I can’t imagine my home without security cameras anymore. Whether it’s during holiday season or a casual weekend away, I like being able to keep a close eye on the house to know it’s safe.
Yale’s new range of IP cameras are intended to make it easy & affordable to keep tabs on your house from wherever you are — whether that’s the corner shop or half way across the world. Well, assuming you have internet access anyway.
The one I’ve got here is the “Yale Home View Pan Tilt Zoom IP Camera, a feature-rich security solution that will set you back £125. If budget is an issue you could opt for the more affordable Yale Home View instead (about £75), but the more expensive option I’ve got here is more versatile with its panning, tilting and zooming functionality. That’s something I’m yet to see in cameras of this price.
Easy set up process — if you don’t want notifications…
Setting up the Yale Home View Pan Tilt Zoom IP Camera was incredibly simple. Once you connect the provided antenna to the back of the unit, plug in the power, and download the Android or iOS app, the in-app setup process takes under 5 minutes. Once that’s done you can view a live HD (720p) video feed, listen and talk back using the in-built microphone and speaker, record or take snapshots of your house and more.
If you want to set up motion detection notifications for your Yale IP camera though, things get a little tricky.
iOS users get push notifications and emails, while Android users are restricted to just emails. In order to get your emails working though, you’ll need to set up SMTP settings first. That bothers me because (a) the rest of the setup process was so damn easy and this complicates it, and (b) not everybody knows what SMTP is — let alone how to set it up.
First impressions of the Yale Home View IP Camera
While the push notifications for iOS don’t seem to work for me yet (seemingly an app issue), the email notifications come through promptly. You don’t get any video snippets to play back later, but you can view the image snapshots on the email sent to you.
Despite the complications of email setup and the lack of push notifications for Android (a big let-down), I’ve actually got high hopes for this camera. From a hardware point of view I’m loving its versatility with the ability to pan, tilt and zoom — all managed through the app with a push of a button. The two way audio feature also seems to work very well and with HD quality footage, I can get clear images and video too.
I’ll be using it daily and will post up my full thoughts on it. Stay tuned to LetsTalk-Tech.com the full review, coming soon!
