Intro; If you’ve been watching the channel
for any length of time now, you may have seen some of my previous reviews of Eufy security cameras.
I’m a fan of Eufy’s products, I think they offer great value for money with lots of features,
and so I was really excited when Eufy reached out to me in early September, and asked me if I’d
like to take a look at their brand new EufyCam 3 cameras, and their brand new Home Base. I received
these cameras in early September, so I’ve had them setup for about 2 months now. Full disclosure,
Eufy provided the setup I’ll be talking about today at no cost to myself, but this is not a
sponsored video, Eufy have had no involvement in the creation of this video, and they will be
seeing this video at the same time as you, so all thoughts and opinions are entirely my own.
What’s in the box; Eufy are currently offering 2
varieties of Eufycam 3 cameras. You’ve got this, the EufyCam 3, and the much smaller EufyCam 3C,
although do be aware that all of my testing is in relation to the EufyCam 3 only. Right now, you can
buy a starter kit, which consists of the Homebase and 2 cameras, for $550, or the version that I
was sent which is the starter kit complete with a 1TB hard drive, and that’s retailing right now for
$630. Eufy also offer 3 cam and 4 cam bundles, as well as standalone cameras for $220 each,
so no matter the size of your home, you should be able to build out a solution that works for you.
In terms of what you get in the box, you of course get the new HomeBase and the 2 cameras,
but you also get all of the relevant cables and mounting solutions needed
to get these cameras positioned outside your home.
Setting Up; Setting up Eufy products is generally
very easy, and this kit is no exception. You’re going to start by downloading the Eufy Security
app to your iPhone or Android device, register an account, and then follow the on-screen prompts to
get first the HomeBase configured, and then the cameras added to the HomeBase. That second stage
by the way is extremely simple, as Eufy use a really clever method of you holding your camera
near the Homebase, and having the camera play out a kind of digital ID sound, that your HomeBase
then picks up using it’s built-in microphone as a method of verifying and connecting to the camera.
Interestingly, the new HomeBase only seems to be able to connect to your router via ethernet,
which isn’t a problem for me, I had a port available, but the previous Homebase could
also connect via Wifi, making positioning it a bit more flexible. That’s not the case this
time around, and I don’t know if Eufy plan on adding that functionality in the future,
but if you’re upgrading and anticipating that functionality, you might be disappointed.
Battery Cameras Explained; I wanted to take a second to discuss
this because I still get so many questions on my old Eufy videos about this subject,
these are battery cameras. What that means is that they run exclusively off of an internal battery,
the one included here is a 13,000 milliampere hour version. These cameras do not,
nor do they have the ability to record 24/7, that simply isn’t how they function.
These cameras are essentially in a constant standby mode, and when triggered by movement,
they immediately begin recording, and then revert back to that standby mode,
once the movement in the frame has stopped. This might sound really obvious to you, but
if what you want is 24/7 recorded surveillance, these are not the cameras for you, but then the
idea here is that, for most households, 24/7 surveillance isn’t actually what you need.
Battery Life; One area of Eufy’s
marketing that I’ve always had a little bit of an issue with is their battery life claims, let me
explain. Take the 2C Pro camera for example, the camera that I’ve owned for a year now.
Eufy claim that this camera can run for 6 months without needing a charge. Now, up until recently,
I had 3 of these cameras dotted around the outside of my house. I had 2 at the front, where there’s
quite a lot going on, lots of people coming and going from the house each day for example,
and I had 1 pointed at the back door, which is generally the quietest part of our house,
by a significant margin. The camera pointed at the back door does indeed get about 6 months of
battery life. The cameras pointed at the front of the house, needed charging about every 4 to
6 weeks. Now, does this invalidate Eufy’s claim of a 6 month battery life? Well, technically no,
but there does need to be a rather large asterix disclaimer explaining that not everyone is going
to see those kinds of results, in other words, your mileage will vary. With these new cameras,
Eufy are claiming a 1 year battery life. The battery here is twice the size of
the one in the 2C Pros, so I reckon if I pointed one of these at my back door and
didn’t activate the solar panel, it would get around a year’s worth of use between charges.
However, I’m not using these new cameras at the rear of my house, I’ve installed them at the
front, one on each side of our driveway. One of these cameras gets a lot of sun,
but one of them gets almost no sun, as it has to be positioned beneath an eave of our house.
Both of these cameras have been operating for almost 2 months as I write this review,
and the one that gets a lot of direct sunlight each day, is at 100% battery life,
it literally hasn’t lost a single percent, despite having recorded 550 events. The one
that doesn’t get any sunlight, due to it’s positioning, has dropped to 23%.
Now, I’m actually quite impressed by that. By that logic, I’d be looking at needing
to charge the camera that doesn’t get any sunlight around every 10, maybe 12 weeks,
which is a marked improvement on the previous camera. The camera that does get sunlight,
at this rate, I may never have to recharge, which is amazing, although time will tell.
Video Quality; Eufy are pushing these as 4K cameras,
and they are, in pulling the footage from these cameras into Final Cut Pro for editing,
it’s clear that the images they produce are 4K in terms of their dimension. But, to simply say that
these are 4K, and therefore significantly better than anything the company has released before is,
in my opinion, a bit naive. The footage from these cameras is heavily condensed, and running
at a frame rate of 14.49 frames per second. In bright daylight conditions, the footage is crisp
and clear enough to make out car license plates, marks on clothing or enough of people’s faces
to identify them, if you needed to. At night, the quality of the footage drops significantly,
in both colour night vision and black and white night vision. Colour night vision in particular
suffers quite badly from ghosting, making it quite difficult to pause a frame and get something
useful from the footage. It’s not impossible, but if the person trying to burgle your home at night
moves around really quickly, the cameras might struggle to pick up anything especially useful.
I’ve personally found that black and white night vision gives the best night vision
performance on these cameras, even with the tradeoff of everything being black and white.
And look, there aren’t really any consumer security cameras that produce clear,
vibrant footage, especially at night. And the footage from these cameras isn’t bad by
any stretch of the imagination, I just think it’s important that you set your expectations
accordingly. The footage from these cameras is good, and it’s better than previous Eufy cameras,
but some of the marketing material being used could suggest that you can expect
a level of quality and clarity that, you’re not really going to be seeing.
Brains; The most significant improvement here from
the previous generation, much more so than video quality, is in regard to what Eufy are calling
their Bionic Mind AI. Let me give you a very basic anecdotal example. The previous generation
of cameras could tell the difference between say, a person and a cat, during daylight hours,
but not at night. At night, the old generation cameras would alert you to all movement. These
new cameras, in my experience, can indeed tell the difference, at all hours of the day, which is a
massive quality of life improvement. Quite simply, if a cat approaches my front door at 3am, I don’t
care, but if a person approaches, I want to know about it immediately, and that’s now viable
with these cameras. You simply head into the Settings for the camera, choose Motion Detection,
and then choose the Detection Type, which you can see breaks down by human recognition,
human detection, vehicle detection and pet detection. And my experience has been that
this really does work, which I’m really pleased about, as I’ve not had any more false positives,
and the app is configured to alert me only if a human is identified by these cameras. This is all
handled by the new HomeBase, and Eufy claim that the new Homebase can make your old cameras smarter
because of this, you can see that right now, my one remaining 2C Pro camera is connected to
the new HomeBase, and Eufy are planning on all of the previous generation of cameras and doorbells
being compatible with the new Homebase by early next year, which I’m really looking forward to.
My only wish here, is that Eufy would offer Vehicle Recognition and Pet Recognition,
just like they do with humans, it would be good, and I’d assume quite simple, for the camera to be
able to recognise our car, and alert us only if an unknown car pulled onto our driveway for example.
The Bionic Mind also encompasses Facial Recognition, and even Body recognition
to a degree, where the cameras can tell if it’s me approaching the house, or my wife,
and you can configure it to only alert you if it’s a stranger. In my experience,
this either works really well, or not at all, and I suspect part of the issue is the problem with
security cameras in general. You position them up high, and unless people specifically look
up at the camera when approaching, there’s a good chance that your camera isn’t going
to get a good look at their face. This is where the body recognition comes into play,
and the AI is both self-learning, and leans from you taking some time to confirm or reject matches
in the app, so this might be a feature that I come back to in 6 months and really appreciate.
Other Features; The Homebase comes with 16gb
of internal storage, or you can expand that out like I have using a hard drive. Eufy make the kind
of claim that I think is difficult to say with a straight face, that with the 1TB drive installed,
you can store up to 15 years of video on the HomeBase, I’ll talk more about that in my 15
Year Review video I guess, but essentially, putting any kind of substantial drive in
this thing is going to give you more local storage than you could ever possibly use,
and it’s very easy to insert and format a new drive. Keep in mind that the whole ethos of Eufy
is that you store your data locally, within the confines of the Homebase, and not in the cloud,
and that extra storage is obviously going to be extremely helpful. Note that you can also insert
an external drive or a thumbdrive into the USB port of the Homebase, and archive your footage
too if you wish, which is a nice feature if you’d like to have more than one copy of anything.
The cameras are IP67 rated, so they should be able to withstand rough weather conditions all
year around, although one point about that, they do feature an anti-theft system, where if
they sense that they’re being removed, they’ll screech out their 100db alarm. The problem is,
wind has been enough to set that off in my experience, although just this morning,
Eufy has rolled out an update that claims to fix that, so I’ll reserve judgement.
The cameras also feature 2 way audio, here’s an example of that.
And the entire setup is compatible with Alexa and Google, although not Apple HomeKit,
although Eufy’s website does claim that HomeKit support is being worked on.
Conclusion; I get that much of this
review video seems either a bit negative, or not exactly glowing, so let me just put
this out there. In my opinion, this is the best home security camera kit you can buy,
right now. If I was kitting out a family member’s home with a brand new setup, this is the one that
I would advise them to buy. The 4K cameras aren’t as incredible as the marketing literature implies,
but they’re very good, probably some of the best on the market. Artificial intelligence
is also good, and should get better over time, and has already massively reduced the number
of false alerts that I get from this system. The promised backwards compatibility, bringing almost
all of the company’s previous devices together to be compatible with the new Hub is amazing,
as it should in theory mean that you only have to recycle your old hub if you’ve already got
Eufy cameras, you can still use all of your old cameras elsewhere on your property if you wish,
and still make use of the new Artificial Intelligence features. Or, you could buy this
setup, and then go and purchase some of the older cameras at a great price to flesh out your system,
knowing that you’ll still be able to get all of the AI benefits on the older cameras. Eufy’s
value proposition of an all-in-one security camera ecosystem, with artificial intelligence and where
YOU keep all of your footage, locally, with no monthly fees is a compelling one, and it’s
not surprising that Eufy’s range of cameras are becoming more and more popular. And these are of
course the first cameras in Eufy’s new generation of cameras. I’m sure it won’t be long before we
see a 4K doorbell, a 4K floodlight camera and who knows what else, all tied into the same system.
If you’re interested in picking up a EufyCam 3 set for yourself,
I’ve included links to purchase in the description of this video.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.