ever since acara announced the G4 video doorbell back at CES 2023 this has been one product that I've been really looking forward to checking out this year because it ticked so many boxes for me in terms of features and I hoped it would have that usual acara quality to it that we've come to know and love from lots of their other products and now it is finally here so let's check out if it lived up to my expectations or if there have been any Corners cut for its really aggressive price point feel transparency as always akara did send me the G4 to review but not paid and not sponsored of course because this is a review and we don't do sponsored reviews I've been using the G4 for around six to seven weeks in total now so I have spent a pretty good amount of time with it the design of the G4 is this really square flat sort of look finished in a really nice matte gunmetal gray plastic with a black accent ring around the camera bump which houses the 162 degree field of view 1080p camera and accompanying infrared for night vision under the camera is this rather large push button along with an LED ring which makes it easy to see and hit in the dark finally on the right side of the unit is a captive security screw which keeps it locked onto its included Mount and if we take it off of the mount for just a sec we can get a good look at the power options for the G4 immediately you will notice the large gaping hole where six double a batteries go if you want to run the G4 completely wirelessly say for instance if you don't have existing doorbell wires or maybe you want to add this to another door or a standalone outbuilding or something like that and running it on those batteries will give you up to four months of battery life acara says depending on how you use it now part of me would have preferred for this to be a rechargeable battery with a USB C Port that you could hook up and then get the batteries charged but then the other part of me likes having these double a batteries because instead of having to unhook the doorbell take it inside charge up for a couple of hours and then take it back outside and plug it in and potentially miss events on the doorbell and just generally not having a doorbell for that period you can just take like 30 seconds to replace all of the batteries and be immediately back up and running so it's a little bit of a trade-off as to which you prefer the other way you can power it is via the screw terminals at the back where it can accept 8 to 24 volt AC or DC power for a permanent Supply which is the way that I have been using it for me personally and because there is no internal battery you don't risk it over charging and blowing up if you have it permanently wired which again is nice finally the G4 comes in at 120 pounds which is a really competitive price for a brand name device and I imagine this will cause some other brands to drop their prices too which is a win-win for us and we're going have it linked down in the description if you want to pick up the G4 the keynote among you will have noticed that there was no SD card or storage on the doorbell itself which is where the second part of the G4 comes in and it's this chime unit which pairs to the main G4 and this guy is responsible for a few key things firstly as you will probably have guessed it handles the chime when the doorbell button is pressed which again is great for the fully Wireless setup no need to have an existing chime wired into your house and secondly it also has the SD card slot where we can record directly too and this is great because it means that your SD card isn't stored inside of the main doorbell itself where it can get stolen with the doorbell finally the chime unit actually handles the wireless transmission so because the G4 is capable of running totally on batteries as we explained it uses a protocol other than Wi-Fi to communicate with the chime unit and then the chime unit itself has Wi-Fi in it and this sort of handles the translation between your phone and the doorbell itself the Chinese unit itself does also plug into USBC and then into any USBC charger akara does recommend that you have it within sort of five meters off the main doorbell and now I do wish that the unit had some way of powering it from your existing doorbell wiring if you do have wiring maybe I'll look into making some sort of adapter that takes 8 to 24 volts from the doorbell transformer and then puts that into 5 volt USBC so that it can all be powered from the main doorbell wiring inside the acara app you can view the camera playback recordings and view the motion events and I don't really love the way that you view recordings inside of the app if I'm honest it feels kind of a little not fully finished with little things like not being able to download clips of certain time frames no option to pin a clip so that it doesn't get deleted and the monitor tab always seems to be like a day behind in terms of recent events and so on but you can mostly get by okay you can also record continuously with the G4 to an SD card or you can record on motion whichever you prefer which is a really nice feature and with a 32 gigabyte SD card I got around three days of continuous recording and it will just overwrite the older stuff if it runs out of space I believe it will also take up to a 512 gigabyte SD card if you want to go all out on SD storage and they are supposedly adding a way to record to a Nas in the future which is awesome and will make way more sense so really hoping to see that feature added soon along with the matter update in the future once the spec allows for this type of device I will say that the responsiveness of the G4 has been probably my favorite of all of the video doorbells I've tested in the past push notifications always work really quickly meaning you don't miss events when they actually happen looking at you yuffie and opening the live stream is pretty Snappy too so you can quickly respond back to any visitors if it need be I also didn't really find any big lag or delay between me talking into my phone and that actually being received on the other end which can be a real problem on some other doorbells whether it's like a 5 to 10 second delay but that is not the case with the G4 responsiveness is such a key component of any video doorbell if you want to actually build to use them to talk to your guests or drivers or whoever and the G4 does this really well image quality during the day is pretty good there is a good amount of detail and dynamic range certainly more than enough to handle face recognition and see what's going on in the near vicinity and no real complaints from me when it comes to the daytime footage but nighttime is where it does become a bit unstuck detail of the street and the brightness of the image isn't an issue and either is movement of a person with it manage to keep a good and consistent frame rate but details of faces become really washed out and can actually be really hard to identify people at night time with this sort of smooth blurry mess that you see now now having the camera mounted with the door and the wall in frame doesn't help here because it causes these bright spots in the image and I was going to 3D print a wedge for this but then I thought that akara supplies this 30 degree wedge in the Box as its only option for mounting and I shouldn't have to print a additional adapter to fix this since this is literally what they shipped in the box so I wanted to show you what you can expect from the out of box experience maybe in the future akara if you can ship like a 45 degree adapter in the Box too that would be amazing the microphone has also good enough to have a quick conversation with your delivery drivers or visitors and I'm sure you are dying to know what does the G4 work with outside of the acara so officially they are supporting Google Assistant Alexa and home kit out of the box which is great if you're a home assistant user as we've seen with previous acara cameras and that means that we can connect it to home assistant using the home kit integration great right well not really as the G4 uses home kit to secure video this time around which home assistant does not unfortunately support yet and I wasn't able to find any way to make this work just yet even through using third-party Solutions like scripted and then firing that back into home assistant it just doesn't seem to be doable just yet unless someone else finds a workaround or alternatively we're going to have to wait for HSV support in home assistant so that we can add this device natively which would be very nice so that is a real bummer as when I saw this doorbell supported home kit I really got my hopes up for an actual good video doorbell that works with home assistant and it doesn't have to deal with any other BS but I guess we're gonna need to wait a little bit longer the doorbell does of course work with home kit like I just mentioned and if you are a home kit user you will probably really like this doorbell you can view the live stream right from your phone and do things like record straight to your iCloud and you can also talk and listen through the homekit app control the chime and set it to record when you leave your house and the whole thing is just generally super responsive because of that local control this is a really really nice home kit doorbell if you're using Google home or a Lexa you can also add the G4 to both of these and then view them on an echo show or a nest Hub and both can run automations when the doorbell button is pressed I did find both but especially Google home to be quite slow to open the camera but that's likely due to the cloud streaming as opposed to home kits local streaming which of course is way faster but what about an rtsp stream to this doorbell ha unfortunately not at least not yet see this to me is a huge missed opportunity see obviously this doorbell can be run fully wirelessly so an rtsb stream to this is not going to work when it's on batteries but because you can run this fully powered also why can't they just let you open an rtsp stream when it's running wired on the mains they already have an option in the settings that you can tell it when it's on Mains so why not just have a little option that allows you to enable rtsp stream when it is being powered that makes so much sense to me and I asked acara about this months ago when I first started testing this doorbell and they said they will consider it so if that is a feature that you want to see and there is no reason you shouldn't want that to be a feature or an option then let akara know down in the comments and hopefully if we all shout loud enough they will make this a feature how having an rtsp stream would literally slingshot this doorbell into my favorite video doorbell of all time please one thing that I do like however is that you can pull out the SD card from the chime unit Chuck it into any SD card reader and play back the clips as normal thank you no dealing with any stupid proprietary video files that can only be read by the vendors app for some unknown reason this just works you can play back the files on your laptop or desktop good job one thing I want to start adding into doorbell reviews going forward because of some recent events is testing of Internet blocking of devices and how those devices respond when you block their internet access I had a suspicion going into this of how it was going to go because I've tested this on previous acara cameras which do continue to work locally when you block their internet access and I am happy to report that the G4 is no different you can block the internet access for the camera meaning that is it is no longer accessible remotely so just be aware of any consequences and actions when you do that but it will continue to work when you block its internet and you are on a local Wi-Fi which is great notifications won't work as that needs client allow you to be able to send those to you but the camera does record properly and you can view the stream talk to visitors and all of that stuff when internet access is blocked at least all of that is kind of true see it works as I just described when you block internet access that is until you reboot the device at which point it will never come back up from the disconnected state until you re-enable internet access so you can re-enable internet access and then block it again and it'll work just fine again until you reboot it I do feel like this is just a bug rather than an intentional decision and hopefully they can fix this soon be aware that clips and snapshots will be uploaded to the cloud if you turn that feature on but they have made it an option in the settings and they have labeled it clearly so just be aware of that G4 also does face detection and recognition and according to acara this is done locally on the device and acara was probably paying pretty close attention to some recent events like the one involving yuffie so I did want to test and see if that is the case so you can upload a picture of yourself or others and tag them so that the doorbell knows who is who and you can also have it Mark different colors on the timeline for different people which is a nice feature and allows you to see when they have came and went I did find that if you walk up the path towards the door open it and walk in without really standing still it's not quite fast enough to make a detection and it will miss your face however if you stop for like half a second so that we can pick you up it will pick you up quite quickly and that will like the face detection work although this is a little confusing as the notification for this takes around 9 to 10 10 seconds to actually come through making you think that the face detection is really slow so to test the speed of this what I did was actually set up an automation that whenever it detects my face to play the police siren through the chime and I can confirm that the face detection does take under a second at least for me it's just a notification bit that takes longer for some reason this automation also allowed me to test the local portion of it so again with the internet blocked on the device I tried the face recognition and out and sure enough the ringtone or the police siren played on the chime so I knew for sure that it was working correctly the weird thing is that I added a blue line to my timeline to indicate that it detected me when internet was blocked but if I went into events it wouldn't actually show me as being detected there until I re-enabled the internet access again at which point it started working properly again likely a bug since the face recognition does appear to be done locally on the device like acara describes at least from my testing now obviously I have no way of knowing what akara is doing with the face recognition information if the internet is enabled or once you re-enable it but it does appear that the face recognition is done locally on the device as they say face recognition also just did not work at night time like the the image is just not good enough for for face recognition a few other things I noticed as missing were things like motion zones which doesn't seem to be possible at the moment being able to Define different zones and different sensitivity for those zones would be really useful at the moment it's just one big area you can define a single privacy mask but not zones currently so that is something I would really like to see I would also love to have seen the doorbell be able to work with your existing chime if you have it wired in like the yuffie does which is a really nice feature but the acara cannot do this unfortunately meaning that you have to use the included chime all in all the G4 is a really solid video doorbell especially when considering that low price tag and particularly if you are an acara ecosystem or a home kit user and even if you are an l-a-l-e-x-a or Google Assistant user you will still really enjoy this doorbell because you're probably used to the cloud streaming already home assistant users will need to wait a bit longer to see what happens there which is a real shame literally if this device had rtsp and on viff available when wired to power I would be recommending everyone to buy this immediately because that resolves pretty much all of my complaints in a roundabout way come on akara you know exactly what you need to do here remember to shout down in the comments and tell them how much you want to see that feature it really needs to happen but hardware and feature wise especially for the price this is a pretty difficult product for really anyone else to compete with but let me know down in the comments what did you think of the acara G4 video doorbell I imagine that lots of you have been patiently waiting for this product and are going to be a bit disappointed with the lack of Home assistant integration hopefully with this now actually being available it means someone will build an integration for this in time anyways let me know what your thoughts are down in the comments and that is about going to do it for this video I hope you enjoyed it please make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed links will be down below if you want to pick up one of the G4 video doorbells and I will see you in the next video hmm