When it comes to purchasing a homesecurity camera, there are several key considerations that you should keep in mind. We share some of the most important factors to consider.
Xiaomi AW200
This fixed outdoor camera emerged as our favourite overall. It’s straightforward to set up and use, it doesn’t try to do too much and its very well priced. The stylish aesthetics mean it looks equally at home indoors and out. It’s a solid build, and fully weatherproofed to IP65, and while it’s not as robust as some other cameras on this list, it does still shrug off dust and rain for outdoor use.
The basic mounting arrangement, with all the required screws and brackets in the box, allows you to position it precisely for full HD coverage with a 120 degree field of view. All the standard features you would expect are available, like auto-detecting movement in key zones and differentiating between pets and humans.
Its low light performance is excellent, including full colour night vision using special infra-red LEDs which remain invisible when activated, so your intruder can’t easily spot your camera in the dark.
It also has two-way voice communication so you can communicate with people detected on camera, whether guests at the front gate, or intruders in the back yard. It’s not battery operated, which means you still need to run its power cable back into the house, which is a pain, but at least you are not teetering on a ladder every other week to swap or recharge batteries.
The on-board microSD slot means it can record incidents without connecting to the network, important if load shedding is playing havoc with your home setup. Full HD, indoor/outdoor IP65, day/night infrared, 106° vertical field of view, microSD slot, two-way audio, R800
EZVIZ C1C-B
EZVIZ is a relatively new camera brand in South Africa, but it is available from several big store chains and has developed a solid reputation over a short time. Aside from doing all the basics, like recording in full HD, monitoring for human-shaped figures and capturing decent footage in total darkness, this basic fixed camera has a number of clever advantages.
It has excellent two-way audio, useful if it’s installed at the entrance to your premises, so you can welcome arriving guests or chase off unwanted visitors. The mounting is fully magnetic, so you can pop that on to any metal surface in the home, and then swivel the camera to optimise your view: no drilling or gluing required.
Our favourite feature, unique to EZVIZ, is the use of audio alerts on the camera. Choose from a short beep announcing the arrival of friends and family, or siren mode to scare off intruders. Either way, you won’t need to be monitoring your camera 24/7 if a burst of sound alerts you to movement on the camera.
Good software is one of the things that separates cheap cameras from the industry-leading products, and the EZVIZ app is now on par with some of the best in the business, allowing you to create a schedule for monitoring, tweak your camera sensitivity and more. Full ID, indoor, day/night infrared, 110° field of view, microSD slot, two-way audio, R800
Xiaomi Smart Camera C200
This motorised camera offers the best value with a simple, foolproof setup and a full suite of features, for a great price. Also known as ‘pan-tilt-zoom’ cameras, the built-in motors allow you to steer the camera to look up and down (tilt), rotate 360 ° to look in any direction (pan) and also zoom in. The C200 has all the expected features, such as detecting human figures to activate, infrared night vision, storage on memory card or cloud servers, and two-way audio.
We found the tracking function, where the camera detects human movement and follows the figure as it moves, to be the best of all the cameras on test. Setup was two simple steps: Install the app, then add the camera by scanning its bar code, printed underneath.
The Xiaomi smart home app is slightly clunky to manage, but is certainly full-featured, with two dozen settings you can tweak to optimise your camera’s performance. Xiaomi says you can control the camera with Google Assistant voice commands, but we struggled to get this working. Full HD, indoor, day/night infrared, 110° field of view, microSD slot, two-way audio, R800
Xiaomi Smart Camera C400
The pan-tilt-zoom C400 improves on the more affordable C200 in two important ways. The image quality, already pretty decent on the C200, is noticeably better on the C400 thanks to a better sensor working at higher-than-HD resolution of 2 560×1 440 pixels (technically considered 2.5K).
The low light performance is also improved with decent colour images possible in very low light. Xiaomi says the software used to detect and track human figures through the camera has been much improved and now uses artificial intelligence to filter out foreign shapes such as pets and plants moving in the field of view.
In practice, however, we noticed very little difference in tracking performance compared to the C200. The two-way-audio set-up is definitely improved, thanks to a better speaker system, which is both louder and clearer and makes your voice sound a lot less electronic and compressed. The C400 also supports 5 GHz WiFi, which is optimised for more reliable wireless multimedia. Full HD+, indoor, day/night infrared, 106° field of view, microSD slot, two-way audio, R1 300
EZVIZ BC1C eLife
Although it’s a fixed position camera, this all-weather outdoor model is loaded with high-end features. It’s stylish enough to look good both indoors or outside where the IP66 weatherproofing keeps out dust and rain, and it has a whopping 32 GB on-board storage, so you don’t have to fiddle with memory cards.
It has an impressively large field of view: 107° wide and 125° high, and spectacular low-light performance, down to 0.2 lux. Unusually, it can even deliver colour footage in low light, made possible by using its two built-in floodlights, which are also a shock-value burglar deterrent. Like the other EZVIZ model in our line up, it also does audio alerts on the camera, which we find especially useful, so you can be alerted to activity even if you’re not watching your phone.
You can configure it for a simple beep alert or a full screaming siren (with flashing floodlights) to intimidate uninvited visitors. It boasts two-way audio and your pre-recorded voice alerts can be played automatically (and loudly) when human movement is detected on camera. Best of all, it is battery powered, so it’s effectively fully wireless and you don’t have to run a power cable back to a plug point.
It has a sizeable 7 800 mAh rechargeable battery, which EZVIZ says should run for months at a time, and it can be recharged with a standard phone charging cable. Full HD, indoor/outdoor IP66, day/night infrared, 107° field of view, microSD slot, two-way audio, 7 800 mAh battery, R 2 900
Yale Keyless Connect Smart Lock
Keyless locks are a product whose time is past due. Why fumble with keys, which are easy to lose, have copied, wear out and break when you can simply key in your PIN to enter? This smart lock is powered by batteries on the inside of the door and uses extremely high-level encryption making any kind of hacking nearly impossible.
You don’t have to use a PIN at all if you don’t want to: You can also tap one of the supplied key cards or a keyring tag to unlock. Each resident can use their unique entry code, and you can easily create unique codes for visitors to gain entry.
Adding in the Smart Lock module allows you to unlock by tapping your phone, and also unlock the door over the net. This also lets you use voice instructions for Google Assistant to lock and unlock, and check your door status.
There is also a built-in alarm which sounds if your door is tampered with. While you do receive a warning when the batteries run low, if you do lose power completely, you can simply touch a 9V battery to contacts underneath the keypad to gain entry. R4 900
D-Link DCS-F5602-P
This dome camera has the dubious distinction of a high IK10 rating, which means it’s highly resistant to tampering, being able to shrug off even serious blows from anything except the most determined vandal. Technically it can withstand being hit by a 5 kg weight dropped from half a meter high. Otherwise it can pan through the customary 360°, and tilt through 70°. R834
D-Link DCS-F5705
The high quality 5 MP sensor on this model delivers picture quality that is almost the best on test here. More sophisticated software on this camera makes for excellent low-light performance as well, using a complex set of infrared beams and Wide Dynamic Range image processing capability. R1 900
D-Link DCS-F5702-D
Although slightly less sophisticated than the 5705 model above this 2 MP camera offers the best low-light performance on test, rated at 0.00 lux, and able to deliver colour images in near total darkness. It’s also the only D-Link camera on test to offer two-way audio, so you can ward off intruders and issue emergency information in a crisis. R1 100
