In all, the Yale Floodlight Camera lives up to the promise of storing home security footage without the need for a monthly subscription fee. Otherwise, it’s overwritten when the memory card is full. The positioning of the camera obviously dictates the camera angle – for example, whether you see people’s faces or the tops of their heads.Īnd if you have an important piece of video recorded – whether that’s of a burglar or a family member being goofy – you can download it from the app, to keep or share. You can’t pan and tilt the camera though, it’s fixed. The 1080p high-definition picture is detailed and you can zoom in to the footage. The app will notify users of the free update and then you can tell it to install over Wi-Fi. Other cameras in the Yale ecosystem do feature AI (with different-coloured bars in the app’s timeline to indicate different types of event) and Yale says it will introduce these features to the Yale Floodlight Camera as a firmware update in 2023. There’s also no AI – the cam can’t tell the difference between a person, a package or a car. I would have liked two: for the camera to record all motion but to only get alerts when someone was marching right up to my front door. Frustratingly, you can only set one sensitivity threshold. Pick from five levels of sensitivity and even pick areas to pay attention to and areas to ignore. You can set the motion detector to trigger the camera and send push alerts to your phone. If you’ve set the app to record footage constantly, coloured bars in the timeline indicate when motion’s detected, so you know which points in the recording could be interesting. You view recent recordings in the app, with a calendar and timeline to scroll through. It might also be good for pranks on trick or treaters. You may have this functionality already with a doorbell cam – and a disembodied voice coming from above is weirder for a delivery driver – but it could come in handy. It also gives you direct control to trigger the floodlights and siren, even to talk through the built-in microphone. The Yale View app gives you a live view from the camera, optionally listening in to the sound. Seeing footage on-screen helps you figure out the best angle to point the camera (you can adjust it up and down, but not side-to-side). It’s worth keeping the ladder up for a short time after installation, until you’ve got the app working. The camera stays connected to Wi-Fi and you can access it from the app, wherever you are. After which, the camera and app worked together beautifully. At least I remembered to put the MicroSD memory card into the slot in the weatherproof camera before it was mounted.īut pairing did work and the app successfully taught the camera how to connect to my home Wi-Fi. We mounted it before pairing, so there was some going up and down a ladder with a phone. Pairing requires you to point your phone camera at a QR code on the Yale (confusingly not the QR code in the instructions) and then it uses the phone microphone to play audio to communicate with the Yale Floodlight Camera’s microphone. Installation went pretty smoothly, though I wish we’d known to pair the camera with the app before mounting it to the wall. You could also install it as a DIY job or use your own electrician. They should also help you get paired and set up with the Yale View app (iOS or Android). For this, you get someone who not only mounts it to the outside of your home but drills through the wall and wires it in to a fused, switched spur indoors. Buy online and you can book a third-party installer, which itself costs around £199. It’s mains-powered and Yale recommends professional installation. Other features include 2,000 lumen LED floodlights, 10m night vision for when it’s dark but you’re not using the floodlights, two-way talking and a 110dB siren. You can set motion alerts to trigger it and pick the sensor’s sensitivity, or record all the time. That capacity obviously lasts a lot longer if you don’t set the video to record constantly but have it triggered by motion instead. That’s enough for ten days of footage (with H.265 compression and 2MP resolution) when recording non-stop. There’s no built-in storage but you can add a MicroSD card of up to 256GB. So you can choose to team it with a bigger Yale security system, but it works fine as a standalone 1080p high-definition camera with no subscription fees. Where most security cameras and doorbell cams demand a monthly fee to store footage in the cloud, this can store videos onboard. So a new pet hate among gadgets is anything that requires a direct debit.Įnter, the Yale Floodlight Camera. Like many people, I have subscription fatigue, thanks to four different TV streaming services and three types of cloud storage.
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