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Great image quality from all three cameras -
Effective motion detection and tracking -
32GB of built-in storage
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Setting up motion zones is fiddly -
Expensive
Security cameras, let’s face it, are not the most exciting products. But they’re not really meant to be. They’re there to deter intruders and to gather evidence if the worst does happen. Some are better than others, naturally, but you rarely pull one out of the box and gasp with wonder. The EufyCam S4, however, is no normal security camera.
It’s the most feature-packed security camera we’ve ever reviewed. Image quality is spectacular in both good and bad light, it’s easy to use and you can run it without having to pay any kind of subscription. In fact, it’s our favourite connected security camera. If you can afford one, or two, it’s the very best way to keep your property surveilled.
What do you get for the money?
The trouble is, you do pay for the privilege. One of these cameras will set you back a whopping £250 and if you purchase it in the kit with two cameras and the S380 HomeBase, it’ll set you back £549.
That’s considerably more than most battery-powered outdoor security cameras. The excellent Tapo C460, for instance, costs around £100, comes with LED spotlights and has a solar panel to keep the battery topped up. The ReoLink Altas offers similar features for around £110.
With the S4, however, you do get a lot more features for your money. The S4 has not one, not two, but three cameras mounted within its beefy frame. One of these is a wide-angle fixed camera capable of capturing 4K video. This can be tilted up and down manually to frame the area you want to monitor just so. The other two – both 2K, but one wide-angle and one 3x telephoto – are mounted in a motorised pan-tilt-zoom housing that you can remote control from your smartphone. The whole housing can be rotated to the left or right once it’s screwed to the wall.
To accompany those cameras are a set of LED lights for colour night vision, red and blue LED lights to scare off criminals, a massive 10,000mAh rechargeable, removable battery, and a 5.5W solar panel that mounts to the top of the unit to keep that battery topped up. This is capable of charging the battery in as little as an hour in direct sunlight, according to the spec sheet, so once you’ve installed the camera, you may never have to touch it again.
Couple that with onboard microSD card storage for local video clip storage, AI person-, vehicle- and animal-detection, tracking and framing, a loud 105dB siren and both infrared and radar motion detection and you have probably the most fully featured standalone security camera around.
To house all this tech, though, the S4 is a big, heavy old thing, and it’s got that very obvious security camera look to it – it won’t be for you if you want something unobtrusive on the outside of your house.
What does it do well?
Mounting the EufyCam S4 is a remarkably simple process. The camera is provided with a sturdy plastic bracket with two holes in it – screw this to the wall where you want it (it can also be mounted to the underside of a horizontal roof overhang), slide the camera on and secure it in place with a pair of captive security screws and you’re done.
All the screws and wall plugs you might need are supplied in the box; all that’s left to do is line up the camera so it’s capturing the area you want it to, and – assuming you’ve already paired the camera with the Eufy app – you’re ready to roll.
The rechargeable battery is easy to remove. Just undo another security screw, clip off the cap and slide it out. It has a USB-C port built in so you can charge it directly, but as I said you shouldn’t need to do that as the solar panel works so well. Even on an overcast London day, I saw it gain more than 10% capacity in a single morning.
Image quality is excellent. The recordings from the main camera in particular look very sharp and well-exposed, and when you want to take a closer look at something, the 3x optical camera provides a useful close up view. The colour night vision has impressive range, recording a full-colour frame beyond the reach of my rear garden fence, a full nine or so metres away.
Audio is exceptionally clear and loud – if you catch a would-be intruder in the act, they will be in no doubt that they’ve been captured on camera.
Tracking and zooming works impeccably. Even if the motorised camera is pointing in the wrong direction, the main camera detects motion and the main camera swings around to focus in on the action.
And the EufyCam is super speedy, too: there’s only a one-second delay between the real-life action happening and that being reflected on the screen of the live view on your smartphone; motion detection alerts are delivered in an average of 6.2 seconds over a strong local Wi-Fi connection; and accessing the live view from the app took on average 1.4 seconds.
I particularly like the way you can adjust live view resolution and recording resolution independently of each other; this ensures you can bring up the live view as quickly as possible while ensuring that any recorded clips are of the highest possible quality.
And of course, you can store all your video clips locally. There’s 32GB of storage built into the camera itself and you can expand that by adding a microSD card. Or if you connect it with the optional HomeBase S380, that has 16GB of built-in storage plus the ability to slot in a hard disk and store up to 16TB of video clips.
{{The S4 even supports Apple HomeKit Secure Video, allowing you to record security video directly to your iCloud storage, although be mindful that 4K security videos will sap your storage allocation pretty quickly.}} – Jon checking this
What could it do better?
The EufyCam S4 is certainly packed with features and it’s a powerful surveillance tool, but it isn’t perfect. First up, I experienced a few small problems attempting to record video in live view mode: when switching between the main camera and the motorised cameras, I found it would switch back of its own accord after a while.
Another gripe I have relates to the sheer complexity of the thing. With three cameras and a motorised pan-tilt-zoom turret, setting things up as you want them can get confusing.
For instance, if you want to set up motion detection zones and privacy zones, you’ll need to do so for both the fixed and motorised cameras. And given how fiddly it is to allocate those zones in the Eufy app, it’s double annoying.
It’s also worth highlighting that although the main camera may record in 4K, the videos you get when you download or share them from the Events screen in the app are not.
In fact, the downloaded video is made up of two landscape camera views – one from the main camera, one from the motorised camera – piled on top of each other to form a single video 2,688 x 3,040 in resolution. Yes, that’s kind of 4K but since each camera view makes up half the frame, you’re not getting true 4K recordings.
Should you buy the EufyCam S4?
Otherwise, though, the EufyCam S4 is an impressive device that’s absolutely packed to the gunnels with features.
It has to be the most advanced connected security camera on the market, and its image quality, zooming, auto-framing and tracking capabilities really set it apart.
It is expensive, bulky and not without its niggles, but if you need a single camera to cover a large area, there’s nothing to beat it.
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