if you're looking for a home security camera the Amazon Cloud cam is worth
considering this is the Amazon Cloud cam came out in 2017 and it was tech Cubs
who runner up as our best indoor home security camera of the year the reason
we like it so much the amount of features you get for the money the
camera costs a hundred and twenty dollars
there are certainly cheaper cameras out there and they're certainly more
expensive cameras out there but this is in a nice sweet spot when you look at
the features the most important thing for any camera is the video quality and
we found that the cloud cam delivers a nice sharp 1080p image with good color
the field of view from the camera is a hundred and twenty degrees and that
means that if you put it in the corner of a room it's gonna see pretty much
everything that's going on in that room now there's also a night mode in here
it'll automatically switch over when it starts getting dark and use infrared
LEDs to illuminate your room so they can keep watch not just during the daytime
but the night time as well and of course that's important one of the other things
that we really liked about this versus some of the competition is that it has a
free cloud storage option pretty much all video cameras these days all home
security cameras will when they detect motions start recording video and send
that video to a cloud storage service and from there you can retrieve it at
any time you want a lot of companies are charging you money for that but Amazon's
cloud cam comes with a free 24 hour storage system so that means that any
video that it's recorded from the last 24 hours
you can access without an ongoing monthly subscription fee there are
subscription options if you want a week's worth of storage you pay seven
dollars two weeks is ten dollars a month is twenty dollars for that month for you
supports up to ten cameras so if you're gonna have multiple cameras then you
will be getting into subscription territory so consider that when you're
looking at the price of this and and other cameras as well but if you're just
gonna have one of these you get 24 hours of free storage and that's really
positive to avoid those ongoing subscription charges
you also get geofencing so as you or members of your family come home or
leave the camera arms and disarms automatically because the most annoying
thing in the world is having a camera and when you're at home it alerts you
all the time every time you walk into a room you get
your phone so geofencing will switch off the switch off the alerts and switch off
the arming if you're at home if you do subscribe though it does bring some more
intelligence to the camera as it stands at the moment this camera is just
looking for motion if you subscribe you can tell the difference between an
animal moving around in your room and a person so if you have pets they're
subscription means that you can tell the camera to ignore the pets and you don't
get an alert every time your dog walks into the living room or something the
subscription service also comes with detection zones and that enables you to
define an area of the image that it doesn't pay attention to and doesn't
alert so if you have something like say a ceiling fan and every time the ceiling
fan starts moving you get an alert with the detection zone you can draw a box
around the ceiling fan and say ignore this area of the picture the camera
comes from Amazon of course it works really well with Alexa so if you do have
an Alexa at the moment if you're already using some devices that are compatible
with Alexa that's a really strong reason to use this also if you have an amazon
firetv stick with Alexa you can tell Alexa to bring the image of this up on
your television so if you are starting to coalesce around the Amazon eco system
another reason to consider this camera some of the things you need to be aware
of though before you buy the camera it needs power there's no battery inside
here there are some battery-powered cameras out there like say Nick is our
low that will last two or three months without needing a recharge this one
needs power all of the time so consider where you're going to put it if you're
going to put it on a shelf if you're going to put it on a bookcase on a piece
of furniture and you can hide the power cord great you don't need to worry about
much if you're going to put this up on a wall or if you're gonna put this out
somewhere where it's difficult to hide the cable you need to consider either if
you're going to bother going into the wall to disguise the cable or if you're
just going to put up with a cable stapled down your wall you might not
want to do that so so think about that also this comes with no local storage
some cameras these days have a micro SD card slot in the back that enables you
to automatically record and store images locally so that once they expire from
the cloud service you still have them that also means that if you have a poor
or a bad Wi-Fi connection or all of your video is still stored this doesn't have
that and there's also no facial recognition and this is a feature that's
coming out on some high-end cameras at the moment and will allow the cameras to
differentiate between the people that it sees so you can alert it you can get
alerts when say strangers arrive at your door but not members of your family or
conversely you can get an alert every day when one of your kids comes home so
no facial recognition on this either but for a hundred and twenty dollars you get
great quality video you get the tight integration with Amazon Alexa and you're
not tied in to a cloud subscription service at least if you go for the 24
hour option so the Amazon Cloud cam is definitely worth a look