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on July 12, 2017
I was impressed with the Quality and clever cupped-magnet camera mount. This ingenious magnet Mount allows easy extremely versatile aiming of the camera. In fact I would say this is the best security camera mount design anywhere as far as ease of positioning aiming Etc. In the cup magnet it's a really solid grip on the curved camera and leaves you pretty convinced that it's not going to move on its own. Another big positive for this system is the account setup which provides for email forwarding of alerts images Etc. It's very easy to do. The extra long cabling is to provide easy installation for people with outdoor power outlets that are not close to the mounting position. I really admire this company Nest, for going off in a New Direction and being Innovative and creating a quality product. Really Everything You Touch speaks of quality materials and refined engineering. I did not try out the audio system the speaker and microphone but this is a nice thing to have for doorway entrances.
Some Cons: In this day of free cheap CLOUD memory everywhere, it is unreasonable that this company charges $100 a year for cloud storage. Unfortunately Nest only provides that one storage option and that's not reasonable for people like me who are sort of techies who like SD cards and FTP storage Etc.
Also the camera enclosure does not meet any outdoor weatherabilitie standards, Iso etc, all it says it can handle rain. And Nest warns about image function in very cold and very warm weather situations. We get bitter cold sub freezing blowing snow sleet dust everything up here. Really hot humid Summers. So I ended up going to a different camera with a more weather proof housing, and that allows free cloud storage or onboard storage or your own FTP storage.
Some Cons: In this day of free cheap CLOUD memory everywhere, it is unreasonable that this company charges $100 a year for cloud storage. Unfortunately Nest only provides that one storage option and that's not reasonable for people like me who are sort of techies who like SD cards and FTP storage Etc.
Also the camera enclosure does not meet any outdoor weatherabilitie standards, Iso etc, all it says it can handle rain. And Nest warns about image function in very cold and very warm weather situations. We get bitter cold sub freezing blowing snow sleet dust everything up here. Really hot humid Summers. So I ended up going to a different camera with a more weather proof housing, and that allows free cloud storage or onboard storage or your own FTP storage.
on February 6, 2017
The Camera itself is great! The reasons why I rated it 2 rather than 5 is that there is no local storage or viewing.
- If the internet goes out it is useless.
- With Comcast's new data cap it makes it an even harder sell. It uploads 24-7, so if you have it set on 1080p (which looks awesome, by the way) it will eat up close to 500GB of data on its's own. You can set it to only be on during certain times, but I don't know when you would not want to monitor your front door.
- Also, if you want to take advantage of any of its features (besides live viewing) you MUST pay a monthly fee which makes an expensive product even more expensive.
Like I said, the build quality and picture quality is awesome, but be prepared to keep paying for it through the subscription service and additional data if you have a cap. I would not recommend this camera to a friend due to it being exclusively tied to the internet ($$$).
- If the internet goes out it is useless.
- With Comcast's new data cap it makes it an even harder sell. It uploads 24-7, so if you have it set on 1080p (which looks awesome, by the way) it will eat up close to 500GB of data on its's own. You can set it to only be on during certain times, but I don't know when you would not want to monitor your front door.
- Also, if you want to take advantage of any of its features (besides live viewing) you MUST pay a monthly fee which makes an expensive product even more expensive.
Like I said, the build quality and picture quality is awesome, but be prepared to keep paying for it through the subscription service and additional data if you have a cap. I would not recommend this camera to a friend due to it being exclusively tied to the internet ($$$).
on November 7, 2016
I have a few indoor Nest Cams and they are perfect for discreet placement. The problem with the outdoor cam is that it has a 5-6 foot USB cable that is HARD WIRED to the camera. You then have to connect the USB male end to the provided AC adaptor and connect the AC cord to the power source. In total the camera has 25 feet of cord length between the AC power cord and the USB cord - it is anything but subtle and when attempting to install looks very unprofessional without finding a way to hide the excess cord – especially if trying to mount to a ceiling (do you really want your cord rolled up and tied hanging off of a roof or window outside your home?). With the indoor cam you can swap the USB cord for any size you need which gives the user the flexibility to, for instance, mount the cam next to a ceiling power source with a 6” or 12” cord making the camera very unobtrusive and hidden (especially if you spray paint the mounting unit white). Not very impressed with the outdoor unit to say the least on form. Functionally – it operates just as well as an indoor Nest Cam (which is a positive).
on March 31, 2017
Good but not great is the way I would sum up my Nest Cam Outdoor experience thus far. Installation can be simple if you don't mind an ugly cable going into an outlet. If you want a clean look, like my wife does, then you will need to get creative. Basically for me the best path was to drill through the exterior wall and then fish down the interior wall to an outlet. I had to drill a larger hole than I would like to as the USB connector is permanently affixed to the cable and you either have to fish the whole camera through or the large 3/4" USB end. This large end also makes fishing down the wall tricky. I saw a video on YouTube where someone cut the cable and then reconnected the wiring with electrical twist nuts. I didn't feel comfortable doing that. It would have been great if the cable had a disconnection to where you could fit it through small cable sized openings, however the waterproofing might be jeopardized then, IDK.....Overall the software is what makes the NEST, if your going to invest in a "security camera" then it needs to be reliable and easy to find something that it recorded, otherwise you have nothing. Due to Nest's expensive cloud recording services, I originally went with a Lorex NVR system, but after 9 months of having it drop cameras randomly and software that is confusing and not user friendly. I returned the system and decided the Nest monthly fees would be the cost of admission if I wanted reliability, simplicity, and usability. I'm not sure how many cameras I will be able to afford with the monthly fees, I really wish they would make it significantly less the more cameras you have.
UPDATE- added a second outdoor nestcam to my front door, I decided to go for cutting the wire and drilling a smaller hole and then splicing the wire back together. The end result was good and I would do it that way in the future. Also it appears that each nestcam is taking about .5 MBS of bandwidth from my internet connection.
UPDATE- added a second outdoor nestcam to my front door, I decided to go for cutting the wire and drilling a smaller hole and then splicing the wire back together. The end result was good and I would do it that way in the future. Also it appears that each nestcam is taking about .5 MBS of bandwidth from my internet connection.
on June 5, 2017
If you have the money and are looking for a easy security system setup, this is the way to go; If you don't have $100-$300 a year to throw at it, I would look elsewhere. The subscription packages are very high for an already expensive product. Without it you can only view the camera live (with intercom feature) and have the past 3 hours of history, thats it. Everything else you have to pay $100-$300 a year or $10-$30/month. The app also constantly pesters you to add a subscription if you don't have one. I hope Nest listens to their customers and makes some changes but I doubt thats going to happen. Until then I would save the money and find another system.
on May 18, 2017
Although called an outdoor camera, I use the camera indoors. It has no battery, or battery backup, so it must be plugged in at all times. The setup was easy and I was able to view through the camera by downloading the app on my phone as well as logging into Nest home on my computer. The video is clear and the fish eye lens allows me see a wide area in my home. There is a 3 to 5 second delay in what you think you are seeing live. I believe for this reason the two way audio does not work very well. It works like a walkie talkie where only one side can talk at a time. So if you are trying to talk and the other side says something, you won't hear what was said. That combined with the 3 - 5 second delay makes communicating very difficult. The camera tends to randomly go offline periodically, which is also annoying.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with the camera is that it won't record anything unless you pay a monthly fee for a subscription. Nest tries to hook you here, by forcing you to take a 30 day "free trial" to the subscription, so you have to wait 30 days to see how the camera will actually work when the subscription expires. The subscription to "Nest Aware" that records and stores 30 days of video to the cloud, costs $10 dollars per month, per camera. So buy a few cameras and in a few years you will be incurring costs into the thousands of dollars.
This is really disturbing to me because other cameras offer stored recording to the cloud for free. Nest is under the (Google) Alphabet umbrella, which is one of the largest cloud storage providers on the planet. We all know it would cost them virtually nothing to allow some video storage to the cloud, but they have chosen to try to make some easy pure profits, by hooking users into a monthly subscription fee. That really bothers me. I will now only purchase cameras that offer free video recording storage.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM with the camera is that it won't record anything unless you pay a monthly fee for a subscription. Nest tries to hook you here, by forcing you to take a 30 day "free trial" to the subscription, so you have to wait 30 days to see how the camera will actually work when the subscription expires. The subscription to "Nest Aware" that records and stores 30 days of video to the cloud, costs $10 dollars per month, per camera. So buy a few cameras and in a few years you will be incurring costs into the thousands of dollars.
This is really disturbing to me because other cameras offer stored recording to the cloud for free. Nest is under the (Google) Alphabet umbrella, which is one of the largest cloud storage providers on the planet. We all know it would cost them virtually nothing to allow some video storage to the cloud, but they have chosen to try to make some easy pure profits, by hooking users into a monthly subscription fee. That really bothers me. I will now only purchase cameras that offer free video recording storage.
on June 19, 2017
This is a great security camera. The image quality is terrific. The features are rich and powerful, although you have to pay a pretty hefty monthly fee to take full advantage of its capabilities. Installation is very straightforward, with one huge caveat. If you are going push the cable through a wall to access inside power (and have a nice, clean installation without a bunch of wires crawling all over the outside of your home) you have two choices. (1) Drill an enormous hole in your outside wall to accommodate the non-removable waterproof housing on the end of the USB cable. (2) Cut the USB cable, which allows you to drill a very, very small hole, and splice it back together inside your house. We went with (2) and are very happy with the results.
Two things to bear in mind if you go the same route that we did. First, cutting the cable will void your warranty. Second, you only have to splice the red and black power lines, since the shielded data lines are not used by this WiFi-enabled camera.
One last point, if you do decide to cut and splice, you can discard the huge (weather resistant) transformer that comes with the device. Any standard 5V/1A USB wall outlet will suffice.
Two things to bear in mind if you go the same route that we did. First, cutting the cable will void your warranty. Second, you only have to splice the red and black power lines, since the shielded data lines are not used by this WiFi-enabled camera.
One last point, if you do decide to cut and splice, you can discard the huge (weather resistant) transformer that comes with the device. Any standard 5V/1A USB wall outlet will suffice.
on October 21, 2016
The good:
*I actually like and trust the magnetic mount. I was not sold on that initially but it actually does a great job and allows for more range of motion for initial placement than most fixed mounts.
*Picture quality is good to excellent.
*Night Vision is pretty great for seeing out to almost 130 feet from my front door into my yard.
*Mounting hardware is quality products.
The disappointing:
The cabling. It has an enormous plug that has to plug into a hockey puck sized power source. I would have expected this from others, but from former apple engineers? Hell nah.
*I actually like and trust the magnetic mount. I was not sold on that initially but it actually does a great job and allows for more range of motion for initial placement than most fixed mounts.
*Picture quality is good to excellent.
*Night Vision is pretty great for seeing out to almost 130 feet from my front door into my yard.
*Mounting hardware is quality products.
The disappointing:
The cabling. It has an enormous plug that has to plug into a hockey puck sized power source. I would have expected this from others, but from former apple engineers? Hell nah.
on January 16, 2017
I will start by saying that this product does almost everything that it is supposed to do.
My complaint is that they advertise that the camera can tell the difference between people and small animals. It can't. As a result, I get lots of false motion alert notifications of someone approaching the zone, when it is just a squirrel or a cat.
This becomes frustrating after awhile.
I also had to disable the noise alert, because many times when a car goes by on out street, it sends a false alert.
Update 4/29/17
Still too many false alerts! I will say that every time a squirrel, or a cat walks across our porch, I get a motion alert. This gets a bit frustrating and, like the boy who cried wolf, you start to not pay attention to the alerts. Of course it will be one of these occasions when a legitimate intruder will be detected and we will not know about it, until the damage is done.
Also, I added another camera in another location/zone. Be aware that for each camera you want on your recording subscription account, it costs $100/year for a 10 day recording period before recording overwrite occurs. So, if you have 5 zones to monitor, it will cost you $500 per year!
It would really be nice if Nest had an option for local recording on my computer. I suppose that the subscription fees is how they make their millions of dollars per month.
Update - I feel like I am a victim of "the boy who cried wolf" so many times, I don't even bother to look at the images when notified of activity anymore because there is a bug that flew in front of the camera, or a squirrel went by on the ground. Also, both of the cameras that I currently have in use go offline on a regular basis, even though the camera that is furthest away is only about 25 feet away from the WiFi signal and the other is only 9 feet away.
Multitude of problems for something that is so expensive. And then I have to pay an expensive subscription cost in order to get full functionality.
I would not recommend these cameras to anyone.
My complaint is that they advertise that the camera can tell the difference between people and small animals. It can't. As a result, I get lots of false motion alert notifications of someone approaching the zone, when it is just a squirrel or a cat.
This becomes frustrating after awhile.
I also had to disable the noise alert, because many times when a car goes by on out street, it sends a false alert.
Update 4/29/17
Still too many false alerts! I will say that every time a squirrel, or a cat walks across our porch, I get a motion alert. This gets a bit frustrating and, like the boy who cried wolf, you start to not pay attention to the alerts. Of course it will be one of these occasions when a legitimate intruder will be detected and we will not know about it, until the damage is done.
Also, I added another camera in another location/zone. Be aware that for each camera you want on your recording subscription account, it costs $100/year for a 10 day recording period before recording overwrite occurs. So, if you have 5 zones to monitor, it will cost you $500 per year!
It would really be nice if Nest had an option for local recording on my computer. I suppose that the subscription fees is how they make their millions of dollars per month.
Update - I feel like I am a victim of "the boy who cried wolf" so many times, I don't even bother to look at the images when notified of activity anymore because there is a bug that flew in front of the camera, or a squirrel went by on the ground. Also, both of the cameras that I currently have in use go offline on a regular basis, even though the camera that is furthest away is only about 25 feet away from the WiFi signal and the other is only 9 feet away.
Multitude of problems for something that is so expensive. And then I have to pay an expensive subscription cost in order to get full functionality.
I would not recommend these cameras to anyone.
