Hey y’all it’s Rose. Today we’re going to take a look at Canary. And Canary is my
favorite home security camera and that’s saying a lot because I have a lot of home
security cameras. And I’ve owned it for over a year, I’ve never done a video review,
but I’m going to do one today because they released an update with a couple of new features
including notifications for extreme temperature changes and also notifications that’ll let
you know if the camera goes offline. So I’m excited because today we’re going to test
out those features and you’ll get to see if they work or not and I’m also going to
give you a basic overview of what the camera can do in general.
I like Canary because as you can see the video quality is awesome, but I also like it because
it’s simple. You just plug it in and it works. It automatically arms and disarms itself
based upon my smartphone’s location. And it also works using 3 modes –3 – simple,
I’m telling ya!
It has an armed mode where it looks out for motion events, a disarmed mode where you can
check in on things, but it’s not actively monitoring for motion, and it has a privacy
mode where the camera and microphone are completely off. You know what mode its in thanks to the
LED ring on the bottom of the camera.
Canary uses automatic LEDs for night vision. In fact, when it swaps between day and night
vision it freaks itself out sometimes causing a false alarm. And that’s a problem that’s
gotten a little bit better over the past year because Canary is actually a learning system,
it can self-resolve problems over time. However, that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. In fact,
let’s go take a look at some gotchas.
First gotcha, it includes free cloud storage, but it’s limited. The free plan includes
12 hours of video history, 3 video downloads, and 5 video bookmarks. While this may sound
limiting, there is another new feature Canary recently launched and it’s called video
sharing.
It’s kind of like a free storage workaround. Tap on the share icon when viewing a clip,
let the video process, and you can share an unlimited amount of videos via text, email,
Facebook, Gmail, etc.
There are some other gotchas. Second gotcha, it has a siren, but the siren doesn't automatically
sound, you have to trigger it manually when viewing live footage or viewing an event.
From the same screen you can call for help if you see something that’s concerning.
Canary is programmed to always call your hometown emergency dispatch crew even if you’re on
vacation hundreds of miles away.
Third gotcha is that Canary lacks local storage, unless of course you count downloading videos
to your phone’s gallery as storage. The next gotcha is that it doesn’t work with
a lot of other devices. It does work with the Wink home automation hub and through Wink
you can actually connect Canary to IFTTT and Amazon Echo, but you can’t connect to either
without a Wink Hub and since I don’t own one that’s sort of a bummer for me. The
final gotcha is that Canary doesn’t have any sort of battery backup and in the past
there wasn’t even a notification that would let you know when the camera lost its power
source. Now, of course, that’s supposed to of changed with the most recent update
… And actually … let’s go ahead and find out if that’s true. I’m going to
unplug the camera and we’ll see what happens.
And 15 minutes later it did let me know and it let me know instantly when Canary was back
online.
Canary has added the ability to get alerts for extreme temperature, humidity, and air
quality. I received a temperature alert after 5 minutes of leaving Canary in the oven, but
I didn’t get a humidity alert at all. You can adjust the sensitivity settings within
the app and it’s possible that I didn’t break what I’d set as a normal humidity
level.
Over the past few days I’ve been getting lots of false abnormal air quality alerts.
I get them, swipe them open, and air quality shows as normal. So I guess my verdict is
that the features still need to work themselves out a little bit, but I have confidence that
they will.
So, that’s Canary in a nutshell. I like it because it’s simple and it doesn’t
take a lot of thought. You plug it in and it works. Easy, right? So, thank y’all for
spending time with me today. If you have any questions about the camera feel free to comment
below. And if this videos been helpful at all I would appreciate a thumbs up. I’ll
see y’all later!