Arlo Essential Spotlight Camera (3-Pack)

Pros: Factory mount is nice and secure The spotlight is a very nice additon, but I chose not to use it as I didn’t want the extra battery drain. The PIR motion activation seems to activate when you’d expect it to. Customer service is highly available, and effective. Cons: The mobile app is horrible. It effectively forces you to sign up for a subscription, even though the camera comes with a free 3 month trial. I had to engage their support for a refund. Mobile app would give me a thumbnail of a notification, then when I selected it, it would take 3-5 minutes to load, then it would take me to the live stream, not the notification. Events took a further 5+ minutes to show up on the timeline. For a security camera, having to wait 10 minutes to see what just happens is completely inexcusable. I ran through the camera setup about half a dozen times before the app would find the camera. I could see the camera on my wifi (and ping it), but the app would just sit there and hang. I have a robust home network, and saw no connectivity issues with any of my other IOT devices (cameras included). Battery life: Bad, just Bad. I used the camera for two days, and estimate in my relatively low traffic area that I’d get about 29 days of usage out of a charge. That’s much lower than competitors. No Magnetic mount option, most competitors offer this. Sharing the camera with my spouse was clunky, and took three attempts before the correct options showed up for her. Geo-fencing was so slow and inaccurate to basically be useless. Overall Review: Decent hardware let down by extremely poor software. For backstory, I work in IT, have an extensive networking background, and have used multiple NVR’s at work, along with a few different product lines of home camera solutions. This was by far the worst home solution I’ve used.

Pros: Arlo’s Essential Spotlight Camera comes in a nice tiny box with minimal things to get you going. You receive a white 3-holed plastic base for mounting, 3 aluminum wood screws, 3 plastic stubs (most likely for soft interior wall panels), the connecting pivot with tightening knob and the camera itself along with a flat-style 6” USB to micro-USB cable for recharging. After signing up with an account on Arlo, you set up 2FA and your network SSID / Password, press the button on the bottom of the camera for syncing, then have it scan a QR code generated on your screen as a pairing ID / token. From there, everything else moves to the App itself. I had no issue installing the Arlo Security App on a Samsung Galaxy S7 or an Ipad Mini Gen 2, or browsing to it on a Desktop. I had to reset the device once as it claimed at first to receive poor reception from our tri-band wireless router barely 10 feet away, one room over. Once the pairing was done a second time and the firmware updated, things proceeded smoothly. I signed into the Arlo app, and there was no problem to ID the camera, set it up, and configure various device options. Keep in mind since it relies on wireless, there is a small delay between a change such as motion detection or other settings being changed in the app to being reflected in the camera output. You can change motion detection settings, crop the region you want recorded, enable or disable night mode, and change a few other parameters. The camera had no problem during testing pinging our phones with SMS to let us know motion was detected when we were walking in or out from our home; about 20 feet from the mounting location nearby, again with a slight delay for live feed. It appears to save battery as the camera retains a low-power state but will automatically record a clip when it detects movement past your specified motion (but not noise) threshold or you hit play (go live) on the app or browser page. Viewing and configuring settings on a desktop was by far the easiest, then phone, then tablet last of all. Overall the video quality is okay for night 1080p as I wouldn’t expect a super high res feed given the item’s cost. I’ll have to run it long-term to see how long the battery lasts but if I can a couple weeks’ runtime from it at a time I’d be happy. Cons: –You can’t really use this camera as a separate software package to your own Network; it requires an Arlo Account and paid subscription to use as well as always-on Internet. While Arlo’s plan is not terribly expensive on its own and priced well for a plan of having multiple cameras for a home is expected, it’s too bad there is no local networking option. –The software review of the feed while great on desktop and workable on a phone, is quite poor on a tablet. You can’t resize the camera feed configuration window and even going live does not let you give you a larger PoV when on a tablet (it does on phone). It made determining if features were working a bit frustrating and many of the menu buttons and icons on a tablet are extremely small. A phone was clearly the designed target for this software. –We have forests and rural property near our location and with the motion threshold still at about 50%, it was detecting cars (fine) but it would also trigger the alerts on bugs flying by when the spotlight turned on. I wonder if there is even a sweet spot where bugs would not set it off but there would still be enough detection for people? I can’t fault the camera too much as it is motion of course but something to keep in mind depending on your location. If you have a rural location this may not be the best device for you. –Video quality is just, okay. On Desktop, zooming into the video feed leaves a very aliased mess as if too much EV is applied and no AA; at least during the night. Daytime review is fine. Overall Review: Overall I can see the product serving as a good deterrent and okay peace of mind since I have not used any other security cameras to date. Setting up was very easy and the hardware is simple to use, however the software needs refinements and more options. Arlo has done a decent job in making a functional product that is certainly usable. However with the quality I’ve seem from the feed so far, I have to ask if this would really stop a potential crime or break-in vs offering simply a deterrent. It is good that you can capture audio, there is a bright LED light for the dark, and the software is easy enough to use if sluggish. Since you can’t run a local network feed, having your phone / browser / tablet always nearby and on and ready to review a camera alert seems to get cumbersome quickly, however you can always disable particular alerts in the settings. If Arlo would consider offering a local networking option without subscription or a toggle for local and network recording (to a user’s memory card first, then to cloud after or both), this product would be even more useful. The software, while functional and easy to read, could use further improvement and a description box of what, exactly, each option does or recommends would be nice to see. As usual for modern products, no user guide other than a quick set-up is included in-box. Everything is online. If you lose internet or disable your wireless, no communication can be made with the camera. This would in one swoop disable someone’s security so there needs to be more thought put into this as well from Arlo’s end. If you have weak wireless or spotty internet, this is unfortunately not a product for you.

Pros: Easy to setup and maintain Adequate lag for real-time feed to start Built-in light Decent video quality Good audio Good app / easy to arm/disarm individual cameras or the whole system Cons: Takes 3-4 seconds for the feed to start, when watching via the app. It’s not really bad, but I wish it was faster. Limited mounting hardware comes with the kit. But there are good aftermarket offerings. Overall Review: I have owned security camera systems from multiple different vendors. Though not perfect, this system is very robust and reliable. Compared to other system the quality and experience have been excellent. I have heard people complain about the subscription cost and vendor lock-in, and they are right. It does cost money to run, and one is locked-in with their proprietary ecosystem. In an ideal world, I would go back to open-source or subscription-free or open ecosystem solution, as soon as I found something that works even half as good as the Arlo. I don’t like paying the fee and not being able run my own detectors with OpenCV, but I like having something that does what it is supposed to do without needing to worry about it or perform anything but minimal maintenance.