Nest IQ Smart Cameras

UPDATE - 2 Months In ------------------------------------ Nest rolled out an update to improve the accuracy of people alerts. It works. Whereas I was getting dozens of alerts per day, I'm now getting zero false alerts: the only time it tells me that it sees a person is when there is actually a person. I'm very pleased with this improvement and am moving my rating up to 5-stars! Thanks for listening Nest! UPDATE - 1 Month In ------------------------------------ After 5 weeks of usage, I'm still holding steady with a 4-star rating for this camera. It doesn't work as well as it needs to but it works better than any other camera I've tried. And the areas where it is weakest are in areas that no other camera I've seen can even touch (identifying people, zooming in on motion, etc...) Things that have impressed me over the month: * It never disconnects. It has an excellent wifi capability * It always works (you can't take this for granted after using D-Link cameras!) * The Nest app always works and is easy to use * The online recording feature is extremely reliable: I can always go online and see what's been happening Things that they still need to work on: * Despite the HDR capability being groundbreaking, the camera still underexposes faces of people walking to my front door, leaving them disguised. * The people recognition feature never misses a person but frequently flags movement as being a person even though it is just the wind blowing a tree limb, etc... This is so bad that I was forced to disable the motion activated notifications rather than being inundated with false notifications several dozen times per day. Despite the negatives, this is still better than 6-7 other camera systems I've tried (D-Link, TrendNet, TP-Link, Lorex, QSee). With the price having dropped from $300 to $225, I'm seriously considering buying a second one. Of course, that $50/year per extra camera makes me think twice about that! I'm hoping Nest rolls out major updates in the future so I can move this up to 5-stars. ORIGINAL ------------------------------------ This review encompasses my first impressions of the Nest Cam IQ. I bought this camera to look out a window by my front door so I can see when people come and go. This area was previously covered by a 720p D-Link IP camera (wired). As noted by others, the camera has some bugs that Nest needs to fix. Those are outlined below. I'm holding steady at 4-stars for now. First impressions: * You will NOT get the benefit of the 4K sensor if just watching video on your phone or computer. That's because the video stream being sent to your device is 1080p. Any zooming you might do on your phone is only able to zoom the 1080p video feed. It was a big disappointment for me but I think there's an opportunity here for the Nest folks to add a great feature that would allow your zoomed video to immediately show what the 4K sensor is capturing. * The HDR feature does a nice job. My camera is pointed at an area with shade but also some sky. The sky shows up blue and the shady areas are still light enough that you can see what's going on. I dare say that it provides an image that is almost as good as what I see with my bare eyes. It's still a bit dark for me in some cases: I'd rather over-expose the sky a bit if it meant I could get a better look at the face of the person walking up to my door. See the picture attached to my review: you can see the color of the leaves along with the bright blue sky. On a non-HDR camera, you'd see the leaves or the sky, but probably not both. * I found a concrete way to take advantage of the 4K sensor. From the nest.com website, you can go into the camera configuration and change the base zoom level. Effectively you can digitally zoom in to a level that you wish you could see clearly and then press a button that makes that particular zoom level the new default view seen by the camera. When you do this you receive a notification that the camera is about to "enhance" the video for this new view. Shortly thereafter the pixelation from the zoom goes away and you get a crisp new view centered on what you were zooming on. I was really impressed by this. You lose viewing angle but it gives you more flexibility to take advantage of the camera's sensor. * I turned off "motion" alerts and set the camera to only alert when it detects a person. Still, the camera sees "people" all the time. Dozens of times per day it will interrupt me to tell me that there is a person in front of my house. Of those times, maybe once or twice there will actually be people. A 70' pine tree in my neighbor's front yard seems to get identified as a person a lot. * When actual people do walk in front of my camera, it does zoom in like you see in the promotional video. It will track them as they walk from one side of my house to the other. It's pretty cool: like a ghost camera operator. This is also how I know that the camera thinks my neighbor's pine tree is a person: it keeps zooming in on the upper branches of said tree (dozens of times per day). * The 4K sensor is incredibly sensitive: it can practically see in the dark. I have night vision disabled because my camera is inside a window and the glass would reflect the IR LEDs, but even with no IR, a small porch light is sufficient to make my entire porch and most of my front yard visible. Even the night sky shows up as dark dark blue. It's impressive. * I'm surprised that Nest didn't bundle any way to mount this camera. The camera base has a tripod mount screw but if you want to attach it to a wall or hang it upside down, you're out of luck from Nest. This is a very strange omission if you ask me. * This camera supports 5G WIFI (IEEE 802.1ac). Because my camera is only about 25' from my wifi gateway, I went ahead and connected it via 5G to give it tons of bandwidth. I wouldn't have tried this if my gateway wasn't so close to my front door. So far it's working great over wifi. * The camera video is accessed through the Nest app on your phone or through your web browser on the nest.com website. Again, that feed is simply 1080p so in many ways, this camera will appear no better than the rest of the cameras on the market. The only way to benefit from the 4K sensor is when the Nest zoom automatically kicks in or when you reset the digital zoom base and let the camera "enhance" the video for that new setting. * The camera has no problem handling multiple simultaneous viewers. I had the nest.com website and was viewing the feed from my iPhone and suddenly my wife started telling me how great it looked on her phone: that was three simultaneous clients, very good! Other notes: * Nest gives you a free 1-month trial of their "Nest Aware" cloud service for uploading 10-day's worth of video to Nest's website. This essentially turns your camera into a full-blown security system. * The camera gets quite warm during operation. The ambient temperature 1" to the left of the camera is 77 degrees but the camera itself measures 120 degrees. I guess this is why Nest makes you click-through an agreement not to set your camera in the sun! * Nest is quite generous by providing a 10' power cord. My old D-Link also had a 10' power cord but newer D-Link cameras ship with ~6' cords. Bugs: * The camera itself has worked flawlessly at providing 1080p video, but the notification system is worse than my Ring doorbell. * A 70' pine tree across the street is frequently identified as a person (dozens of times per day). * Even though I turned off motion events, yesterday my camera reported 440 motion events. * Even though I had all notifications disabled for my wife's "family" account, she continued to receive dozens of emails from nest notifying on each of these motion events. I contacted Nest support and after 30 minutes online chatting, I was told "wait 24 hours for your change to take-effect". Sure enough, the next day, the e-mails stopped. I'll update the review as I have more time with the camera. Feel free to ask me questions and I'll do my best to help answer them.