It’s so easy now to protect your home, monitor your home, inside, outside, it’s wireless, it’s battery-powered and there isn’t really any excuse not to now. I’ve tried several cameras, doorbells, I wouldn’t be without them now and even my wife, family members have come to love the accessibility it provides to them and have jumped in too. I’ve been using the Swann Xtreem wireless security camera for a while and here are my thoughts.
Features
- Wireless, battery-powered with up to 6 months of life (based on 20×15 seconds clips per day).
- 1080p image resolution / 110degree field of view.
- Infrared night vision up to 8m away.
- True Detect, heat from people and cars trigger notifications & recordings.
- Weatherproof, designed for outside use all year round.
- 2-way audio.
- Free recordings via local micro SD card.
- Price £179.99RRP
Visually, it’s quite a compact and discrete looking camera. White in appearance, apart from a black face, it’s heavy and very well built. To the top, a single button and the micro SD card slot, under a rubber flap. It’s worth noting the camera has a small lip at the top, to help protect the lens from raindrops I imagine. To the bottom, is the micro USB port for charging and speaker. The battery is not removable, so you have to actually take the camera down and charge it for several hours, you can have a spare charged battery and swap it out, meaning you won’t be covered during the charge. To the front, the lens, the sensor and indicator lights.
Set up was fairly straightforward, charge the camera fully, download the free Swann app and then assign the camera to your Swann account. The process took about 5 minutes because the camera also had a firmware update which it had to do. Once the camera is set up and you can view the live footage via the app, it’s time to put the camera into position. You get a magnetic mount with the camera, you find your position on your external wall, out of arms reach, and screw the mount onto the wall. From there, you can magnetically attach the camera to the mount and away you go. The magnet is fairly strong, strong enough that it will withstand wind and rain but not so strong that it wasn’t easy for me to pull off with one hand. Hence out of arms reach, you don’t want someone walking up to the camera and just taking it away with them. Fear not if the initial position isn’t perfect. Thanks to the ball joint, there is plenty of scope to slightly tweak the position to get the best coverage.
Within the app, there are a number of features and settings allowing you to get the most out of the camera. You can obviously live view the camera or go playback and view previous recordings. You can control each camera separately, if you have multiple, with each having different settings if you wanted. Go into a camera, you’ve got camera settings like live quality, colour night vision, image mirror or flip depending on how you’ve mounted it, plus speaker and mic volume. Detection settings, motion, set how sensitive you want the detection to work before recording. You can also set a sleep period and siren. Modes, if you’re at home, you can set the camera(s) to work a specific way to say your night mode or way mode. You may want a more sensitive detection when you’re away or maybe if you’ve got a camera somewhere that will always go off when you’re at home, you turn that one off under home mode.
You’ve got three options to view or store content. Watch it live, no recording. Record it locally via a micro SD card or record to the cloud. Swann provides a service called Secure +, which will automatically store all recordings on their cloud for a price. One camera, it’s £2.99 per month but if more than one camera, it’s £8.99. This is a very similar pricing arrangement to Ring. The service offers 60 days of cloud storage, which is more than plenty. Where it gets interesting, certain features are locked on the camera IF YOU DONT take out the paid sub. Things like the True Detect is limited without a subscription. Rich notifications, are also locked, so no image previews on the free model. However, the sub does also include extended warranties and insurance. You get 90 days for free with any purchase, then you either pay or don’t. It is disappointing to see certain features locked behind a paywall.
Visual performance is pretty good when compared to other cameras I’ve tried in the past. Good colours, the resolution is fairly good, it’s quite easy to easy details from about 6 meters away. So if someone was walking up the drive, before they got to the door, I could get a good look at their face with enough definition that if I needed to, I could zoom in a little and send the image to the police. The image is wide, it’s got a very prominent fish eye effect to it which is fine when the camera is outside, you get a great field of view but the closer you get to the camera, the more fish eye you’ll see. The automatic detection works well, with most things setting it off, cars, people, cats and sometimes even the hanging basket if it’s windy. I had it set to medium sensitivity for the majority of the time and found it to be about right for me. When something was detected, I’d get an alert on my phone and then I was able to live view the feed. Night vision works ok, it’s a little distorted but the movement is fine and if someone looks at the camera, you’ll be able to see who they are.
The audio performance was very good. You have to press and hold down the button on your smartphone and talk into it, then there is a short delay and your voice comes out the speaker built into the camera. It worked every time, no problems with that and my voice was clear enough that the voice could understand me but it wasn’t always loud enough, especially if the cam is up high and the person you’re talking to is a few meters away. The siren to or alarm, if you see something you don’t like the look off, you can press the siren button and a siren sound will come out of the camera. It’s ok, again, it’s not overly loud but may deter someone. The volumes for these can be adjusted within the app.
Battery life seemed good, 6 months as stated might be pushing it and some days you may detect more things than others, but at least 2 months is very achievable based on what I’ve seen.
At £179.99, it’s not cheap for just one camera and then the monthly subscription on top, plus you’d probably want more than one camera. Performance-wise, on par with others, good image, plenty of features and settings, battery life is good. Having the microSD card is nice, although if someone stole the camera, the footage is gone too. However, there is no interchangeable battery, so you’ll be without coverage while you charge and the fact that Swann puts specific features behind a paywall, not cool.
If you like Swann, if you have other products of theirs and like the user interface and you’ll bundle a system together, it’s worth it but when the Ring stick up camera is £89.99, half the price for near on the same feature set, why wouldn’t you spend £180 and buy two ring cameras instead of one Swann…
For more info and to purchase, head over to the official Swann website.