eufy Security, Wireless Add-on S220 Video Doorbell with 2K Resolution, 2-Way Audio, Simple Self-Installation, HomeBase 2 Required

Good product. Easy to connect to my WiFi and easy to assemble outside. Works perfectly and picture is a decent quality during the day and night. Good app that is easy to use. Recommend.

After receiving an email from Ring Doorbell to tell me my basic single subscription was going up to a whopping £50 a year (from £34) I found myself in the market place for a replacement that wasnt going to need an expensive subscription or even better...a subscription free model. So after a bit of research I purchased this Eufy doorbell instead. No subscription needed whatsoever to use it, as it writes the video content to a local SD card built into the base unit. A 16gb card is included which is enough for around 3 months recordings, but you can buy a bigger card cheaply if you require more. You can add a cheap subscription to it, to store your videos in the cloud if you prefer, but it isnt a requirement unlike the ring doorbell. Pros: No subscription required - main reason for getting this. Local storage Picture quality is great, and probably a little better than the ring gen2 box it replaced. Night vision is better than the ring too, as it has further reach. Easy enough to setup but make sure you register the base station/chime FIRST, otherwise the app gets stuck in a loop. (It took me a while to figure this out after trying to register the doorbell in the app first) and going round in circles!! Nice quality and as a premium device, you would expect this. Better longer lasting battery than Ring. Cons: mobile phone App is not a slick as the ring app.. but its not far off tbh. It does all the same things as ring does but not quite as intuative. A bit slower compared to ring to show notifications on your phone. This is a bit annoying and hopefully this will get better with newer apps and firmware etc. It takes a couple more seconds than ring to notify you of movement etc. The ring volume on the base station isnt as loud as the ring chime.. but at least it came free in the box compared to me shelling out another £30 to get the ring chime as an add on when i got that! Early days yet, but as a Ring alternative you cannot really go wrong and with it being subsciption free, it will have paid for itself within a couple of years.

Overall I am relatively pleased with this doorbell camera. When making the purchase, my primary objective was to receive alerts when people come on my drive near my front door. Primarily for security purposes. I see the remote talk function as a bonus, but not really what I personally purcased the camera for. For this reason my review may be critiucal in part, however this is likely more to do with my personal reasons for buying the doorbell. Product install was very easy, just opened the box, installed the app on my phone and then followed the video guide from within the app. A firmwre update was done on the security base, which took around 20 minutes. Once installed, I found that the audio is very clear, and image quality is very good during the day, and acceptable during night time. It's at least comparable to other offerings currently available, and likely better than. Motion detection This could be improved. Compromise has to be made in order to obtain good battery life. This said, some people are after outright performance (I'd class myself in this catregory). You may say I should buy the wired version, however eufy's wired offering is older, and actually of a lower spec, and doesn't come with a security base. I believe that this product is advertised as the successor to the original wired version, and in many ways in on par performance wise, or even slightly better in some areas. This said, I do feel that it should be improved further. E.g if used in wired mode, a 10 second continuous pre record buffer wouldn't fgo a miss. It can take anywhere from 2 to 15seconds for the device to detect motion. more typically in my case it's in the 2 to 7s end of this. Where I have experienced slower times is at night. Here I am referring to the time to start recording, and not the time to notify your device. I have been using the human detection option, as I live facing a street where walkers pass by on average every 5 minutes or so. I have also configured the zone to cut out the street from the detection. Motion detection should be faster in my opinion and more should be available option wise to extract more performance in this regard. All too often the video starts rolling once the person is already at your door. Based on this, if it were a criminal, they would likely spot the camera before the camera spotted them, and thus stay out of shot. I have read that an eufy PIR can also be integrated. I have yet to try this, but will likely do so in the coming weeks. I am hoping for the PIR to be a proper integration, whereby it just wakes the camera, and the camera still uses it's own human identification algoythm too (rather than just relying entirely on the PIR, as PIR's are also flawed in some respects). I will update my review once I have tried this. I've actualy found the notification time boeth once a recording has started due to sensing activity, or due to doorbell press to be be very fast, and only a few seconds at the most. My security base is about 10ft from the camera, which connects to my network via ethernet cable. I would say this aspect is incredibly fast when considering market competition. The last firmware update i have is actually 13/1/2021, so hopefully this is a sign that improvements are still being made. I do believe that this Battery or wired version with security base is currently the best on the market overall despire it's flaws. This said, it looks like not all of the best features from eufy's original wired attempt were carried forward to this more mature 2nd attempt. So far i've used this for around 1 week. I will update this review after some further use. suggested product Improvements for Eufy: 10 to 15 second pre record buffer speed up initial motion detection time for human events alternate angle wedge options other than nothing or 15 degree. E.g 20 or 30 degree. More options codedinto the software for improving performance for this device if being used in a wired configuration. 21/2/21 a further update on battery life. First battery charge has lasted 38 days so far and theres 18% left. In my case its seen 595 events, sometimes if people have been standing at the door having a chat then we've had 40 or so events in a short time due to that. I played with it a lot this time and the battery dropped a lot in the first week. The weather has also been very cold lately. Im expecting that next charge will last at least 2 months now that my settings are in place and im not playing with the features. Anotger point to note is the Eufy forum isn't very good. I placed a couple of posts with technical questions about performance with wired/vs battery configurations, and no response was received within several weeks, which goes to show Eufy don't commit as much effort as id like to see for answering queries on there. 8/5/21 after using the doorbell for a few more months, the battery lasts about 2months in my case. That time goes quick, and thus i do find it a bit of a faff having a doorbell like this. Id like to wire it in at sone point due to this.

Update: AnkerDirect saw my review below, they contacted me and have provided a replacement device, already the system is functioning at 100% of it’s capabilities, I have voice and picture and the new device fully charged within 60 mins. Well done AnkerDirect, excellent customer service, I’ve updates to 5 stars! Thank you I’ve had doorbell for 1 year. Set up was a struggle so was using it with some functions missing. But picture is good so I persevered. After 6 months got a notification to recharge, it struggled with the charger supplied in the box.. fiddled about, eventually got it to 80% after 2 days of charging, so put it back on the wall. Now down to 15% need to recharge and after 36hrs of saying it’s charging I’m on 15%. I’ve changed USB and charging unit, cleaned heads, restarted, all things they recommend on their troubleshooting. Nothing will recharge it. All in all I wouldn’t buy again.. going for a RING this time.

Sooo I finally bought this after researching tonnes of video doorbells. Eufy looked like the best option as it is “ADVERTISED” as “LOCAL STORAGE”. Why am I shouting? Just wait for it, its insane. So listen to this, I am setting up the doorbell and you have to register with eufySecurity via the app. I register, and it tells me it is sending me a verification email. I wait, no email arrives. I check Junk Mail, no email. I try to log in to eufySecurity, it says I haven’t verified the email address. I double check everything, and try again. It gives me an option to “resend” the verification email. I tell it to resend. I wait. No email. Nothing! Been an hour now, and I can’t even register the app let alone set up the doorbell! What a waste of an evening. BUT THERES MORE!!! I go online to see if anyone has this issue - turns out that if eufy servers are down (and judging by people complaining on Twitter/Reddit the servers go down a lot for lengthy periods of time), YOU CAN NOT view your recordings, get doorbell notifications, or ANYTHING!!! They advertise all this as “LOCAL STORAGE” which doesn’t “rely on the cloud” yet if their shoddy servers go down then YOUR WHOLE HOME SECURITY SYSTEM goes down! You can’t view recordings or anything!!!! How on earth is this legal if they advertise this so aggressively as “Local Storage does not rely on the cloud”?? Even the packaging has stuff about the cloud being as “secure as a cloud”. What a disaster and what a let down! I made this evening free to install the doorbell, maybe I should just pack it all up and get a refund. Never expect eufy to lie to us, but I was obviously wrong. Don’t believe me? Google eufySecurity servers and read the horror stories. There are even people who can’t go in to or out of their houses due to not being able to arm/disarm their eufySecurity systems. The app (same app this doorbell uses) becomes unusable when servers go down, and their customer service is shockingly bad (again, Google it, you’ll see the complaints). People are even complaining being trapped in their houses as the eufySecurity “server is down” so they can’t disarm their front doors to leave the house! A major flaw and deceitful marketing, this product is dead in the water.

**152 days later** Using the optimal surveillance mode, it lasted 152 days until it required charging. It captured 3668 events in total. Overall, I'm pleased with the system and the way it works. Would recommend fully. **Original review** This was an upgrade from the 1080p doorbell camera and chime. After being impressed with the 1080p, I purchased the Eufy alarm kit when it was on offer. However, to use the automation feature in the app with the other items (PIR sensors, additional cameras etc) the doorbell needed to be unpaired with the chime and added to the Homebase 2 that came with the alarm system, this in turn would render the chime redundant. So it made sense to return it and purchased this 2k add on. Overall it's a great bit of kit for those wanting a reliable doorbell without having to pay extra to save the 2am video of the fox in the front garden or the time you tripped up the front step. Everything is saved locally on the Homebase 2 and you can access this all through the app. Setup was straight forward and installation was easy. With this the option is there to hardwire it in with existing doorbell wiring and the leads and connectors you may need are supplied in the box. Straight out the box I charged it to 100% which took just over an hour from 74%, from there it was a quick change of the back plates (the 2k is annoyingly ever so slightly bigger and required a new hole drilling in the door frame, not ideal if you're a renter like me...). Be prepared to tweak the settings. A lot. The first few days the motion detection notifications can get annoying and I live in a quiet cul-de-sac... you'll need to find balance as even though the AI is good, it doesn't mean it's flawless. With the 1080p I was able to set 3 square activity zones whereas with the 2k, you get 1 hexagonal zone to form a shape. The attached image shows the weird shape I had to form (and it's night vision thrown in for good measure) but it works me. The attached video shows next doors cat which rubs against that corner a lot and it set off the motion detection, but now with the activity zone it filters out that corner. Battery life so far has been good, the attached screenshot shows it's state and that is from the 1st charge cycle. I've had it set to optimal surveillance from with all motion detection selected. All in all, a good piece of kit. An extra point goes to it's release key. With the 1080p you get a standard SIM pin tool, nothing fancy and likely to be lost, but with the 2k, you get a chunky magnet one, ideal for me as the metal consumer board is right above my door.

Fantastic camera & easy to set up. Also no monthly fees as you have your own box.

Very clear camera but battery life only one week before charging. Easy to set up recommend this doorbell.