£85.99
imoulife.comWE’RE IMPRESSED Excellent
features for the money; works
really well; video quality is good.
WE’D IMPROVE Not always
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app; some small language issues;
feature list might be overkill.
THE LAST WORD If you don’t
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layout, add a star – this works
really well, and is good value. But
it’s a little too confusing to call it
a slam-dunk recommendation.VERDICT
See more of the best security
cams at: bit.ly/t3secamhere’s a lot of smart camera tech
crammed into this little sphere,
especially for the sub-£100 price.
The Ranger IQ is a smart security
camera with motors so that the lens can pan and
tilt, following a person around the room if it
spots them (and returning to its original position
after). That’s paired with being able to identify
humans, so it won’t track the cat, unless you
want it to. It also has two-way communication,
so that you can yell at the burglar/cat from
anywhere. You can view footage from it live (and
can control the camera’s view) in the app or via
Alexa/Google Assistant, and it will notify you
and record video when it detects motion.
There are smart features connected to the
motion detection, beyond just the panning of
the camera. You can choose specific zones in the
frame you want it to monitor (so that it can
ignore a window, for example), and you can set
the sensitivity. It doesn’t have face detection,
though; it’s due to be added later, we’re told.
The packed feature list is rounded out by
colour night vision, geofencing (so it can turnAffordable security cam
that does some things well
Imou
Ranger IQ
VIEW LOOK
off motion notifications when you’re home),
offline storage on microSD cards as well as paid
cloud storage, a siren, a privacy mode (that
turns the lens down so the camera can’t see
anything), and a noise sensor that you can
adjust the sensitivity for, so it could be only loud
enough to hear alarms in the house.
It’s a packed list, and everything worked well
for us. The HD video quality is good, the app is
quick to respond and load cloud video, the alerts
arrive in timely fashion... functionally, it’s great.
But we struggled with the app. Again, it
works fine – it’s snappy and reliable – but we
found the way it lays out its options to be quite
unintuitive – actually finding all of the features
above to customise and activate them left us
scratching our heads a lot. There were also some
instances of the English on the app being
imperfect, which can confuse things further.
And while it’s excellent value in terms of
features per pound, it weirdly might do too
much. There are smart cameras with these
features but without the rotating lens (still with
wide fields of view, though) for half the price.
Or even with the moving lens, but without
advanced night vision. Do you need all these
features? If so, and you don’t mind the app
issues we’ve mentioned, we recommend this.
But there are easier, simpler options.T
64 T3 JUNE 2020Te s te d
Imou Ranger IQ