Table of Content
You really see quite a lot of real estate wherever you have Canary pointed. Test your WiFi connection speed from your Android device. Shop your favorite products and we’ll find the best deal with a single click. Our test floor has no windows and gets pitch black at night, but Canary's night-vision camera still offered outstanding detail in the dark. Originally hailing from Troy, Ohio, Ry Crist is a text-based adventure connoisseur, a lover of terrible movies and an enthusiastic yet mediocre cook. A CNET editor since 2013, Ry's beats include smart home tech, lighting, appliances, and home networking.
The graphic of the different plans is shown below. The wide camera lens, various other features, and subscription free options made for a great security option. I know what the changes include and don't include but now that the new business model is to eliminate previous subscription-free options these products are no longer worth it. I'm swapping my two canary cameras for a better option. The company's response doesn't appear to actually understand the frustration. You can see the Canary lens has a definite “fish eye” effect to it, just like Arlo.
Setup
On night mode it will pick up a moth flying past at night. You can adjust your settings for notifications of movement. For the money, the build quality is good, the camera is good and it is super easy to use. I just had guests over for a week and no one noticed the cameras where they were located in our house, or asked what those devices were sitting there. I will be definitely adding another camera to our household.
Included on the camera is a speaker , microphone and air quality/temp/humidity sensors. The sensors are an interesting inclusion and one would think integration with Nest or ecobee as a remote sensor is an obvious next step. I honestly wouldn’t count on integration with Nest anytime soon however, since they have Dropcam . Cloud-based solutions seem great for checking on the cat in the middle of the day.
Easy to Use
Once your location is set, the Canary app asks if you want to connect by Wi-Fi or Ethernet. I chose to go with Wi-Fi and here’s where it gets weird. Once you set the configuration, you are prompted to plug a yellow audio setup cable into the headphone jack of your phone and into Canary. Canary says this is to "securely communicate with your Android device to authenticate your Canary with our servers". What's more impressive, though, is Canary's video quality. Compared with iSmartAlarm and Piper NV, it looks the clearest to me by far, offering a strong degree of detail, even in night-vision mode.
As an example, the image below shows where I had the Canary set up at home. Notice my dog in the bottom left corner; every time my dog moved his head I got a notification. It would have been really nice to adjust the sensitivity of motion detection, or even not include that area, as you can do with many IP cameras. The Canary records remarkably crisp, 1080p HD video and audio with automatic night vision and a wide-angle lens. The viewing radius ensures your living room, nursery, kitchen or basement is entirely visible with vivid clarity.
ZYXEL P-2000W v2 VoIP Wi-Fi phone
I tried to combat this issue by tagging aggressively, marking each and every clip as "Shadows" and telling the system that everything was fine. I wanted my Canary to calm down and stop flooding me with irrelevant alerts that might ultimately drown out a legitimate one. Over the course of my tests, though, it never got any better and never learned to auto-tag anything.
From time to time, the Canary auto-mode switching feature may briefly access your GPS in order to have high confidence in your location. Battery life is very important to us and we do many things to ensure we use it sparingly. Please be aware that continued use of GPS services running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life. Canary is an interesting product, still in its early days, with many features on the "to-do" list. Given its crowd-funded startup status, my spider-sense starts tingling when I hear "coming in a future release", because we’ve all been down that road before.
Watch Live
The first video is NETGEAR’s Arlo, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. But other smart home devices manage to get set up securely via more common methods . So this seems an unnecessary complication that’s compounded by needing the cable for any subsequent changes to the Wi-Fi network, even if Canary is already connected.
I did not take any videos outdoors with the Canary. While it would have been interesting to see how it did, Canary is not meant to be an outdoor camera. One particular thing to take note of here is really just how wide Canary field of view is (147°).
I paid for a camera that was advertised as and gave me the ability to see recorded videos on my timeline but now I hear that is no longer an option and I have to pay extra for that. Thats really messed up and looks like false advertising to me because its worthless without that capability. Its like I buy a car and then they say, ooops you only get 3 tires.
Because of its very wide field of view, I look farther away in the Canary image even though the cameras are in the same location. Overall, Canary’s night vision looks pretty good. It really lights up the room and items closer than 25 feet would be more visible than with Arlo. Let’s see how it looks with motion in the video below. The problems are due to the nature of this type of IP camera. Since the camera is sleeping, it can’t do any image processing, which is required to set motion detection zones.
You can’t adjust detection sensitivity and you can’t block out image areas that you don’t want to trigger recording. Over time, Canary is supposed to be able to figure out what is and isn’t a false alarm. But I didn’t see any obvious signs of learning in the week or so I spent with the product.
No comments:
Post a Comment