Swann Alert Indoor Security Camera, 1080p, Heat & Motion Sensing, 2-Way Talk, Audio Analytics and Siren, SWIFI-ALERTCAM

It’s hard to review a product that’s app controlled without reviewing the app as well. Especially when it seems to be the only app you can use with it. I’ll at least try to seperate app comments from camera comments.

This is an INDOOR camera. It’s not subtle. Fairly large for a home monitoring camera. The cord is only 4 feet long, and it has to be powered. It’s a regular electrical plug on one end, and an old school mini USB on the camera end. The plug came with an adaptor for another country, and the window stickers came in several languages. It stands on the base and can be angled and swiveled as much as you like by hand to get the right position. I only had stability issues when the weight of the extension cord pulled it off the top of the entertainment center. Once I had that supported, it stayed put just fine.

I could not get the two way audio to work properly. Even 40 feet away, I got feedback at both my phone and the camera, but couldn’t hear anything spoken into the phone through the camera’s speaker. The reverse worked pretty well – I could hear even the smallest background noises – dog walking around, cat playing in a paper bag, etc – from my phone as picked up by the camera.

Video quality during the day is washed out, but night vision is good looking. And now we get into the app.

The app is terrible. I can’t dislike it more. From the ten second load screen EVERY TIME I open it, to the controls that don’t do anything. It almost wants to be malware. It won’t let you install it without giving it access to take and record as well as access, pictures, video and audio.

This is definitely an indoor camera, yet the app will not see it as one. No matter how many times you switch it to ‘indoor’, the next time you look at that setting, it’s outdoor again. I’d guess this is why daytime indoor images are washed out. There are no zones, like many other cameras have, so you can’t set it to only see a doorway or not where your kids run through all the time.

There isn’t an arm and disarm function really. You click the app, wait the ten seconds for it to load, and it turns your camera on to live view it, no matter the prior settings. Click in the upper left to open the menu, and select Device Settings. You may have to select your camera at this point, sometimes it does, sometimes not. There, you can set the device name, TRY to set the proper time zone (took a dozen tries to make it stick) , view the wifi connection and the name of your wifi network. Click on camera settings, and you can select video quality – low, high, or max. There’s no telling what those actually are. Here, you have also have a Mode setting, of indoor, outdoor, or auto. Mine will always set itself to outdoor, no matter what I click on. You also have the option to mirror and flip the images, and adjust the mic and speaker volume. Sometimes, it works.

Backing up to the previous step because we see there’s no way to turn off alerts in camera settings, we then go to Motion Settings. You can set the Motion Detection settings sensitivity to off, close, medium, far, and max though again, it doesn’t really define what those are. Below that, there’s “Human detection” which is something other than motion detection, though I suspect it’s just ‘tall’ motion. This has the same sensitivity selections as the prior setting. Below this, there are sound detection, with the same settings, and siren duration, with off, 30, 60, 90, and 120 second options.

Backing up again, we see an option for Storage. This lets you view previous recordings. I’ve no idea whether videos, images and audio are stored locally on the device, or in a cloud, though it would seem like it would have to be cloud based, and that kind of bothers me since I can’t keep it turned off. The terms of service note that in the event of an alert, their staff will monitor all video until the alert is cancelled, I think by law enforcement. Which means that potentially, some staffer is going to go looking through every video of your kid running through the house nekkid before bath time, every video of you behaving as if you were in private. I wouldn’t mind that they keep the live feed on when an alert goes through until law enforcement tells them turn it off – and how would they know to do that? But I don’t like that they can go through all the old video as well. Or that I can’t turn it off. I guess if you want privacy, you shouldn’t have a camera in your home.

TLDR: The camera takes nice night vision video, but the app renders day video unusable, and the ability to disable /turn things off during certain time of day is buried in settings. And that doesn’t stay set very well. Opening the app starts the camera recording again.