Review on 📷 WYZE Cam v3 - Color Night Vision, 1080p HD Wired Indoor/Outdoor Video Camera, 2-Way Audio, Works with Alexa, Google Assistant, and IFTTT by Chris Stanisic

I want to start by saying that I am very interested in having security cameras in my house, but I never wanted to spend a lot of money on it. I heard about this camera in a tech news article and thought I'd take a picture. After all, the $2,000 security camera and free cloud storage seemed to be true. That I love: Image quality is very good and setup was easy. The price is very good! Each camera comes with a metal plate and adhesive tape that allows you to place it on any flat surface. This is good since the camera has a magnet on the bottom of the stand. Updates are released regularly to fix bugs. Hope this continues for many years to come! The two-way sound quality is actually very good! Also, you can now enable night vision when the LED is off, which is very useful for a camera viewing a window. Now I can see clearly as long as I have enough ambient light. What I do most of the time. What I don't like: In order for your voice to speak through the camera, you must open the camera in the application and press and hold the microphone icon. To hear the other person, you must turn on the camera. Seems reasonable to go this far, right? Well, every time you click on the microphone icon, the camera will turn off again. It's kind of pointless to advertise two-way audio if the person on the app has to constantly turn on the camera sound to hear the person on the camera trying to talk to them. Not sure why it doesn't stick to the setting I chose. Recorded alerts are too short. For example, I have a camera installed in my garage to start recording when sound or motion is detected. Whenever the garage door opens, I am alerted and the camera starts recording. However, the footage is long enough to see the garage doors open and nothing more as the footage is 9-12 seconds long. There seems to be a cooldown between each alert too. I'm saying this because I don't get another alert when I have to park my car, close the garage door, get out of the car, and walk through the camera to get into my house. Having a microSD to continuously record everything can get around this, but being able to record 30 second warnings can avoid this whole problem. Now you can set the time when the camera will send you alerts, but unfortunately these options are limited to the time of day and do not include the day of the week. So if you're hoping to set it up to alert you Monday through Friday between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm, you couldn't. This will always alert you every day of the week between the times you specify. It's a minor complaint, but the app saves a thumbnail image for each camera right on my phone. I'd rather have the thumbnails stay in the app itself rather than being saved in a separate folder on my images. This also applies to my avatar in the app. Both of my cameras shut down frequently and require power cycles to get them to work. They can work for several hours or a day if I'm lucky. Also, the alert notifications won't appear until I open the app, rendering the alerts almost useless. I'll wait for an update again, but I'm losing hope here. They pushed out an update to help fix the frequent blackouts I was experiencing, but now only one camera seems to be working at a time. (This applies to live broadcast). What happens is that it always seems to me that one camera randomly fails while the other continues to work normally. As soon as I turn off the camera that is not working, the other one turns off after about a day and I can no longer connect to it. If I turn one on and off, the other turns off. This has been happening since my last update and now I only turn them off if Wyze runs an update when it's out of date, turning it off every other day. I'm still getting notifications about what happened, so this is just a live broadcast that doesn't work. Speaking of notifications, if you're on an Android device and you're not receiving notifications from the app, try disabling any battery optimization options (i.e. Doze) that interact with the app. Disabling should make the notifications reappear. My phone recently updated to have the Doze feature in Android 8.0 and turning those settings off seems to have gotten them working again. WyzeCam still suffers from a short 12 second motion detection clip every 5 minutes, which is the biggest drawback. This makes the camera unreliable as a security solution. Cloud recording cannot be bypassed either. If you turn it off and only use a micro SD card, you won't get any motion notifications. Even if the cloud storage is free, I would like to be able to turn off cloud recording and still receive notifications when motion is detected using an mSD card. From this date, it is not possible to record movies or images to any cloud service. The camera also lacks a web interface for viewing live feeds or changing settings. The V1 camera only records at 10 frames per second, which can make fast or close moving objects very choppy. The V2 version records slightly better at 15 fps. However, they have improved the motion detection feature. Now you can define a rectangular area for the motion detection area. In addition, motion detection sensitivity, which greatly improves false alerts. There were many connectivity issues that have now been fixed. You can use the camera through the window by turning off the lights to avoid reflections. However, this also disables night mode (black and white), which makes the image look very dark if you don't have good outdoor lights where you point the camera. Wyze also has a user forum (Wyzecam.com) where you can get help from other users if you have problems with your cameras. This is a fantastic security camera for the money. Most of my issues are software related and will (hopefully) be fixed soon. In general, I recommend this CCTV camera to you, but it both has its pros and cons.