Opinion
The AI security camera to keep an eye on your home over Christmas
John DavidsonColumnistHome security cameras have a bit of a problem with premature cessation.
Almost all the home security cameras we’ve reviewed here in the Digital Life Labs over the years either have batteries that die so quickly, you get so tired of recharging them that they wind up as dummy cameras with only deterrence value; or, in an effort to force you onto a monthly subscription, their manufacturers delete your security recordings so quickly, you could easily come home from a weekend away, only to find your house ransacked with no security footage to show for it.
Google deletes the footage from its Nest cameras after just three hours. You could come home from lunch, find your home ransacked, and it would already be too late to view the footage. It’s criminal.
The eufy SoloCam S340 is solar charged, and doesn’t require a subscription to keep footage longer than a few days.
Hence, this review of eufy’s new SoloCam S340, a twin-lens, WiFi-connected outdoor security camera that keeps its footage forever, and that should never need recharging by you because it’s charged by the sun.
The SoloCam we set up here in the Labs started with a charge of 71 per cent, and after five days of relatively heavy usage in a two-thirds-shaded position in our courtyard, its charge has crept up to 77 per cent. Two of those days were overcast and/or rainy.
We’re yet to see how it fares in winter, but we’re fairly confident that for most people under most conditions, the SoloCam S340 has the first premature cessation problem licked. You’ll never need to charge it.
(As an added bonus, the surprisingly good eufy Security app that you use to set up and maintain the camera has a power management page that includes a very useful Solar Dashboard. We’ve become quite addicted to opening up the dashboard to cheer the SoloCam’s battery on to ever greater heights. Cracking the 80 per cent mark is only a sunny afternoon away! It could be today if the sun stays out!)
As for the second problem, the answer is a little more complicated.
The SoloCam S340 itself has 8 gigabytes of onboard storage, capable of holding (by our calculations) 4 hours of very-high-quality video footage from both the camera’s wide-angle lens and its telephoto lens.
The dual-camera footage is actually kind of cool. From the wide-angle lens, you see the fish-eye view of everything happening. But then from the 2x telephoto you see a close up of the intruder as the camera uses AI-based motion detection to follow them around, tilting and panning until the “human” (as the AI calls it) walks out of sight.
Regardless of how clear the footage is, though, having that footage stored on the camera does you no good if the intruder steals the camera, too.
Which is why we had been hoping the SoloCam S340 would support Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), the way many eufy cameras do, to let us stream its footage to something like a Synology NAS, which could then synchronise that footage with another NAS in another city, so that even if the intruder stole every single item in the home including the NAS hidden in the attic*, there would still be footage of him doing so.
(Doubtless he will be wearing a baseball cap and a COVID mask, and there’s every chance the police will tell you there is little they can do with the footage, but it’s still nice to have footage, to feed the grudge and to show to your friends.)
The Eufy SoloCam S340 has a wide-angle lens and a telephoto lens, plus a motion sensor and a spotlight.
Alas, though, eufy generally doesn’t add RTSP to its battery-powered cameras, arguing it drains the battery too much, and it’s not available on the SoloCam S340 despite the solar charging.
We’d argue, however, that there would be plenty of users who have enough sunlight charging their SoloCam to give RTSP a red-hot try, maybe not for continuous recording but at least for offloading motion-detection recordings, and that eufy should give us the option of RTSP, just in case it can work.
As it stands, you need to buy a second eufy product known as a HomeBase, which connects to the SoloCam via WiFi and offloads the camera’s videos onto its own storage.
We used the HomeBase S380 in our tests, to which you can add USB drives or even a 2.5-inch hard drive, giving you oodles of storage you can hide away in a cupboard somewhere.
The new HomeBase has the added bonus of improving the AI-based motion detection, by adding face recognition so you (mostly) don’t get alerts when the camera sees people it knows, but it’s $314, let’s say $400 by the time you add a hard drive. You could get 33 months of a Google Nest subscription for that money.
Or eufy could just add RTSP to the SoloCam S340 in a firmware update, to make storing security footage as free and as eternal as the solar energy that powers it. It’s what nature intended.
Likes: Great app. Dual-camera footage is superb. Should never need charging.
Dislikes: Can’t save directly to NAS.
Price: SoloCam S340 $399, $314 for HomeBase S380, $60 to $90 for hard drive.
*Just kidding. It’s in the basement.
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