TP-Link Tapo Outdoor Wireless Camera with Solar Panel Bundle: Outdoor Wireless Camera C420S1 + Solar Panel A200 (2K QHD, Color Night Vision, Starlight Sensor, Works w/Alexa & Google Home)

I have many TP-LINK lights and smart switches, so I had big expectations for this camera. However, I'm pretty disappointed. The image on this camera is good, but not as good as my Wyze cameras. That's especially true at night. The night vision is OK, but IMHO much clearer with a Wyze camera. It's perfectly acceptable though. The big problem with these is their detection algorithms. I don't want a notification every time something moves, so I have motion turned off and I'm only using AI detection, and it's pretty bad. I have a camera in my driveway. During the day, it detects vehicles basically only if they are within 10 feet of the camera unless I point the camera at the road. Then it can detect almost every truck that drives by even though it's like 50-60 feet away. On my driveway, that means there could be like 10 cars parked on my driveway and this camera wouldn't notify me. At night, it's even worse. I've driven directly under the camera. My roof is literally feet away, and the camera never triggered. It's similar for people. The UPS guy walked all of the way up my driveway and up my stairs - all of which are within view of the camera, and the camera never triggered. It triggered when he was on his way out, and somehow started when he was like 30 feet away from the camera. I also have a camera in my backyard, and I have a dog. That camera is also set to AI detection, and I have the AI level set to max on everything. That camera has not recorded a single image of my dog yet. Also, my wife goes out the door and smokes every morning. The door is located about 25 feet away from the camera. It's never taken a single image of her either. I have some plants on a table about 10 feet away from it, and it triggers about 1/2 of the time when I go out to water them. Also, they seem to go offline quite a bit, so even viewing them when there isn't any notification will often result in absolutely nothing. I'm hopeful that these triggers will improve with updates. Since they're AI, that should be possible. I'm not sure if the offline problem will ever go away though. The WiFi outside my house isn't great because of my metal siding, and there's not a lot I can do with that. Still, I would hope these things have some way of caching recordings if they can't push them to the server immediately, but I don't know if that's true or possible. In the end, these partly work as I wanted them to and they work well enough to keep. For the most part, I just wanted to be able to see my driveway from my phone while I was working in my office without having to get up and walk across my house. I previously had POE cameras, but because of some other changes at my house I had to cut the ethernet lines that went outside and I'm not keen to run them again. Battery-operated wireless convenience, for the moment, is more important to me, and I'll just cross my fingers and hope they can update these to function better. *Update 6-27-2025* These have improved significantly since I bought them. TP-Link continues to impress me with their consistent updates, and seemingly never abandon their old products. There have been multiple firmware updates, all being applied automatically without any intervention from me, and the detection algorithms have improved to the point where I'm very comfortable recommending these cameras. I also realized the WIFI issues I was having weren't actually WIFI issues, but the placement of my hub. Apparently, the camera uses some other wireless protocol to connect to the hub, and moving the hub closer to my cameras resolved all of my issues. I can now reliably view my cameras. While the night vision is still better with my Wyze cameras, it's perfectly acceptable. I have 2 of these cameras connected to small solar chargers, and have no issues keeping them full and running all day. I've raised my initial rating to 5 stars, as I now believe they deserve that rating.

The C420 system is incredibly easy to use. Once the H200 hub was connected to the router the setup was very straightforward and connecting to my account and the tapo app took only a couple of minutes. I've been told by support that they are adding wifi support to the hub, but for now it requires ethernet. This was not personally a big issue as my router is central in my home and had extra ethernet ports, but if someone does not have an extra port this could be a hurdle requiring extra hardware. The cameras themselves were equally easy to set up. I did initially put the batteries in backwards and spent a minute or so wondering why the light was not flashing like the app said it should be, but that was user error. The batteries charged relatively quickly, about an hour each, and seem to be holding a good charge. In the 2 weeks since I've turned the cameras on they've only dropped about 1%, though I am not actively using all of the detection features. Access through the app is easy and connecting to the cameras seems to be just as fast on any fast wifi network as on the same network as the cameras. The signal latency is also quite good. I found the picture is only about a second delayed from real time. The detection settings work well and the detection zone drawing tool and privacy zone tools provide a good level of control. The AI detection did notify me when it saw a car in my driveway. Picture quality is very good in the daytime. The image is very clear and detailed. Picture quality at night was very impressive. With some light in the scene, I did not need to have night mode enabled to see clearly. Multiple times when checking the camera at night I thought the picture was frozen because of how bright it was. It was not frozen. The range of the wireless cameras is strong. With the hub in a central location in my home, both cameras could be placed anywhere without signal loss. For an average sized home, I don't think there would be any issue regarding placement. The media from the camera saves to either the internal storage or Tapo Cloud. There is no FTP or ONVIF support. Overall, for where this camera is priced, I think it is a good value and would recommend it to someone looking to add some easy and basic cameras to their home.

Works great. Night recording is good. Fairly easy to setup. Just wish they had a url to be able to view cameras outside the app.

Très facile à installer et à lier avec le HUB. Application instinctive très facile à utiliser, vraiment enchanté de ce produit!

Muy buena cámara, es inalámbrica, graba videos cortos en una memoria micro sd sin necesidad de pagar una suscripción, tiene batería recargable, muy buena definición, visión nocturna, detección de movimiento, alertas y se instala muy fácilmente. Se ve resistente y es discreta. Solo hay que tomar en cuenta que los videos que graba son cortos (se puede configurar un poco la duración) de 10-15 segundos en promedio lo cual puede ser un problema si requieren grabaciones más prolongadas o 24/7 pero ahí la opción sería, pagar la suscripción que no es cara. Otra cosa, la batería a mi me dura cuando mucho 13-15 días, configurando todo al mínimo (la menor área de detección y con la sensibilidad a vehículos y personas en el nivel más bajo) pero con la mayor definición posible. La batería tarda en cargar desde 10% al 100% alrededor de 3 horas. Para la mayoría de los usuarios en una vivienda normal, creo que cubre más que bien las necesidades comunes. Es una opción recomendable.

Good stuff I recommend it

Great product easy to install. Quick delivery. Camera working approx 30m from hub.