EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam review

Price When Reviewed

199

The EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam is a weatherproof external video camera that doubles as a security light for your home. It is simple to fit and easy to use with the EZVIZ app, although it does require mains power so is not true wireless. Video footage can be recorded to a 128GB memory card or backed up to the EZVIZ cloud service.

At 1080p the EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam offers full HD capture, and even without the lights being activated the night vision mode offers up to 18m of vision – according to the manufacturer. If the subject of your filming steps close enough those dual 2500 LM LED lights provide enough illumination to light them up. The camera/light is weatherproof at IP65, and features include motion detection, two-way talk, and the ability to set off an alarm if you don’t like what you see. 

Where to buy EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam and value

The EZVIZ floodlight camera is available now from Amazon, AO and Very at an RRP of £199.99 (at the time of writing it is £186.99 at Amazon). It’s not a cheap purchase, but worth comparing to the opposition. The EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam at is less expensive than both the Netatmo and Ring equivalents and so is good value. You can compare rival products in our Best Security Camera article. 

When we come to consider total cost of ownership things get a little less clear, however. There is a cloud recording option, but unlike the Ring products you can use an SD card and not pay for cloud storage. If you want to utilize the cloud, however, you will pay more. Ring charges £24.99 a year to back up a single camera, EZVIZ £49.99. That’s fifty quid per camera, every year. Or you could pay EZVIZ £4.99 per camera for a seven-day plan which is expensive when you consider Ring costs £2.50 per month for 30 days for one camera or £8 per month for unlimited.

Finally, as with all these types of product you need to consider fitting. My house is old and doesn’t have ready-made external power points, so I had to get an electrician to run a line from an internal socket and punch through the wall. EZVIZ offers its own installation service with reasonable pricing if this is an issue for you. 

EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam set up

Once the power was in place set up was a cinch. The camera needs to be attached to the mains, and screwed in to the wall. EZVIZ provides the fixtures and fittings, but as is the way with these things the screws seemed to be made of marshmallow, so we used our own.

Much more importantly getting the camera online was a slick and seamless experience. Once powered up we opened the app and scanned the barcode sticker helpfully appended to the camera. The rest is simply a case of following a simple wizard: basically, hooking up the EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam with the Wi-Fi. And away we go. As with all EZVIZ products we have tested, the user experience is good.

EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam in use

We’re happy with the EZVIZ floodlight camera. The lights are sensitive and bright, and the picture is clear. It’s not a beautiful image, being too sharp when compared with cinematic or televisual footage, and because the field of view is by necessity super wide.

Watching live is a next to seamless experience and accessing recordings from the past simple. Real-time footage is so close to being up to the second that it is uncanny. You’ll find it hard to stop yourself simultaneously watching the outside world through the window and your phone.

The night mode footage is useable if not clear, exactly. Although the claimed 18 metres of capture seems ambitious to say the least. Two way talk is useful with conversation being audible both ways(and a fun way of scaring members of your family), and the alarm works well. Saving and sharing clips is simple: the EZVIZ app really is intuitive, if not beautiful.

Importantly the system is reliable. We’ve had it in place for several weeks during some poor weather and as long as the Wi-Fi is working the camera is fine. And the EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam isn’t ugly – it looks like an outside light that you would see on any home. It’s a good product that does what it sets out to do and does it well.

Verdict

Good features, well made, and easy to use. The EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam is simple to set up and performs well. And this floodlight camera is also very good value if you don’t require cloud storage. But who wants to have to retrieve a memory card from a wall-mounted camera every time it is full, or you need to access stored footage? That £49.99 per camera per year charge stops us being able to unequivocally recommend the EZVIZ Outdoor Floodlight Cam. A shame in an otherwise excellent product.

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