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Withings has expanded from fitness trackers and health-monitoring devices into the growing digital home arena with the Withings Home monitoring system ($199.99). This cylindrical device houses a 5-megapixel image sensor and a variety of sensors. It can record video and store it in the cloud, send alerts when motion or sound is detected, and let you know when the air in your home contains an unhealthy level of pollutants. The Home ($119.95 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) is a neat-looking surveillance camera that’s simple to install, but it only works with iOS devices. Moreover, its HD video quality is lacking, and there’s no way to download and save recorded video. Our Editors’ Choice, the Piper nv ($335.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) , is pricier, but it’s a much more robust camera for keeping tabs on your home.
Design and Features
The Withings Home is shaped like a soda can, only shorter. It measures 3.4 inches high and 3.0 inches wide, and sports a faux-woodgrain shell and a white, LED-backlit base that serves as a status indicator and nightlight. The light will pulse blue when the camera is waiting for Bluetooth pairing, and orange when trying to make a Wi-Fi connection. Solid green indicates a successful setup, while solid red means the setup failed. The nightlight can be programmed to glow any color or to change colors randomly. The camera comes with a magnetic base that allows you to tilt it at an appropriate angle.
Withings HomeThe Home uses a 5-megapixel camera with a 135-degree viewing angle, and includes motion, sound, and ambient light sensors, a 2-watt speaker, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, an Ethernet port, and a pair of digital microphones. It also contains multiple environmental sensors that measure air quality, including a VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) sensor. (VOCs are carbon-based contaminants that originate from chemicals such as Acetone, Benzene, and Ethylene glycol.) The woodgrain shell can be twisted to block the lens for privacy.
The Home camera uses a free, well-designed iOS app, but it doesn’t currently support Android or access through the Web yet; according to a Withings spokesperson, those are both on the horizon. You can configure the app to send push notifications when motion and sound events take place, but there’s no email support. Withings offers a free cloud service that will hold two days’ worth of event-triggered recorded video and thumbnails photos, but there’s no way to download and save the videos, which means they’ll disappear after two days. Thumbnail photos can be saved, emailed, and Air Dropped, though. Withings will be offering extended cloud storage subscription plans in the near future.
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The app lets you view live video, and displays a Journal of short recorded event videos. One of my favorite features is the time-lapse option, available in the Live Feed screen. It plays an accelerated clip of the last 24 hours so you can see what’s been going on at a glance. While in the Live Feed screen, you can press the microphone button to communicate with anyone close to the camera. If you’re using the Home as a baby monitor, you can press the half-moon button to activate the nightlight and play a lullaby. A timer lets you decide how long the lullaby plays. The camera’s electronic pan-tilt-zoom (ePTZ) feature offers a 12X digital zoom, with automatic image enhancement and digital pan-and-tilt functionality.
The Photo Album screen lets you view thumbnail snapshots, and the Air Quality screen shows a historic graph of air contaminants in ppm (parts per million), as well as a live reading. The Monitor Settings screen contains options for adjusting motion, sound, and air quality sensitivity levels. Air quality settings include Good (450-1,000 ppm), Medium (1,000-2,000 ppm), Bad (2,000-3,000 ppm), and Very Bad (3,000 ppm and above). You can have the Home send a push notification if your air quality reaches an unsafe level, at which point you should open some windows to clear the air. The Account Settings screen lets you change your password, set iOS system authorizations, view a list of FAQs, and access the user manual.
Installation and Performance
Withings HomeInstallation was quick. I downloaded the Withings Home app from the Apple App Store and created an account. The app instructed me to plug in the camera and began searching for a device. The camera appeared in my device list, and I was asked if I wanted to connect to my Wi-Fi network. I clicked on the tab with my network name and was instantly connected. After a four-minute firmware update, the camera restarted and was ready to go.
The Home’s 5-megapixel camera streams 1080p video, but I found its image quality to be a bit too soft. It lacks the sharpness that I saw with other HD cameras like the Piper nv and the Compro TN900R ( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) . Both live and recorded daytime video was a bit too dark as well, even though the lighting environment was fairly bright. On the plus side, color quality was very good. And the camera’s black-and-white night vision was soft, but the infrared LEDs did a good job of supplying adequate light.
The camera’s ePTZ function worked flawlessly, as did the motion and sound sensors, although I had to adjust their sensitivity levels to prevent false event triggering. I received push notifications whenever the sensors were triggered, and the camera took snapshots of each event. Push-to-talk communications were loud and clear.
Conclusions
The Withings Home is a neat-looking multifunction camera that makes it easy to keep tabs on your home and protect the health of its occupants. It offers a couple of cool features, including time-lapse video and real-time air quality monitoring, and it’s a snap to install and configure. However, video quality is soft and a bit too dark, and you can’t download and save recordings, or preserve them past the two days offered by the Withings cloud service. The Piper nv remains our current Editors’ Choice. For an extra $70, it delivers much sharper and brighter video, and it can be used to control Z–Wave home automation devices.
3.5
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The Withings Home is an attractive surveillance camera that also monitors air quality, but it won’t let you save recorded video.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/withings-home
