if you're considering buying an August doorbell can Pro - this is what you need
to know before you make your decision so the first thing you notice about this
doorbell camera is its shape it's not the tall thin shape of most doorbell
cameras this one is square three inches by an inch deep seven centimeters by two
and a half centimeters and there has some consequence on where you put it
because it's too wide to fit on most door frames you're going to end up
mounting this on the front of your house and if you don't have wiring there
you're going to have to move the wiring so consider that doorbell wiring is
low-voltage and it's relatively easy to move the installation itself is quite
easy and straightforward there's a guide in the August app you simply choose the
type of material you're mounting it onto and it takes you step-by-step with
pictures through how you should do it so what's the video quality like I've been
using it for the last couple of weeks and I found the quality to be pretty
good it's sharp and it gives you nice color images the resolution is a
non-standard resolution it's 960 by 1280 that means it's taller than it is wide
one of the advantages of this means that it fills up your cell phone screen
without you having to turn your phone on the side the field of view is a hundred
and twenty degrees it doesn't have a big fisheye effect on it so you don't get
very much Distortion and that's good one of the disadvantages
of not having the fisheye is that you don't see quite as wide this is not
meant to replace a front of home security camera but if you do like to
have a wide view of what's going on in front of your house this might be a
little bit too narrow for you but with 120 degree field of view I found this
gave a perfectly adequate view of everything that was happening on my
doorstep and on the path leading up to my house so I can't really fault that oh
one of the things that I'd like to see on this is a manual brightness and
exposure control at least on my house there's quite a large overhang which
makes the doorstep quite dark and sometimes as people got to my doorstep
especially if the sky was bright behind them the camera didn't do a great job of
automatically adjusting and their faces were quite dark the camera doesn't have
night vision so that means that at nighttime you don't get that
a scale image of everything that's going on in front of your house it uses the
regular camera so the disadvantage is less visibility at night but the
advantages that you do get a full-color image at nighttime it relies on the
available light so whether that be a moon whether that be path lighting
whether that be floodlights in front of your house and augments that with what
August calls a floodlight it's the little logo in the middle of the button
here that lights up it is not a substitution for a real floodlight no
one's going to be scared away by this light coming on but it does give enough
light to light up someone's face when they're standing at your front door but
if you have existing floodlights or a porch light you might want to keep them
switched on to help give a lot of light for the camera the camera uses infrared
to sense what's going on not video motion detection so say something like a
tree moving isn't going to set this off in a couple of weeks I used it the only
two things that set it off were people coming to my front door and large
garbage trucks driving down my street a regular cars driving by didn't set this
off so it did a pretty good job of not sending me false alarms all the time
and when the camera does send you alerts it goes to August cloud service now you
need to know that the cloud service doesn't have a free option you have to
pay for the cloud storage of your video and that costs five dollars a month or
fifty dollars a year so if you're going to have this on the front of your house
for say the next four years it's an extra two hundred dollars that this
doorbell is going to be costing you so factor that into your buying decisions
when you're considering other cameras out there August has a feature they call
hindsight basically the camera is constantly buffering a few seconds of
video so that when something triggers it it doesn't just send you the video from
that moment but you get to see a few seconds before and that's sometimes
useful to try to figure out what was going on or what triggered the camera
compatibility the system will work with Amazon Alexa if you have an echo show
that's the echo with the screen you can ask Alexa to put the video from this on
the echo show but there's no compatibility with Google and there's no
compatibility with apple's homekit either it does work with august's
existing smart lock if someone comes to the door through the same app you can
unlock the smart lock and let them in the house
if you want to do that also if you have a nest camera or nest thermostats then
again through the same app you can watch video from inside your house and switch
on or off the thermostat as people come and go and so that's the August door
belt cam Pro - it looks good it has good quality video and we didn't get a lot of
false alerts on the downside it doesn't have compatibility with a wide number of
smart home devices you are gonna have to pay a subscription for cloud storage of
the video and there isn't infrared night vision
we gave it three and a half out of five