You don’t have to look far into the future to see a time when all houses come equipped with home security cameras. Tech companies have been pushing hard to innovate in the connected home CCTV camera space. Big investments by the likes of Google-owned Nest, Amazon’s Blink, and up-and-coming security company Ring have made home security cameras more prominent.
In a nutshell, these cameras record both the inside and the outside of your home, and save the footage somewhere (it might be in the cloud, it might be in the device itself, depending which one you buy). Often, they also connect with your smartphone so you can stream live everything that’s going on at home, wherever you are in the internet-connected world. .
So what kind of product do you need? I’ve spent time reviewing the best home security cameras on the market. Here’s what I found
Whether you rent or own, you want the best security camera system for keeping an eye on your home while you’re gone. That used to entail signing on with a professional—and pricey—security service. But a boom in consumer-level smart-home tech is putting indoor and outdoor home surveillance into our own hands.home-security-cameras
These close cousins of webcams require minimal installation and offer flexible setups and a range of security features. Indeed, the offerings vary widely by camera, and deciding what to buy gets more daunting as this category grows ever more crowded. But whether you’re looking for an easy way to check on your kids and pets, or a full-service sentinel to monitor for intruders, we’ll help find the right product for your needs.
Most versatile home security camera
Arlo Pro 4 Camera
In addition, just like most of the other security cameras, you can stream from the doorbell if you want to check what’s happening on the street at any time.
If you think you’re getting a standard sized doorbell, prepare for a shock. This bad boy is large: about five inches tall and two and a half inches across. It also comes with two face plates so you can have a plain black doorbell or a silver one. Either way, it works well enough and has the best two-way audio of any device on here.
It also comes with the rest of the usual stuff: motion detection, night vision and weather resistance. On this latest model you can also set up motion zones so if it tracks any motion in a specific place, you’ll get an alert.
I noticed that setup wasn’t quite as easy as the other Ring device and it struggled to connect to my WiFi. But once I did get it up and running, I was impressed.
The new version of the Nest Cam is a nice bit of kit. For starters, it looks beautiful: the all-white design and black camera face are seriously spacey (if eerily reminiscent of the AI in 2001: A Space Odyssey). It’s far from the horrid metal CCTV box that you might call to mind when you imagine a home security camera. Even better, Nest have slashed the price taking this device from nearly £300 to less than £100.
Fundamentally, the Nest camera sits wherever you put it and records what it sees, saving the last five days of footage to the cloud. The wide face of the camera gives you an impressive field of vision, and the picture you get is of good quality (you can change the resolution; the better it gets, the more data you’ll use to save it to the cloud.) To see that footage, you can use an app on your phone or a browser link on your computer.
So far so normal. Things start to get really interesting with the Nest’s facial recognition system. If the camera detects a face it doesn’t recognise, it will send a notification and picture to your phone, allowing you to give that person the once over. If it’s someone getting up to no good, the camera will follow their movements and save the timestamp, so you can easily find it in the future. And, of course, you can phone 999 while they’re still in your house.
The system is smart enough to remember faces it has seen before so you don’t need to keep approving family and friends every time they enter the living room. The downside to all this is that you do have to pay a subscription fee for this service.
There’s a few other cool features in the camera itself such as an automatic zoom which tracks moving objects if it detects an intruder.
In general, I found the video footage captured by Nest to be almost perfect when viewing it on other devices. There’s less than a second of lag between someone performing an action and you seeing/hearing it on the screen. That’s also the case in night vision mode which, I noticed, caused some of the other cameras to slow down.
I tried the indoor model of the Nest but the outdoor one is largely the same in terms of quality. There’s also an waterproof outdoor version which is a fair bit more expensive (£159, John Lewis) and a battery powered option which you can stick anywhere you like (£179.99, John Lewis) they’re largely the same in terms of camera quality, though the latter will offer the facial recognition capabilities without need for a subscription.
If you think you’re getting a standard sized doorbell, prepare for a shock. This bad boy is large: about five inches tall and two and a half inches across. It also comes with two face plates so you can have a plain black doorbell or a silver one. Either way, it works well enough and has the best two-way audio of any device on here.
It also comes with the rest of the usual stuff: motion detection, night vision and weather resistance. On this latest model you can also set up motion zones so if it tracks any motion in a specific place, you’ll get an alert.
I noticed that setup wasn’t quite as easy as the other Ring device and it struggled to connect to my WiFi. But once I did get it up and running, I was impressed.
