Somfy Outdoor Camera

Would be better if the camera was a wider angle to capture a bigger area but other than that, it's very good. Easy to install and I love the alarm bell. It's a fantastic feature that really differentiates it from many competitors. The bell can also be cancelled from the app. Very good.

It took me a good while to get this installed because I was waiting for the right wire to be able to loop back to a lamp, but eventually I gave up and went ahead with a standard non light based install (the light control I will add later)Install is easy, you put the somfy protect app on your phone and it presents a barcode to "show" the camera which is neat. Presumably this barcode gives the camera the wifi AP details.The functionality is actually pretty decent. It can detect motion with a customisable grid, albeit a coarse one, but enough to remove pavement/road/neighbours. The motion detect so far seems excellent, I'm guessing it's using the PIR mainly as it seems to be unphased by sun/clouds or reflected headlights at night which is good.I like the siren, it's very loud. You can manually make it go off or when "armed" it works like a dead man's switch, after motion is detected it counts down, if you don't disarm it, the siren goes off. This is useful if you're out of range, but I guess could lead to false alarms. It can be turned off in the app, so, temporarily even if you're in a meeting or whatever.Image quality is nothing short of excellent both day and night. If you have a ring doorbell you'll know that image quality has dropped massively on those, but this feels like the ring used to be back a couple years ago. You can probably sense my annoyance with ring, so please somfy, if you're going to drop the video quality, please at least offer a premium option so we can see faces!The app works well although on one phone I do occasionally lose picture and get a "holding screen" telling me the camera is unavailable, when I can see it perfectly well on the other phone. Logging out and back in tends to fix it, but if the devs are reading this, would be cool to have a fix!The somfy ecosystem also plays well with IFTTT so the light pass through can be augmented with other actions if you're into that, I may well be into that when I have time! Even geofencing on the arm / disarm is an option. Nice.Suggestions I have would be to customise the "countdown" time to the siren (hardcoded 3 mins) and adjust the siren length (hardcoded also to..I think 3 mins?) Other sirens would also be cool, like a warning message or a ding dong noise or even a custom sound (mine would probably be ominous vintage gramophone music).I'm going for 5 stars as an initial rating because it really does perform well. I will adjust if I hit any technical problems but so far so good!

I've had an indoor security camera for a while, given to me as a present and whilst I initially thought I had no use for it, it turned out that I do like review the last 24 hour clips that device provides.Here I can think of many use cases for an outdoor camera, but whilst execution is generally as good as I'd expect from a security camera, it just doesn't serve it's purpose without an ongoing subscription. Only being able to capture short clips and only 10 seconds or so.The camera itself is well packaged, the design is simple and I would say elegant. It's a little bigger than I had in mind, and whilst it appears well sealed, I would want to avoid it getting wet, so ideally use in an area will some sort of roof or gutter overhang cover.The manual provides straight-forward instructions to install. If you're able to install a wall face-place then you pretty much have the skills to do this. However accessibility to an outdoor electrical terminal isn't a given for victorian houses in london. However luckily I have a porch light that can be daisy chained to the camera.Once connected and mains power turned on, you simply link to the smartphone app and are able to access features like the mic and alert preferences. I'm quite impressed by the alerts, which pop up on your phone, or can be sent to your email. This feature was super annoying as being on a main road, people walk by all the time, so it was difficult to wide angle camera to just focus on those individuals coming onto the front garden. The mic to talk to people such as the postman or intruders and the siren to put them off is pretty good. I like that the app geofences to remind you to set notifications when you leave the property.In call, this is a great camera that I have few issues with. I can appreciate the concerns from other reviews I've read, the main one being the image quality isn't that great, but you're never going to get a good image from these sorts of devices, at least not enough to get detail to get a photo likeness of a person. However the deterrant features are pretty great and okay value for money given this is not a cheap chinese seller.One thing I did think about during this review. The ability to see and speak to people are a great airbnb feature, if you were to couple this with a smart-lock. You could probably manage your property without ever having to hand over any keys.