Review on Arlo Pro 3 Spotlight Camera - Wireless Security with 2K Video & HDR, Color Night Vision, 2-Way Audio - Black (Add-on, Wire-Free). by Shaun Bushey

First, as a previous reviewer said, the hardware is excellent. The cameras produce sharp, clear images with very good color reproduction. Setup is quick and easy. The app is also easy to use and mostly intuitive. However, most of the advertised features are mediocre at best. Worst of all, there's a significant lag between when an event occurs and when you can actually see it, even if it's connected to the same network as the hub. There is a 10-30 second delay in live view (which can take a minute or more to connect). This can make positioning the cameras a longer process than we would like. But worse, it renders the two-way audio feature useless. If you see someone you need to speak to, they've probably already left, and that's real time when you're home. Even worse is the latency associated with notifications. The delay between recording an event and getting a notification is not that long, around 5 seconds. But if you then see what the notification is about, you'll have to wait for the entry to load. It may take a few minutes for it to appear in your library. Again, this means you can't see events in real time and can't react fast enough to affect what's happening. If you want to use two-way audio to alert someone, it's completely useless when you're away from home (that's when you want to use it most) since you won't even know someone is there. for probably 5 minutes and then you still have to wait for the live view to activate. By that point, they'd probably already been hacking or doing something else they came there to do. Another issue is that the system doesn't record all the time like wired video systems, so the stored videos actually capture a few seconds of activity before recording begins. This means that recordings often miss large and important parts of the action. The recordings themselves can either be set to a fixed point in time or as long as there is movement. But that too is problematic. What if the action lasts longer than 2 minutes (longest time setting)? On the other hand, the As long as there's motion setting literally turns off the moment the camera stops detecting motion, potentially missing important parts of the action both at the end and in the beginning. You really need at least 10 seconds of recording time before the triggering event and 10 seconds after motion is no longer detected to ensure no important information is lost. Delay also often means that the video itself has gaps. Often there is no video at all, just a single still image (0-second video). Motion detection isn't very good either. The cameras are extremely sensitive and can pick up the slightest movement of almost anything. That's not bad, except that you have to set the sensitivity well below the maximum to avoid constant false alarms. But the adjustment is terrible. We have a few neighborhood cats that roam the yard quite often, as well as birds that visit the feeding station in the back of the house. But trying to set the sensitivity so low that it doesn't always work on these animals but still doesn't let a human through is almost impossible. You would think there would be a significant difference between an 8 pound cat and a 180 pound cat. Mailman that the system can recognize. You are wrong. In this sense, the system labels the video according to the type of movement that caused it and is very good at accurately distinguishing between people, animals and vehicles. However, there is no way to ignore animals, for example. You can prevent notifications from being sent depending on the type of trigger, but the recording will still be saved and drain your batteries. Edit: For some reason, after the first two days, the system also stopped correctly identifying "human" and "animal" and now just flags everything as "movement". Night shots are generally good, with one big exception. I have a camera monitoring the gate from the side of my house. There really is nowhere to mount a camera to effectively monitor these gates other than on the side of the house itself. This means that the side of the house on the right side of the image is about 1/5th of the frame. Not a big deal as the rest of the area sees what I need to see. However, at night, when infrared or white light is used, that part of the house is so brightly lit by the camera light that the rest of the image is completely out of focus. There's no way to limit the field of view (there's a setting that says so, but doesn't actually crop the image) so the camera ignores that area. In short, if you want high-resolution images to show that someone was on your property at a specific time, this system will do it pretty well (images are great when actually recording - which often isn't even of people walking by directly through the field of view). However, if you want a good record of what they did or even more if you want to watch them in real time, this system is not for you as their service is working properly. it doesn't do well now, or in some cases not at all. And forget about two-way audio as it's useless. UPDATE: Having had this for a few weeks I am able to amend this review. I downgraded it from two to one star. First, none of the above issues have been resolved. Latency varies drastically from one instance to another, but is always excessive enough to render the two-way audio feature unusable. Not to mention the fact that the audio from the cameras is poor so it doesn't make any sense even with no lag. It was impossible to set the motion detection to record what you want, not what you want. Not. Even at 100%, it almost never captures people approaching my front door, although I set the camera to require them to walk horizontally in the field of view (presumably that's the type of movement it detects best) at a distance . almost 30ft, within 5ft of the camera to get there. When he writes them down (and not always) he almost always catches them just at the door or even on the way. Ironically, it still often catches cats, birds, and small plants 20 feet away blowing in the wind, so much so that I get over 100 notifications a day and the battery dies after about a week. And that with battery management set to the lowest video quality for the best battery life. It's so ridiculously bad that I generally record a video with a postman about every three days (usually just a few seconds of him walking), even though he could almost reach out and touch the camera, but I have every day a dozen 60-second videos showing a cat preening itself 20 feet away. There are two capture modes that I mentioned: motion capture and time capture mode. I've had such poor results recording in motion (I could get split seconds when someone walked out of frame, or start recording when they were halfway through the frame and then stop recording while they were still in and out moving) that I switched to the timer mode, where you can set the duration of the recording from 0 seconds to 2 minutes. The camera is said to automatically record for a set amount of time as soon as motion is detected. No wonder it isn't. The results I get are better than before, but the video never reaches the length I set. Usually it is much shorter, but sometimes twice as long. And I still usually get people to leave when they've already come to my door, done something (ring the bell, dropped the package, etc.) and turned to leave. I usually only get the back of the head, not the faces. Another feature that doesn't work is Hot Zones. First, they don't record hot zones, only hot zone notifications. At first I hoped I could get the cameras to better record what I wanted, but that didn't change that. Well, that's not what it was designed for. But he doesn't do what he's supposed to. Since you can't turn off notifications (you can choose between a text notification or an email, but you must choose one, the other, or both), I tried using the Hot Zone to reduce notifications from the camera, what i was getting was too many bogus notifications (sometimes one per second or two for a full minute). So I just set the hot zone to the smallest area I could, in the corner of the frame where there's absolutely no movement. It didn't help. I still get as many notifications as I used to, and if you look at the recorded video you can see that the movement that caused it (if there was any) was far from being in the hot zone. In short, this technology is far from perfect. ready for the consumer market. Although much more difficult to set up, a wired system that costs a quarter as much will produce much better results, although the video quality isn't nearly as good on such cheap systems. But a video that either doesn't cover what you need to see, or arrives so late that you can't react in time to make a difference, is pretty much worthless, no matter how good the picture quality.