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One of the main reasons for 3 stars is the fact that motion detection doesn't work unless you have a cam subscription. If you do do have a subscription with motion or person detection activated, it no longer announces it on my Amazon echoes. I used to love that feature, you could be anywhere in the house and hear it.
You can get the original Xiaomi for even better price.
"to maintain video data recorded from Your WyzeCam on the WyzeCam cloud. Wyze Labs shall use commercially reasonable efforts to prevent unauthorized access to Your recordings maintained on the Wyze Labs cloud. However, You acknowledge, understand, and agree that as a result of issues unrelated to Wyze Labs’s fault, including the inherent limitations in all hardware and software, unauthorized access to Your recorded video data may occur. As result, in addition to, and without limiting any other provision of this Agreement, You agree to and shall indemnify and hold harmless Wyze Labs, its employees and agents for and against all claims, lawsuits and losses arising out of or related to video data recorded from Your WyzeCam and Wyze Labs’s storage of that video data. This provision shall apply to all claims, lawsuits or losses whether or not based on negligence (active or passive) on the part of Wyze Labs, its agents or employees"
Available on Aliexpress, this is not even the best cam by Xiaomi, better get the Aqara gateway cam instead. Better sound, panorama view (great for motion detection) and a zigbee gateway built in for about the same price.
I own the Wyze Cam v2 and Pan Cam, both were super easy to setup and access via the Wyzwe app. They latest release of the Wyze app introduced shortcuts that took a little to get use to and create working versions. Looking forward to the day they come out with an outdoor camera.
I had the opportunity to try out the new Wyze Cam Pan as a part of the alpha testing phase and was impressed with what it has to offer. I’ve had an original Wyze Cam as a part of my home monitoring setup for a year or two, so I was really excited to see what the Pan had to offer.
Initial Thoughts
Upon opening, I was immediately struck by the size of the Pan. When I heard that the camera would have full motion capabilities, I expected something pretty hefty. In reality, though, the camera is quite a bit smaller and lighter than I thought it would be.
As with my older Wyze Cam unit, setup was simple. It only took a minute or two to get the Pan connected to my network and added to my list of cameras. The Pan also runs through a little calibration phase when first plugged in which I thought was pretty cool because it immediately gives you an idea of the range of motion that the camera is capable of.
Picture Quality
The Pan, like other cameras from Wyze is a 1080p HD camera and offers night vision. Overall, I would say the picture is in line with what I expected. Depending on network conditions, I occasionally notice some loss of clarity, but I chalk that up to my home network and not the camera.
Motion Tracking
Motion tracking was the part of the Pan that I was most interested in. The original Wyze Cam offers motion notifications and recording, but it doesn’t have any features to highlight motion so it can be difficult to see what actually triggered a recording sometimes. The Pan, on the other hand, can outline the source of motion in a video clip and you can also set it to actually pan and tilt to follow the motion automatically.
Right off the bat, I enabled motion tracking and tested it out by walking around the room. I was pretty impressed with how well it was able to follow me, even if I was moving at a fairly brisk pace.
I did have a couple of instances where the camera would over-rotate and then get stuck looking in the wrong direction, but after a couple seconds it would typically reset to its initial. From my testing, it seemed like the reflective surface that I had the camera sitting on would sometimes be misinterpretted as motion and the camera would end up following that rather than the actual moving object. As far as I can tell, a lot of this have been ironed out, though.
Noise Level
This is my only gripe with the Pan. When I first set up the camera, I was struck by how quiet it was when moving. After a few days, though, my wife and I started to get a little annoyed by the sound of the motor. I’m not sure if it actually got louder or if we just started to notice the sound more, but it got to the point that we decided to turn off the automatic panning and tilting when we’re home. I set the camera up in a pretty high-traffic area, so it was moving a lot and we decided we’d rather not hear it constantly. My wife also raised concerns that if someone were to break into our house, the motor sound would probably draw their attention to the camera which I think is a valid point.
Final Thoughts
All in all, this is a great camera—especially for the price. I have already started recommending the camera to friends now that it is officially released and I’ve been trying to think of places in my house where I could add more Pans.
Wyze has also recently added IFTTT support which I am very excited about. I can’t wait to see what kinds of things become possible going forward. I’m hoping they’ll introduce a web app soon so that viewing streams in-browser is a possibility. If that becomes a reality, I’ll probably replace all of my non-Wyze cameras with Wyzes.
The motion and sound alerts have put my wife at ease with our newborn.
