This is the WUUK Wireless Cam Pro kit, and it consists of two security cameras
which you can easily fit yourself, at home, to be up and running in a matter
of minutes. You might remember WUUK as I reviewed their first ever product,
a smart doorbell, on the channel last year - and now they’ve come back with a security camera to
add to their ecosystem - and make sure you watch to the end as I’m going to be giving
away a couple of these kits, and I’ll tell you how you can win at the end of the video.
So it’s good to see WUUK back again with a new product and great to see the development
of this company as we see the app become more mature and refined with each update. Setup of
these cameras was really easy and everything paired straight away,
you don’t even need to scan any barcodes or anything.
I like a couple of things about this camera kit - firstly, and most importantly,
just like their doorbell it features local storage for your video recordings.
So unlike with my (admittedly excellent) Nest cameras from Google,
you don’t have to pay for cloud storage with these as the base station has built-in storage
so all your footage is stored securely inside your house. That’s right, built-in storage
you don’t even need to buy a memory card for it, you’re good to go right out of the box.
There’s no magnetic mounting option or stand with these cameras, they HAVE to be secured to a wall
or post with the 3 supplied screws - there’s no other way, which could be a bit restrictive
and means they’re not really designed to be used inside your house and placed on
shelves or mantle pieces - they have to be screwed to a wall, internal or external.
I do like how the base station (which is almost entirely empty space) plugs into your router
with a wired connection, not via WiFi, so performance will probably be better
and more reliable, however that will also limit placement in many people’s homes.
You can also have multiple base stations if you like, so for larger houses you could for
instance have some outside at the front and some at the rear each with their own
base station if you’ve got network sockets in those rooms. It’s also a nice touch that you
can charge the cameras via usb from the base station itself, although only one at a time.
The cameras connect wirelessly to the base station, which then connects to
your home network - it’s a shame the cameras can’t be just a little bit more independent
so that if you have a mesh network they can hook onto that and then talk over your network
to the base station. But despite that in my tests the wireless range was pretty good;
I put the base station at the front of my house and could still put a camera
outside in the back garden as long as I kept it fairly close to the house.
The second key feature of these cameras - and somewhere they excel against most
Nest and Ring cameras - is that they feature a bright spotlight on the front meaning
that as an alternative to infra-red mode, which will always be in black and white,
you can turn the light on to illuminate the area around your camera and record events in colour.
To be fair to them, Nest does offer a camera with spotlights - but they’re
designed like huge floppy ears, and although Ring
does a similar floodlight one they also do a more compact spotlight version too.
Now, you might think that a camera kit that features two cameras and local storage all at
this price point would have to have cut corners somewhere and therefore produce
terrible picture quality, and whilst it’s fair to say that it’s certainly
not a high quality video recording, it’s adequate for monitoring an area,
seeing what’s going on and potentially recording a crime taking place. Here are some examples:
Normal Daytime B&W Night Vision
Spotlight Night Vision
WUKK describe the video on these as “2K Ultra Clear”. I don’t think the 2K resolution is
really that important as sensor quality, bitrate and encoding is what really matters,
and the video I pulled directly off the unit with a resolution of 2304x1296 had a bitrate of just
under 1.2Mbps and only 15fps - so extremely low quality if you judge by the numbers.
So extra resolution is a bit pointless at such a low bitrate as the video becomes
blocky and full of artifacts. That said, it’s perfectly sufficient for
what you need in a security camera, things like car number plates are clearly visible
even at a bit of a distance from the camera, and the low bitrate creates really small files which
are easily shareable so if you need to send them to police or anyone else that’s a good thing.
One thing I don’t like is that recording duration is fixed at whatever duration you set
in the app - even if something is still going on, it splits it into separate videos which
means important details and bits of evidence can be lost as the next clip seems to start a
few seconds later. That duration time should be a minimum length, not a fixed length.
That leads me on to another great feature of this camera kit and that’s how it lets you define
Detection Zones so that you’ll only be alerted of motion if it happens in these zones. It’s not as
mature and advanced as the equivalent feature on the Nest ecosystem, for example I couldn’t draw
diagonal lines to create my zone, just a square or rectangle, but it’s still good to see this
feature included for no extra monthly cost and I hope it will develop and be improved over time.
So I’d say this is a pretty good little camera system, not at all bad for the price
and of course if you’ve already got the smart doorbell from WUUK which
also features a camera then it’ll slot into that ecosystem and work inside the same app.
If you want to pick one of these up for yourself there’s a link in the video
description underneath the LIKE button and I’m also giving away a couple of kits too.
If you’d like to be in with a chance of winning, leave a comment below and tell me firstly,
where you’ll be installing your WUUK Wireless Cam Pro if you win - and also what’s the funniest
thing you’ve ever seen captured on CCTV? I’m looking forward to reading some of those comments!
There are full details on the giveaway in the video description and entries
will close on the date shown on screen. Good luck, and next up why not watch my
review of WUUK’s first product, a smart video doorbell. I’ll see you in that one!