Canary View Review - Review 2022

Monitoring your dwelling when yous're not in that location is easy to practice with a security camera, and at that place are more than on the market at present than ever. The $99 Canary View is a 1080p indoor dwelling house security camera that sports a fashionable design and offers a handful of welcome features including person detection and compatibility with Amazon Alexa and Google Banana voice commands. Day and nighttime video quality was first-class in our tests, and move alerts arrived rapidly. But certain features such as two-way sound and desktop streaming require a paid subscription and the camera does non back up native IFTTT interactions.

Design, Pricing, and Features

Similar the original Canary All-In-One, the Canary View is a good-looking camera that you lot can place out in the open. The half-dozen.0-by-iii.0-inch (HW) cylinder looks identical to the blackness or white All-In-1, but comes in a gray finish. Behind its glossy black panel are a 1080p photographic camera with a 147-caste field of view and a 3x digital zoom. Information technology uses 12 infrared LEDs to provide upward to 25 anxiety of night vision. The base has an LED ring that glows white when the photographic camera is in Abroad mode (ready to record motility) and is off when in Home mode (recording is turned off). It blinks white when the camera is trying to connect to a network and blinks red when the connection fails.

Canary View

The camera has a microphone and a speaker, but every bit with other Canary cameras, you have to subscribe to a plan to apply the 2-way audio characteristic. Information technology also has a motion sensor that uses an algorithm to differentiate betwixt motility acquired past a person and other objects such equally a pet or a passing machine. Connectivity comes past mode of an 802.11n Wi-Fi radio (2.4GHz) and Bluetooth. Missing are the siren and environmental sensors that you go with the Canary All-In-One and the Sens8 cameras.

You lot tin can use the View without a membership subscription but features are limited. As previously mentioned, two-way audio won't work, and you can't admission live video from the spider web app or download recorded videos. Moreover, you only get access to the last 24 hours of recorded video, and the clips are only xxx seconds long. For $9.99 per month or $99 per twelvemonth, you get 30 days of recorded video and the clips last as long as the move is taking identify. In improver to two-fashion audio and desktop streaming you get unlimited downloads and admission to Canary'due south Incident Support service, which connects you to a live amanuensis who will walk you through the procedure of retrieving video of an event. If you subscribe to a one-year membership the initial price of the camera drops to $49 (a $l savings), and with a two-twelvemonth membership the camera is free.

Canary View As is the case with the Canary All-In-One camera, the View is accessed using a free Android or iOS app. You lot can also utilise a web app to sentry alive video, but you'll accept to subscribe to a membership plan to do so. The mobile app opens to a home screen with the name of the photographic camera and a Lookout man Alive button that launches a live video stream. Turn your phone sideways to view the video in full-screen in landscape fashion.

At the bottom of the screen are buttons to sound the siren, enable two-manner talk (this too requires a subscription), and place an emergency call (you enter your emergency number in the settings menu). The View doesn't have a congenital-in siren like the All-In-Ane camera, but if you accept an All-In-1 installed somewhere else in the house, the siren button will activate that alarm. Missing is the transmission recording pick that yous become with cameras such every bit the Reolink Argus ii and the D-Link Mini HD Wi-Fi Camera DCS-8000LH.

In the top right corner of the home screen is a three-bar push that takes you to a screen where you can manage your membership, edit your accost, and configure the geofencing feature that uses your phone'due south location services to automatically put the camera in Away mode (set up to record motion events) when you get out the business firm and back to Home fashion (no recording and Sentinel Alive enabled) when you lot render home. Hither yous can too invite other people to share access to the camera and add new devices to your account.

At the bottom of the home screen are buttons for switching modes and viewing the Timeline, which provides a list of all recorded motion recordings as well every bit all mode changes, geofencing changes, and firmware updates. Each video event is accompanied by a thumbnail of the video with a play button and the type of event (Person, Motility). Video can be shared via text and e-mail messages, and you can download clips to your telephone if you take a membership subscription.

Installation and Performance

Setting up the Canary View couldn't exist easier. I already had a Canary account from a previous review, but if this is your first Canary device yous'll have to download the app and create an account. I plugged in the device, tapped the three-bar button at the top of the abode screen, and so tapped Devices. I selected Add Canary Device and chose Canary View from the list. The illustrated instructions prompted me to affect the top of the View until the LED flashed blue, at which point the device appeared in the app. Once confirmed, the camera was paired to the app within seconds. I chose my Wi-Fi SSID, entered my Wi-Fi password, and gave the camera a proper name. It was immediately connected, and afterwards a five-minute firmware update, setup was complete.

The View delivered top-notch 1080p video in testing. Daytime video streams were colorful, with sharp item, and black-and-white dark video appeared well-lit, with skilful dissimilarity. Barrel distortion was minimal and ii-way audio was loud and clear.

The movement sensor worked well and button notifications arrived quickly, but as we saw with the All-In-One camera, the View would occasionally send a person alert when it detected motion from my dog. I had no trouble viewing live video on an Amazon Echo Testify using Alexa voice commands, and the geofencing characteristic worked like a charm, automatically switching between Away and Domicile modes as I left my business firm and returned. While the camera works with Alexa and Google Banana, it doesn't collaborate with other smart habitation devices and lacks support for IFTTT unless you use it with a Wink Hub.

Conclusions

If you're in the market for an indoor security camera that delivers abrupt video and looks practiced doing it, the Canary View is worth your consideration. Its sleek design lets you place it anywhere in your dwelling house and its 1080p camera provides excellent daytime and night vision video. The View's motion detection works fairly well, and Alexa voice commands work perfectly. Two-manner sound is also clean, but you lot have to subscribe to a membership to use it and to access alive video using the spider web app.

On the other hand, if yous want a camera that will trigger and be triggered by other smart devices in your home, our Editors' Choice, the iSmartAlarm iCamera Keep Pro, is your best bet. It costs around $seventy more than than the View, but you become a lot of features for your money, including motion tracking, mechanical pan and tilt, complimentary cloud and local video storage, fourth dimension-lapse recording, and interoperability with other smart devices via IFTTT.