Facial recognition works fairly well after you set it up.
There's no subscription fee, and everything is stored locally. If someone unplugs the camera, it uploads a few photos to the cloud--that's it.
The camera itself is well-designed and attractive.
Configuring the facial recognition feature can be a tedious process.
There's no online backup of your videos, so you lose them if a thief steals the camera.
The live video stream is delayed more than on competing cameras.
The Netatmo Welcome is a smart home security camera. Plug it in, point it at an entryway, and it records movement, sends you alerts, and allows you to view a live video feed from your phone or a Web browser. Unlike competing security cameras, this smart home security camera stores your videos locally on an SD card. It doesn't require a subscription fee to upload them to a cloud storage server. With integrated facial recognition, the camera identifies people it recognizes and detects new, unknown faces.
Netatmo’s incorporation of facial recognition is something unique compared to other home monitoring and security cameras we’ve seen, and it’s definitely both a good and a clever implementation.
Netatmo wins more points for creating a camera that doesn’t look like a camera.
It's only possible to record onto the microSD card on board too, as cloud storage is not available (only key still frames are stored). That saves on subscriptions fees, which is a positive, but could be a limitation at the most critical of moments.
Netatmo is keen to point out the advantages of its product: face recognition; no subscription fees; fine-grained privacy settings; and video stored locally rather than (potentially insecurely) in the cloud.
In daylight situations, the video was highly detailed, and, with a good Wi-Fi signal, very smooth during playback.
Unfortunately, it's always slow and sometimes unreliable. It has trouble picking up any face if you move past it quickly, and it might not even register that there was motion.
Recognition accuracy is far from perfect. Even after a couple of weeks, with all profiles showing as complete in the app – meaning the camera has captured everyone’s face in enough different ways - there were still plenty of ‘unknown face’ notifications.
Its ability to “see” faces is patchy. When on the windowsill looking outside, Welcome picked up the mailman each time, and the picture it grabbed was so hideously distorted the poor man was unrecognizable as a human.
In the real world, however, the Netatmo struggles to get to know your family, and it’s missing many of the features that other cameras in its price range deliver.
It's a beautiful device that's not meant to hide amidst cluttered bookshelves, and it's slightly more unassuming than the Canary camera thanks to its smaller size.
I think Netatmo will want to work on a Welcome Version 2 that can't be defeated by a strong backlight.
If you’re turned off by monthly subscriptions, and willing to wait for Netatmo to iron out the bugs, that could make it a good choice in a segment increasingly demanding a regular dip into your wallet.