the tapo c320ws and the tapo c310 11 months later are they still any good we'll see so 11 months ago i bought my second tapo c320ws and decided to make a video of it so on that video it had the initial unboxing the installations and connecting into the app and my initial thoughts at the time when I had the cameras. But today, 11 months later, are they still any good? I have placed them in places that would test its outdoor capabilities, it has endured the Philippine scorching heat, and of course, the Philippine tropical storms and rain. So today, I'm gonna share with you guys my findings, I guess.
Let's start with the pros. It is such a reliable security camera, so its IP It's rated IP66, so we're not gonna have any trouble with, you know, placing it outdoors and facing the rain or storms. And as I've said earlier in the video, it has endured even the Philippine scorching heat.
And I have not seen any problems. There has not been any overheating during the hot Philippine days. It never shut down on me. It just kept on working.
Although I did have a problem with one of the cameras, but it is not the product. fault a rat chewed through one of the wires and i just had to connect two of the copper wires again together just so that it could have power again thank goodness that i was able to fix it that way because i was really worried and the wi-fi is still working i'm not using ethernet on the person detection is good although there are times when it detects my dog and says that it is a person but more on that later when we're talking about the cons so that's the only pro i can say you Alright now, let's talk about the cons. There are a lot of cons in this camera.
The person detection works 95% of the time because the 5%, it doesn't detect any person and sometimes when there's a lot of large motion going on, doesn't even need to be a person. It could be bugs or raindrops or leaves. It will say person detection for some reason. I don't know, the camera just freaks out. most of the time when something gets close to it like obstacles like for example raindrops when it's raining or the camera just doesn't know what it is and it just says that's a person so moving on with the other detection settings there is something called the line crossing detection setting so on paper it actually sounds so great like you can set up a line like for example outside your front gate so the video here is for from the tapo c310 and you can set it for when a person walks Towards the inside, it will send detection or when a person walks from this side, it will send a detection or even both.
So if somebody crosses that line, it will send you a notification. It will have an alert. On paper, that sounds amazing.
But when I tried it out, it feels like it's just motion detection renamed and you were just given the option to put a line in there. Because it does not work. There doesn't need to be any...
person crossing that line there just needs to be some motion like for example shadows or light that's just passing through so i do not recommend using line crossing detection when you're using this camera outdoors maybe inside a house where there's not a lot of movement but again i tested this once indoors as well when it detected my curtains move it said line crossing detection without it even Crossing the line on the frame. No idea why, but yeah, I guess it's just a party trick. It's just motion detection renamed.
So area intrusion detection is a bit the same. It's motion detection in a short box. So you are given an option to add some boxes and shrink them up and place them on some parts of the frame on video. And so the hope is when a person gets detected within that space. It will send you the notification.
Again, on paper, it sounds amazing, Tapo, but why doesn't it work? Because there doesn't need to be a person inside that box. All it needs is one leaf to be flown away, and it will send you a notification. It doesn't even need to be a leaf, a shadow of an item, or just wind in general, or even rain as well. It's the same problem with person detection, but when it rains...
the cameras freak out no matter what detection setting you use but yeah technically on my end i just turn off all the detection alerts except for person detection because person detection has the highest success rate of 95 for my testings it could be better on different environments but for me person detection does occasionally mess up i said this earlier in the video it could be some bugs it could be rain it could be your dog your cat it could say that those are persons but person detection is the highest success rate of all of the settings because if you have motion detection outdoors the slight motion wind plants get alerts rain of course so another con as well is the pass-through audio so using the audio in my environment outside my garden Nobody could hear it because there's a lot of noise pollution coming out. Even if it's a quiet day, you don't hear any cars. And for some reason, the speakers are not that strong when you're speaking through it from your phone. When you set on the alarm, the alarm is extremely loud.
You can hear it from afar. But when I use pass-through audio to speak from, you know, my phone to the through the camera, nobody could hear it for some reason. So it's not as strong.
I tried even upping the volume. It does not work. I tried.
Using an emulator on my PC and maxing out my microphone volume here. I think it's capped on a specific audio level. I wish it was as loud as the alarm.
Let's move on to another con. So if these cameras get stolen or if somebody breaks in and finds the camera and breaks it and you're not at home, you're not going to be able to find out. You will just see that the camera device is offline. In order for you to know if somebody does break the camera or steals it, you are gonna have to subscribe to Tapos monthly subscription or yearly subscription because it uploads the videos to the cloud.
So if it, if somebody enters your house right now and you're not subscribed and they break it, you're not gonna know. You're not gonna know who did it. So that's a big on for me.
But yeah, I guess TP-Link needs to earn some... more money even though we did buy a product we're not getting a hundred percent of it i wish there was an option that we could set this up and connect it to a nas or your pc through wi-fi your pc storage because xiaomi has that option we can use our pc storage so so on xiaomi on some of the xiaomi cameras every single night you set a time and it uploads all the footage from that day to your pc storage so you can buy a big one terabyte drive and just set that for you know your storage so if somebody does steal your camera you can get some footage through the nas so there are a lot of cons about this camera especially the ai functionalities it still has a long way to go but the end of the day it is still a very durable and capable security camera that you can place outdoors i for myself am still buying a few more to set up around my house And if you guys enjoyed this video or you have any other questions, leave a like and drop a comment down there below. I'll reply when I'm not busy, when I'm not at work.
And if you guys want to see more, hit the subscribe button over there. That would really help out your boy a lot. And again, my name is Gab and thank you so much for watching this video.
Have a nice day. Peace.