Xiaomi 360 home security camera review. A lot of tech for the money

This is a Xiaomi 360° Home Security Camera 2K and as you may have guessed, it’s a smart camera. It doesn’t come with much in the box, just the camera itself, the wall mount kit, and the power cable.

Setup

Setting it up was pretty simple. You make sure you have the Mi Home app and once that’s done, the app will take you through all the steps to get it set up. So connecting the camera to the wifi, setting up the room it’s in and other basic settings to get it up and running.

The camera itself has quite a wide viewing angle of around 108 degrees but also, on top of that it can rotate 360 degrees so it can cover virtually the whole room. The camera can also tilt up or down by 110 degrees and in its extreme upward position you get access to the microSD card where the footage is stored. Sadly you don’t get one in the box but you can go as big as 32GB which they say is enough for about 3 days worth of footage.

The camera itself is 3MP with a pretty bright F1.4 aperture so it does do a decent job in low-light scenarios. It also has night vision built-in with infrared lamps for security in pitch-black darkness. Now because it is a smart security camera, you can bet there are a couple of neat features it comes with.

Xiaomi 360 home security camera review. A lot of tech for the money

Intercom feature

The camera itself has a built-in mic and speaker which you can use to communicate with anyone whilst you are away. All you do is press the mic button in the Mi Home app and you can have a video chat even though only you will have all the video and all they will have on the other end is just your voice.

And you can play around with the quality of the footage too, from 360p all the way to 2K even though the 2K is technically a few pixels short at 2304 × 1296. Not exactly 2560 x 1440 now is it? But still impressively clear.

Remote recording

Yes, you can set it to record onto an SD card but you can also record the feed you are viewing from the camera to your device if you need the footage on you. All you do is press on the video camera button here in the Mi Home app and when you are done recording, the footage is saved onto your mobile device.

The same can be done for photos as well, you can just click on the camera button and it will take a photo which is again saved to the gallery.

Remote control

Movement of the camera can be done remotely as well. You can use the virtual buttons to point it wherever you need it to point. And you can even zoom in up to 6x which will not be visually perfect but for the sake of security, I think it does a good job. And when zooming in it’s pretty much cropping into the sensor. There is no optical zoom here. Nonetheless, the quality is not bad at all.

Night vision

The camera can automatically switch to night vision when the lighting drops too low which will turn the image black and white for better contrast. But if it gets even darker, it’s got built-in infrared lamps that help illuminate the area where the camera is pointing. Now our human eye is terrible at seeing infrared light but cameras however are pretty sensitive enough and will see it with no problem.

Smart stuff

There are a couple of smart features built into the camera that you can enable in the Mi Home app. It can tell if what it is hearing is a baby crying and send you a notification to your phone that the baby is indeed crying.

It can detect motion and notify you of movement in the area the camera is placed and automatically take pictures of whatever it is that triggered the motion. And when you open the app you can start recording a video or even communicate with whoever it is that’s on the other side with the intercom feature.

You can set up smart scenes where the camera can behave in a certain way if other smart devices in your home perform certain actions. So for example, I have a smart home security system. So I can set up the camera to always begin recording whenever I arm my smart home security system. And you can set up as many of these scenes as you want if you really feel like going all autonomous with it.

The camera also supports Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa so if you wish to integrate it with devices that support these assistants or even if you just prefer managing all your smart devices under one ecosystem then you’ll be happy to know that this smart camera is compatible.

Pretty decent for US$49

Looking at what it can do it seems to be a decent buy at US$49. It’s got a decent camera with the added bonus of IR-assisted night vision. It’s smart and very customizable if you need it to perform specific tasks and it can even be set up to react to events from other smart devices. Also, not only can you communicate through it but you can remotely record security footage as well as control the camera remotely.

The only caveat is that for it to be useful it heavily relies on a constant connection to the internet. If you have that sorted then this is a value-for-money addition to your home security.

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