A home security camera with everything you need for just thirty dollars. Yep, what's going on. I'm Rich Damiro. This is Rich on Tech Daily. And you might remember last year I told you about a twenty dollars home security camera. It was called the wisecam. Well, this new camera is from the same company. It's called the Wise Campan, and it adds the ability to pan, till and zoom.
And yes, it is just thirty dollars.
And before you get to the whole monthly fee thing, no there are no monthly fees whatsoever.
Let me explain.
So the Wisecampan is definitely not the best looking security camera in the world. I find it to be kind of boxy and the design is not going to win any awards. But at this price you really can't complain. I think buyers are going to be most interested in the combination of features.
For the price, you pretty much get it all.
You get the pan, tilt and zoom control, zoom up to eight times, you get night vision, You get a motion to techction zone, continuous recording. If you add a micro SD card, it can go three hundred and sixty degrees horizontal, ninety three degrees vertical motion tagging, two way audio, smart sound recognition. That means if your smoke detector goes off in your house, the wisecam is smart enough to notice that and it will send you an alert to
your phone based on that sound recognition. You also get time laps, motion tracking, full HD in ten EDP, motion and sound detection and alerts, and free rolling fourteen day cloud storage.
Let me explain how that works.
When the wisecampan detects motion, it's going to capture a twelve second video clip. It uploads that instantly to the cloud. Then once that storage is filled up, it automatically deletes the earliest clip to make room for the new one. So basically, clips are held for a maximum of fourteen days. You can also add an SD card up to thirty two gigabytes to capture that continuous recording. Like I explained before, that is stored on board. Setup of the wise campan is really easy.
I love the way they do it.
The app generates a QR code, you hold it in front of the camera, The camera recognizes the code and it uses that code to pair up with your Wi Fi network and the app, and from there you basically get a live stream of the camera at anytime on your smartphone. You can just tune in on your phone and watch the camera live, and the quality there is excellent. Then, once you're inside the app, you can manually move around the lens and the unit itself by using remote controls.
You can also put the device in automatic mode, so it tracks any motion that it sees. I found that this aspect of the camera wasn't always perfect, especially if there were multiple things moving in front of the camera. It doesn't know which one to track necessarily. But remember these are all software things that can easily be improved with software over time, so I wouldn't get too caught up on that.
Now.
Another mode allows you to automatically have the camera scan an area of a room by moving back and forth. I think of this as those eighties security cameras that would slowly move left to right to sweep an area. But again, it's a handy feature to have. All right, pretty much everything on the wise Campan works as advertised, and yes it's a great value for thirty dollars. But here's the issue that I found. The movement and the
sound of the movement is kind of distracting. So if you have this thing set up in a room where you're hanging out regularly, like I had it set up in my living room. Literally, my wife unplugged it by the end of the night every single time I plugged it in because it was tracking her, and it's tracking your movements. And it also is kind of loud, so you notice that this thing is tracking you, you will be very aware of the camera's movements, especially when it tracks you.
So that's my only real downside.
So my advice, unless you have a specific use case scenario for the movement ability of the wise Campan, I think you'd be better served with the original wisecam, which shares nearly all of the same features minus the movement and the zoom. But that camera is only twenty dollars, but it doesn't move other things. To keep in mind, the wise Campan is only for indoor use, and there's still no smart home integration with Alexa, Google Home, or
Apple Home Kit. I don't think that's a huge deal breaker, but it is kind of cool that you can see your Nest and Amazon cameras on the Fire TV and also on the Apple TV if you have the nestcams. Overall, if you're not worried about the potential sound and movement of the Wisecampan distracting you. I think that this thirty dollars camera is an amazing value and a great way to keep an eye on what's important to you, all again with no monthly fees.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you want to see my video review of the Wisecampan, go to my website.
It is rich on tech dot tv.
And if you like what I'm doing here with the podcast, I'd really appreciate a review in the Apple Podcasts app.
That way more people discover the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Rich Damiro. I'll talk to you real soon.