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I'm returning mine to Best Buy today. I had a Dropcam (Nest) that broke this week and I had high hopes for the Ultra. It feels like it's something to do with the base station, which is a shame as I have an Netgear Orbi system that is awesome, but this product is still in beta as far as I'm concerned.
I love the 180 degree view and the clarity but the rest of this is just way too buggy to rely on for safety and security.
It took 40 minutes last night for the base station to connect, find and activate with the two cameras in the package. After I finally got them to connect, I did the firmware update for all three devices. I plugged the base into my Orbi base in the center of the house and took one camera up to our front balcony. Lost the signal before I even got outside.
During the setup, the base station kept reverting to flashing yellow and showing disconnected in the app. Multiple reboots, factory reset (just in case) and resetting the Orbi and checking Ethernet cables didn't have any affect on the base station working. Had to remove the base from the app twice and both cameras once to get them to sync properly. If I wasn't reasonably tech savvy and patient, I'd have given up then as the app does lead you through additional steps like holding down the camera sync button to "force" it to be found etc...but the time to set-up was pretty bad. Again, I compare it to the Orbi set up and a Nest with built-in wifi.
I moved the base station to the repeater Orbi location, near front, and the signal is better but it's not a great location. I set the second camera up inside so I could compare both in and out together. I set up and activated all the settings for smart motion, 4K, high streaming etc....
Everything was working fine until about 10PM last night. That's the last time either camera registered motion of any type. The cameras seem to recognize motion, light goes on, but there's no recordings or notifications. Again, this is after firmware updates and rebooting. Nothing seems to change the fact they've stopped. Arlo support isn't set up for Ultra yet.
I manually turned on both cameras today to check they had power and signal and they both responded but there's been zero motion sensed since yesterday. I've even adjust the sensitivity. No change.
The street facing camera hasn't been able to detect any cars or people since last night and it's been light for 4 hours and nearly every neighbor has driven past the house, we have a solid view of a cu-de-sac without obstruction. The inside camera hasn't been able to detect 3 adults, 2 dogs and a child moving around getting ready and leaving for school etc...
The iOS app is slow to open and each camera takes a while to connect, I realize it's a power saving function, but it's not functional if the motion isn't working. The Nest App is much faster at responding and loading. That latency is something that Nest, Ring, Skybell, Kuna and others are all competing to beat.
iOS app is also having a view issue. The attached screen shot is what happened when I tried to manually load Camera 1 and zoom today. I got an overlay of a thumbnail from last night with the live picture in the zoom box off screen.
The auto zoom is a little slow to respond, lagged for sure and the AI isn't great at sorting things out yet. I did one test where I walked out to the street and came back around the van towards the house, stopped at the van and then continued towards the house. After I left the frame, the camera zoomed on the entire van and not once on my body walking around the driveway.
There's also a lengthy delay when zooming in on a person or object. I tested it with license plates in the drive. When you zoom, the picture is initially blurry and then a few seconds later it clears up and is crystal clear. It's impossible for me to tell if this is just the 4K/1080 function sorting itself out, a delay in streaming or something else. Not being able to have a clear zoom in a reasonable amount of time could be an issue using this for identification.
Night sensing and contrast/brightness is also affected by the zoom. I don't think you could clearly identify a person's face at night from a normal mounting height, which is fine, but the zoom picked up a lot of glare. When zooming at night the license plates became unreadable. Due to reflected light? The sensor overpowered? The HDR? I don't know, but basically you could read the plate in the wide view but not the zoom.
This might be great someday, but at $650 including tax for 2 and a base station, I don't want to beta test it at full retail. I'd be happy to test an Arlo system like this, but not without another camera to back it up. The 180 degree view looks awesome though! I'll be getting the Nest Outdoor IQ until Arlo sorts itself out...
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