ADT is one of the leaders in the field of professional home security, and is now adopting a series of free, fully loaded smart security cameras to embrace DIY smart home.
ADT’s wired indoor cameras, battery-powered outdoor cameras and wired video doorbell cameras appear blue. They can be used as standalone devices or synchronized with them
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The price of each device is $199.99 (somewhat expensive in today's smart homes), but they are all fully equipped cameras with full HD 1080p video, facial recognition, smart alarms with video preview, sports areas, two-way calls ; They also provide free 24-hour video storage.
The cost of cloud storage for 60 days per month for each camera is only $2.99 ($12.99 for unlimited cameras). Or give up the cloud altogether by using the onboard SD card (only for indoor and outdoor cameras) for local storage options.
The Wi-Fi extender priced at $49.99 can act as an indoor ringtone for the doorbell and extend battery life and the range of outdoor cameras.
The camera can be with
In a limited way, there is no
Or the built-in Alexa-it was ridiculed when it was unveiled at the 2020 International Consumer Electronics Show.
ADT said that these functions will be launched soon, and the hub of the Blue by ADT security system is also Z-Wave
If you want to expand your smart home. We are testing the security system separately, so please be patient and wait for our review.
At the same time, how do these smart security cameras stand out from the celebrities in the field? Are they viable Ring competitors and can they accept Arlo? Keep reading our full review.
ADT has taken a completely different route in the design of these cameras. Practical, very large and light gray (you can choose graphite dark gray), they are made of tough plastic, although they will not give the product an elegant feeling, but they do exude an atmosphere that can survive for a long time and throw them at them Anything.
For cameras that live outdoors (outdoor cameras and video doorbells), this bulletproof style is not a problem, but indoor cameras are too large and bulky to fit well in the living room.
The design is obviously a personal matter-I don't like it, but my 12-year-old son was so impressed that it was "the coolest doorbell so far", and he saw some.
In the current ocean of white and black smart homes, Gray is a bold move and is again suitable for outdoor use. White is too dirty, black stands out, and gray is a good middle ground. Indoors, not many.
The indoor and outdoor cameras look very similar, and both have a sturdy, flexible bracket, and can be fixed to the wall or ceiling with the provided mount and screws.
The indoor camera cable is very long, giving you enough placement flexibility, while the outdoor camera is battery-powered. However, you need to remove the bulky and large battery to charge it, which takes 6 hours to charge, and the charging cable is short and can only be used indoors.
The Blue by ADT doorbell cameras have the same design direction, with bright LEDs surrounding the buttons to indicate status and show visitors where they are pressed (each camera has an LED strip to show which mode they are in).
Its installation is slightly different from most installations
, You can connect the power bracket to the doorbell wiring, and then clip the doorbell (the doorbell has a built-in battery that can keep running when the power is off, but it needs to be wired for regular use). The disadvantage of this process is that there is no angular mounting option.
There is a chime kit that can be connected to your indoor mechanical or electronic chime, and there is an optional Extender + Chime that you can plug into the inside to hear the doorbell ring. You can also hang the doorbell to your
Let them announce when someone is at the door.
It is very easy to set up each camera using the Blue by ADT application. Just create an account, add the device, and scan the QR code with the camera to sync to your WiFi.
All three cameras provide 1080p high-definition video, two-way talk, 130-degree field of view (can be increased to 180 degrees in the doorbell cam setting), night vision and battery backup.
They all come with action-activated recording, rich notifications (show clips), customizable active areas, facial recognition and personnel-only alarms. These are all standard features-like Ring, Nest and Arlo, these features are also No extra charge.
Considering shots that are recorded for free for 24 hours, you can easily run these cameras for zero dollars a month. On indoor and outdoor cameras, you can also choose to store locally on an SD card up to 128GB (not included), so you can see time farther than 24 hours without any ongoing cost.
There is no doubt that this makes higher upfront costs easier to swallow.
Other features specific to a single camera include: a smoke/CO listener in the "indoor camera" and a physical mute button on the device. However, indoor cameras cannot be turned off (except for unplugging), and are only available in the following situations. The rules in the application can be set to turn on or off the camera or arm/disarm the system according to the time of day. You have installed the Blue By ADT security system.
Both outdoor cameras and outdoor cameras are weather resistant, and both can be used with the optional Extender + Chime, which has the same color options and styles, can be plugged into sockets to extend battery life, and extend outdoor camera signals and doorbells signal. It will also play customizable tones based on actions or when someone presses a button.
Neither the ring camera nor the Arlo camera has a built-in alarm to scare off intruders. When connected to Blue through the ADT security system, you can use the alarm in Smart Home Hub and Extender + Chime, but as a standalone device, these cameras lack additional security features.
In general, these cameras have left a deep impression on us, especially the number of high-end features that can be provided without paying extra, and the option to run them without paying a monthly fee-we think this will attract a lot people.
However, we did encounter problems with some functions not working properly. We were disappointed to find that the camera could not be turned off or turned on automatically without installing the Blue by ADT security system.
The video quality during the day is very good, clear and detailed. But the lack of HDR imaging does mean that the face is not very clear on the doorbell camera, because our front door is in the shadow.
The night vision is great on the camera, but the positioning of the doorbell on our door frame means that the LED reflections on the wall make the night vision unusable-and there is no option to tilt the mount to correct it.
There are many options when tailoring the system's recording method and notification time. You can choose to record all "actions" or "people only", and you can choose to always record any detected actions, but only notify you of certain events.
You can set the motion area to reduce unnecessary notifications, but every time we try to set it up, we only have a blank screen and a rotating wheel, so we can't test on any of these three cameras.
In addition, the incoming speed of action notifications is very slow, and it takes at least 10 to 15 seconds after the action starts to appear on our mobile phones. The same is true for doorbell presses. The most worrying thing is that battery-powered outdoor cameras sometimes miss sports.
To test this, we placed the camera at a different distance from our house, and the situation would be better when it was closer. However, when we put it next to the video doorbell for comparison, it still missed about 20% of the incidents that occurred with the doorbell cam. Adding Chime Extender may help this-but we did not test the device.
This
Probably the motion sensor did not wake up the battery fast enough, and the events it did capture were all plagued by the problem behind the head, where it woke up and recorded it in time to see the end of the action.
Another annoying software error is related to facial recognition. You can choose to receive notifications about familiar faces and/or unfamiliar faces, but the notification only says "Media cannot be displayed at this time", which means that we have never seen "unrecognizable faces".
Even though faces are added to our app in our profile, facial recognition cannot identify yourself or your family members. Obviously, this feature requires some work.
Notifications other than facial recognition are generally good. You can customize the time when you receive them. We like to display rich notifications of operation snapshots, and you can play these snapshots directly from the notification.
This is particularly convenient because when pulling up the app on battery-powered and wired cameras to view real-time feeds, it usually takes more than 30 seconds, sometimes even completely timeout.
However, viewing the recorded footage is much smoother, and the good history screen in the app will show the latest clips from all cameras or a single camera.
Overall, the app works well, and we like the main homepage layout, which displays the camera feed and the history of the latest actions in real time.
However, there is no full history log or tabs or shortcuts for saved videos, instead, you have to scroll down the home page and click on the text link-a bit strange.
The device settings are easy to find, and there are many options to modify the camera's motion sensitivity, image settings and audio settings.
The notification settings are all in the "My Profile" section, which is another weird choice, and it's all or all off-for example, you can't just turn on notifications for outdoor cameras. Also, email notifications are turned on by default, which means that my inbox will soon be flooded-you may want to turn off this feature immediately.
After integrating with Alexa, you can receive motion announcements and doorbell news announcements, but we cannot provide any real-time broadcasts.
. However, we can operate on Google devices, but this is what Google Home integration can do.
In addition to software, you can't beat free cloud storage-even if it only provides 24-hour service, not many companies provide high-quality hardware to provide free cloud storage.
For indoor cameras and video doorbell cameras that make ADT Blue worth seeing, outdoor battery-powered cameras are currently not recommended, and since there is no built-in alarm, it is not enough as a security camera.
Overall, these cameras are mainly worth considering if you also want to install a security system, because they can be well integrated with the hub and sensors of the system. You can set "rules" in the app to make your security system run autonomously and turn off the camera when you are at home.
This cannot be done without a hub, which is a major disadvantage for buying a camera as a standalone camera, especially because there is currently no option for two-factor authentication to protect your privacy.
However, if you purchase a camera and system, you must pay a monthly 24/7 monitoring service fee of $19.99 on top of a monthly cloud storage subscription of $12.99 (Ring combines these two costs into one). But you can monitor yourself for free, but you still get all the same software features, which is not the case with Ring.
