What's up guys. It's Chris Majestic here with Majestechs
and today we're going to reviewing the Arlo Pro.
so as you know traditional security
camera systems require you to run wires
throughout your house to wire up the
cameras and even the wireless outdoor
ones still require you to run power to your
house which means you have to drill
holes into your house to run wires
inside
well this is the are Arlo Pro and it's a
100-percent wireless camera solution so
each camera is battery-operated and
weather-resistant so you can pretty much
put these cameras wherever you want.
They can easily mount to a wall or ceiling using
the magnetic mount that they have and
that mounts going to allow you to
position it in pretty much any angle you
want now these cameras are 100-percent
wireless but they do come with the base
station and the base station has to be
wired to your router and each camera
comes with a rechargeable 2400mah
hour removable battery and you can
charge the battery while it's in the
camera if you want using the included
micro USB charger. You just plug that into
the back of the camera and it's going to
charge it. You can also buy additional
batteries for fifty bucks and you can
buy standalone battery charger that
allow you to charge up to two batteries
for about 50 bucks as well.
And they claim that you can get four to six
months of use out of these batteries now
that's going to be affected by how often
you have motion on that camera
Each camera also comes with a built-in
microphone and speaker which means that
you can actually talk to the person on
the other end of the camera and you can
hear them so that's really nice you can
get two-way audio going.
So these cameras are HD they do 720p they have
built-in motion detection, night vision, and
a 130 degree field of view
so you can get a lot in the view of this camera.
alright so onto the base station. The base
station has two USB ports and you can
actually use those ports to connect an
external hard drive and you can actually
store your recordings directly on a hard
drive instead of relying 100%
on the cloud. It has an ethernet port
which are going to use to connect that
to your router. The base station also has
a 100db siren built into it
which gets really really loud and really
really enjoying. And that siren i can
actually be triggered manually using the app
or you can have it go off if there's
motion on one of the cameras or
something like that. Setting these
cameras up its really really easy all
you're going to do is hit the sync
button on top of the hub then you're
going to hit the sync button on the
camera and within a few seconds it's
going to pair with the hub and the
Arlo pro and the Arlo are backward
compatible this means that the Arlo Pro Cameras
will work with the original Arlo Hub and the original
Arlo cameras will work with the Arlo Pro Hub.
The Arlo app is also really nice so
the cameras are triggered by what are
called "Modes" and you'll see four modes
in there by default when you first open
up the app and you can add more if you
want but the modes are going to tell the
cameras what to do so if you put in "Armed Mode"
that means that the cameras are
going to be ready when they sense motion
to start recording and push that
recording out to the cloud and you can
add a lot of different settings that
each one of these modes to tell the
cameras how you want them to react
whether you wanted to be triggered by
audio which is really cool so you don't
have to rely 100% on motion if
it gets sound it will actually push the video
as well. They also have a mode here for
geofencing which is really nice and it
looks like it's in beta right now but
that's going to do is allow your cameras
to be armed whenever your phone leaves a
certain designated area. So like if you
leave your house is going to turn into
Armed Mode or can turn it off when you get
back or something like that so that's
really nice as well. Under the
devices section of your app this is where
you'll see all your cameras and you can
actually tap on it to view a live
video feed it does take a few seconds
for the video to come up and you can
only view one of the time but it does
have that option for you to do you live video.
You can tap the Settings button
that's on each camera that's going to
allow you to change the device settings.
You can look at the battery life, the signal
strength, audio/video settings, and
sensitivity settings as well.
But the very first thing that I recommend for
you to do is to actually adjust the
video quality of the cameras to higher
quality now this is going to affect your
battery life but this is going to make
your videos true 720p and the library
section of the app is where you can
actually view your recordings and you can
choose to delete them or share them or
download them if you want and the Arlo
does come with 7 free days of cloud
recording so you can get up to 7 days
here for free and they do have different
packages you can pay $100 a
year for 30 days of recording or you can
pay $150 a year for
60 days of recording.
And they also have the option for
24/7 recording if you want
obviously this is going to be a little
bit more expensive but it will be a good
option if you're really paranoid or you
just needed to be recording all the time
and they do give you discounts if you
have more than one plan and they have a
lot of different plan options i will
post the link in the description to their
website for you to check out their plans
another thing i really really like about
these cameras is that they natively work
directly with SmartThings and IFTTT so
you can do things like link the modes so
if you're SmartThings mode changes it
will change the mode on the camera so
it will Arm the cameras or you can have
recordings be triggered by some other
sensor on SmartThing so that's really nice.
And IFTTT is just going to open up the
door for a whole lot of different
automation if you want.
Now this is the Arlo Pro. They do still have the
original Arlo and there are a few
differences between the two. The main
thing is that these are faster and they
better motion sensitivity so one
major problem that the original Arlo
cameras had was that it would start the
recording a little bit too late
well with the Arlo Pro they've definitely
fixed that issue. Within I'd say a split
second in most of my videos it started
recording as soon as it saw me.
It did work really well for inanimate
objects when I opened up my garage
door really didn't pick that up but it
did pick me up as soon as I came into
the frame so i don't know if it's using
a heat signature or what
Another difference from the old Arlo is
that he's actually come with
rechargeable batteries.
So the old Arlo came with a CR123 battery
the other difference is that the base
station actually comes with that
100db siren that didn't exist on the
whole base station.
So there's a lot to love about this Arlo security camera
system but there are a few things I
don't like.
The very first thing is kinda obvious and that's that these are
battery-operated that means you're going
to have to replace the battery every few
months if you get a lot of motion and
you're doing 720p recording that can
definitely dwindle that 4-6 months
down a little bit so that could
definitely stuck if you've got like 4
or 5 cameras and you find yourself
out there every 3-4 months or so
replacing the batteries constantly
swapping them out that can definitely be a pain.
Now as I said, you can buy the charging station and additional
batteries but if you want to do that
you're pretty much looking at an additional $100.
That brings me to my next thing
which is the price now these things are
not cheap now you definitely paying for
convenience here so you've got the
cheapest option for the Arlo Pro, which
is about $250 for a 1-Camera system
all the way up to the 4-Camera system
which is what i have here and this cost
$650 so once you start adding things like
the charging station extra batteries it
can definitely get really pricey.
Another concern that I have is that these are
only 720p now some people might think
I'm nitpicking with that but I do wish
they had a 1080p option and only reason
why I say that is when you're talking
about these recordings being highly
compressed and they're 720p, when you're trying
to do something like pick up a license
plate or face off in the distance
that's going to be kind of hard to do
with 720p video so I definitely wish they
had a 1080p option they do have the Arlo Q
which is an indoor wired camera and
that is 1080p but i do wish they had
some outdoor cameras that were 1080p
another thing to keep in mind is that
you can't record more than two minutes
at a time so by default your recordings
are going to be 10 seconds. You can take
that all the way up to two minutes but
you're not going to be able to go beyond
that and that's going to be whether you
trigger the recording manually or if it
does it automatically with motion and
the last concern I have about this is
that you can only do 5 cameras.
That may be plenty for some people but i
would like to see like an 8 camera
system but overall i really like these
cameras i think they're really good for
somebody who is either not handy or not
really technical since they make it
really simple for you to set these
things up. You can even buy some really
cool accessories for the cameras like
you can buy different mounts if you want
you can get some camo skins and
different colored skins so you can like
hide the camera a tree or something like
that if you want to. Now Arlo isn't
the only 100% percent wireless
camera system out there. There are a few
other ones out there but i do think
Netgear got it right with the Arlo cameras.
Alright guys that's going to be it for this
video if you found it helpful go ahead
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i'll see you guys in the next video.