Top positive review
55 people found this helpful
Revised Review: Great product and superb customer service
By Ed Wood on Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020
Revised 17 July 2020 Eufy customer service reached out to me shortly after my post of the initial review. They asked if I would be willing to work with them to troubleshoot the issue. Since my issue was not critical and did not affect functionality or security, I agreed. Over a series of days, I performed tests and uploaded logs to their support staff, and any time that I had questions or comments, they replied to me quickly. Ultimately, the problem could not be resolved, and they replaced the doorbell without question. Now that I've been using the doorbell for close to a month, I can say that I am thoroughly satisfied with it. It is responsive, has great video quality, saves video locally instead of the cloud, can be powered by battery or existing wiring, can use existing doorbell chimes, chimes on the Homebase hub, chimes and announcements on Amazon Alexa. I have nothing but positive comments about this device and Eufy's customer service (thanks Daisy). I'm leaving the original review below, because it documented my observations and discoveries when I first installed the doorbell, and they may be helpful to new users. Any problems that I experienced in the original review have been resolved. ************************ Original Review I really didn't need a fancy video doorbell, as I live in a gated community on a dead-end street with very little traffic and few visitors. However, I replaced my front door and thought that it would be a good time to replace the original old-school doorbell while I was at it. I chose this product primarily because of the local storage. I have very slow Internet (20MB down, 1.3MB up), and other products which relied on cloud storage would not have worked for me. I also chose wired installation instead of battery so that I would not have to charge the battery manually 2-3 times a year. Installation was relatively straightforward, but I found that motion detection was not working. In fact, the doorbell failed to respond until I was only a few feet away. I contacted Eufy support, and without hesitation they told me to submit a request for an exchange, which I did. A few hours later, I found a setting in the "Power Manager" section that had three options: Optimal Battery Life (default), Optimal Surveillance, and Customize Recording. The default setting is doorbell only with no motion detection. If that was mentioned during setup, I did not see it. You would also think that the support techs (2 of them - one on live chat, and one on phone), would think to have me change that setting, since I am a new user with a new installation and probably using default settings. So, I changed the setting to Customize Recording, which enabled motion detection, and allowed me to set longer record times. Since I am using a wired setup, I don't have to worry too much about long recordings depleting the battery. The next thing that I tried to do was download video clips from the Homebase to my iPhone while in my home wifi network. Every video that I tried to download SEEMED to download properly. There was a % download progress display, and the time to complete was appropriate for a 30 second clip, but the file saved to my photos was only the last 3 to 5 seconds of the clip. I repeated this multiple times with about 10 different files, with the same result. I then realized that all of these files were associated with an eventual doorbell push. So, I activated the system several times from motion detection only (without pushing the doorbell button) to see if it made a difference. Every single one of those clips would download to my iPhone in their entirety. So, it appears that if someone pushes the doorbell button, you are not able to download the full clip from the Homebase - only the last few seconds. This makes no sense to me, as the full clips are available and viewable on the Homebase, but they are apparently not fully downloadable. I have not yet contacted Eufy on this second issue - perhaps they'll see it here and comment on it. The final observation is that it seems that video clips are more stable (when created and also when viewed later) if the Homebase is connected with ethernet instead of wifi. I have terrible Internet, but great internal wifi (Arris Surfboard Max Mesh), and videos seemed more jittery with more dropouts and freezes on wifi. I was pleased to see that I am able to receive alerts and view clips when my phone is on cellular, although the video is very choppy. This, I assume, is because the video is streaming to me over the Internet via my terrible home internet 1.3MB upload connection. I am actually OK with that, because I didn't expect to be able to access anything away from home anyway. Overall, I am relatively happy with the device, and hope that some of these issues go away with firmware updates.
Top critical review
50 people found this helpful
(UPDATE) Eufy is iffy.
By RAVA22 on Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2022
“Update” Due to recent reports from various sources, Eufy (Anker) is allegedly uploading images from video captures and using/storing facial recognition into their AWS provided cloud system, even when cloud services are not selected by the user. This seems to be an alleged breach of privacy and because of these recent reports, I will not give more than 1 star. When it is advertised that your information will be stored ONLY locally, I fully expect that. It’s 2022 and mobile devices now have more power and memory than ever. Cloud services should not be required to do basic functionalities. There’s a reason I avoid Amazon and Google products – lack of privacy. And now that Eufy (Anker) is allegedly putting personal facial recognition information without permission AND on an AWS system, I will now be in search of a replacement that hopefully doesn’t have this kind of issue. After 2 years with this I have mixed feelings. TL;DR No subscription needed. Pretty good camera picture. Good, intuitive app UI. Streaming recorded events is fast. Good looking doorbell. Motion detection is way too aggressive at times even when using motion detection zones and after changing suggested settings, causing you to not want to check your notifications which defeats the purpose. Intercom is pretty laggy (about 1.5 seconds with high speed internet). Doorbell microphone doesn’t always pickup what’s being said during intercom use. Not compatible with Apple HomeKit. Cannot attest for battery life since mine is hardwired. First the positives: No subscription!!! That is a rarity in todays world. It is for that reason that I haven’t switched, yet. Good video quality. Streaming recorded content is fairly fast. App UI is straightforward and simple. Camera isn’t obnoxious. Now the negatives: The motion detection is somewhat inconsistent. No matter what setting or restrictions I put on it, more times than none, it records unwanted motion detection, even things that are out of its motion zone. I would say it DOES record wanted motion (like the mailman dropping off mail at our wall mounted mailbox) fairly consistently – about 95% of wanted motions. But there are random days where it will record every single car passing by, even though the street isn’t selected in its detection zone. There are days when we’ll have just porch movement recordings, then days when it’s every single car driving by. So sometimes a day with 3 or 4 recordings, others with 15-30 recordings. It’s incredibly annoying because the point is to check the motions that matter. I can’t be checking my motion notifications every 5 minutes at work. So then I quit checking them and then add to the chance that I won’t catch something important happening. Another negative is the lag when using the intercom system. It’s bad enough that you can’t really relay your messages without confusion. On top of that, the camera doesn’t always send the audio in the intercom system, so on top of the delay, you’re also asking them to replay what was said. I don’t use that feature often, but when I do need to, it’s kind of useless. I’m also tied to the Apple ecosystem, and really wish this camera would work directly with HomeKit. I’ve received 6 motion notifications while I typed this. It’s all just cars driving through my street. Luckily I don’t live on a busy street or I’d just get a different camera (probably will anyways).
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