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BARGAINHUNTERWIRELESSSMARTSECURITYCAMArlo Ultra S
PERFECT PICTURE AND SERIOUS
SMARTS IN A BRILLIANTLY
ENGINEERED PACKAGE.SIDE BY SIDE with its competitors, you’d be hard
pressed to outwardly tell the difference, but fire up the
Arlo app and the quality gap between this and others is
all too clear.
It starts with connectivity. Setup of the Arlo hub and
its paired camera was super fast, and where the others
might have you wait a while before reaching a live view,
the Arlo gives up the goods quickly and in remarkable
quality, and when you’re wondering whether you need to
hit the siren (or just use two-way talk to dismiss the cold
caller at your front door) that immediacy is priceless.
While it hits the resolution, we suspect there’s a little
interpolation on its 4K footage given that the Arlo
Ultra’s recordings can tend to be a bit smeary when
zoomed right in, but this is still far and away the
sharpest security camera we’ve seen in action, wireless
or not. You can configure it to capture anything from a
sensible field of view right up to a full 180º fisheye, and
that HDR picture comes with tremendous colour
depth. Testing at twilight on a clear evening, the Arlo
managed 20 minutes longer than its competitors at low
light before switching to night vision mode, still pulling
in a clear and colourful image.
At night, though it lacks the full IR LED array of
Swann’s camera, the Arlo captures enough light to see a
good distance, and there’s an adjustable spotlight
available if you’re placing it outdoors. Which rather
neatly brings us to motion detection: it’s great, and
super smart. Not only is the Arlo quick to pick out
moving items, it’s brainy enough to make a decent stab
at working out exactly what it’s looking at. Your push
notification might say ‘motion’, it might say ‘person’, or
it could even say ‘animal’; we certainly didn’t notice it
struggling to determine the difference between a
human and a cat. There’s even a package detection
algorithm, where a doorstep-pointed Arlo can spot
when your latest online purchase has landed and alert
you as much. That’s just cool.
If you have an Arlo camera plugged in via its optional
magnetic cable, you can configure specific detection
zones within its vision, meaning it’ll ignore any motion
that happens outside of those areas – handy if you live
near a busy road, for example. But the power
requirement somewhat nullifies its otherwise
wireless nature.
The only real issue we have, though, is with the cost.
The package isn’t at all cheap in the first place, but if you
want to store 4K recordings in the cloud you’ll need an
additional subscription. And additional 4K camera
units cost $449 each! Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue thatThe Arlo doesn’t take long to set up, has excellent image detection, and pulls in clear and colourful images the Arlo Ultra doesn’t earn its price tag.
even in twilight.