everything in great color,
but when I walked up to the door,
without that nightlight being on you couldn't really see me
at all.
So you almost have to have that nightlight on every single
time and looking at the options in the settings when you
have that on, and it is nighttime,
it'll automatically turn that light on and keep it on all
the time. So overall, I mean,
it's good that this doorbell is one of the first to the
market that has the secure video with it.
But overall, I'm not impressed with it really at all.
If you're somebody who is very paranoid about your clips and
your footage,
and you don't want it to be sent out without it being
encrypted, this might be something you want to look into.
But another alternative doorbell that I personally like even
more is getting a Eufy doorbell.
So with Eufy everything is kept locally in your house.
I mean, you're not sending anything to the cloud at all,
because you're going to get a base station depending on
which one you get.
But the one that I would recommend is get one that has the
base station.
That's going to record everything locally in the house.
It's going to save it on that device.
You can put it anywhere. It is wireless,
and it's just going to record everything to there.
They've got 10 ADP, they've got 2K versions.
I like those doorbells a lot more.
And that would be my recommendation,
but am I completely off base here as other home kit users?
What do you guys think about this doorbell?
Is this something you're going to pick up?
If you have this doorbell,
are you having the same quality issues that I'm having,
or are you having a better experience than me?
Let me know in the comments below.
If you guys want to know anything more about this doorbell
or any other doorbells,
check out the link below to reviews.org.
If you guys want to see more from me,
check out my YouTube channel.
Steve does where I do a lot of other cool tech reviews.
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give it a thumbs up and let me know that you liked it as
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I'll see you in the next video.