Yale Smart Indoor Camera – Hardware Review
If you’ve been reading our reviews for a while now, you know we love a variety of different genres of games, dabble with card games, enjoy working with the best available hardware, and collect a geeky thing or two. Having a huge collection of collectibles also means that you want to make sure your prized possessions remain safe. We assume that many of our readers have a substantial collection of games, warranting the need for some additional home security. This brings us to the subject of today’s review: Yale’s Smart Indoor Camera.
Design
Yale’s Smart Indoor Camera has a sleek design and the white frame and body will blend naturally with every type of interior. The black faceplate created a nice contrast with the rest of the body. Of course, design is perhaps a slightly less important feature here, but it’s still nice to have an indoor camera that looks good if you’re placing it inside a room you spend a lot of time in as well. There are no real bells and whistles, which does make it easier for the device not to stand out too much.
Comfort
Comfort might also sound a bit weird when talking about an indoor camera, but in this case, it does make a bit of sense. Yale has ensured you have all the necessary tools to set up the camera. The box comes with an adapter, a cable, and even a wall mount. The wall mount allows you to hang up the camera, in case you don’t have a flat surface that would overlook the area you wish to monitor. The camera itself can be turned at a 360-degree angle, and you can also fold it at a 90-degree angle. This makes it ideal for flat surfaces, but also for low and high placement on walls.
Overview
Setting up the Smart Indoor Camera is quite easy. You’ll have to download the Yale Home app, then create an account, and then you’ll need to add your device(s). This can be done by scanning the QR code on the device, and then you’ll be able to set things up. The setup process guides you through all the necessary steps, and if you already know how things work, you can skip the short tutorial.
In the app, you’ll be able to choose recording length, how sensitive the motion detection is, the video quality, and so on. It’s fairly intuitive to work with, and the menus are very clear. In the app, you can see past alerts and the recordings that come with them. Sadly, we noticed a lot of connectivity issues, where we couldn’t access our past video recordings, making it a bit of a frustrating experience. It also seems we aren’t the only ones when reading many of the recent app reviews on the Google Play Store. We do hope this gets resolved in the future. The times we were able to access our clips, however, things worked smoothly and we were quite impressed with the overall recording quality.
Of course, the most important aspect here is the actual recording quality. You’ll be able to recognize those on the footage clearly, and depending on if you have sound activated, the sound quality is actually quite decent too. You can use the talk-through function via the live feed, which allows you to talk to the person on the other side via the app. There is a small delay for the sound (on both sides), but this feature worked quite well, and it allowed us to either give instructions to those at home or perhaps prevent a pet from destroying the house. The camera does have all the functions you could wish for at a very reasonable price.
Conclusion
Yale’s Smart Indoor Camera is a great device when the app decides to fully cooperate. It’s easy to set up the device, and the overall motion detection works great, the recording quality is crisp, the talk-through function also works amazingly well, and it’s simply a solid product. You’ll get the full package as well, as a wall mount is included and you’ll also get the correct power adapter, which is something that is not always included when purchasing products such as this. On top of it all, it comes at a very affordable price. We do hope Yale solves some of its connectivity issues, however.
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