Eufy Dual Camera Doorbell Review

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Whatever physical gaming software or hardware you order online, it is guaranteed that at some point there will be a knock at the door. Now while a majority of courier transactions will happen while somebody is at home, there is always the chance that the courier will leave the package on the doorstep, take a photo and leave. Wouldn’t it be nice to know that a package has been left at your door? Wouldn’t it also be great to have some form of security watching over the package until it is safely collected? Well EUFY has thought very hard and long about this issue and has produced a doorbell security system that houses not just one but two cameras for double protection.

EUFY Dual Camera Doorbell – Always Watching

Whether it is guarding your gaming shed, room or front entrance, doorbell cameras are becoming more common. Do you have a video doorbell, what do you like or not like about it? Leave a comment below!

EUFY Doorbell — Meet EUFY’s 2K dual camera and homebase.

Design

I was sent the EUFY Video Doorbell Dual 2K which is battery-powered. Straight out of the box you find the white EUFY homebase that acts as not only a chime unit but also the main HQ of EUFY’s products. With a built-in 16GB of local storage to capture images and video footage, it can hold around 90 days worth if being triggered around 25 times a day, which I can verify through my extensive testing.

The homebase comes with a power plug and an ethernet cable for connection to your router as well as a handy short USB-C that can be used to charge the doorbell up from the homebase itself.

The IP65 dual camera doorbell comes in black and is a bit of a beast when it comes to size. At 16.5cm tall, 5.3cm wide and 2.8cm deep it is much taller than a Ring video doorbell 2nd gen although almost 1cm narrower. Both are of the same depth. EUFY include both a flat and angled doorbell mount to aid with your installation.

With a doorbell battery that EUFY says will last between 3 and 6 months, in comparison, it is a lot less than Ring which states 6 to 12 months for an “average” use. Now before you start to feel that EUFY clearly doesn’t have efficient batteries, let’s get to the features of the doorbell which will explain where that electricity is being used!

EUFY has seemingly broken the traditional video camera setup of a push button, camera, and 2-way audio by adding in some clever extras. Here we have integrated it into the doorbell dual cameras. There is a primary front-facing 2K camera at 2560 x 1920 with a field of view of 160° and a secondary “package” camera that is angled towards the doorstep that is 1080p (1600 x 1200) and has a field of view of 97°.

The idea of having two cameras is to prevent blind spots. When something is left at your doorstep, it is captured by the package camera and monitored by the AI. Should the package then be moved, the event is both recorded and a notification sent to your phone via the EUFY app. This service is known as Delivery Guard. With HDR visuals, the cameras will always have a crisp clear picture while at night IR comes into play.

With two cameras there is a lot of scope for false alarms therefore there is an advanced system for motion detection built in. A PIR scans for body heat, while a radar scans for movement. After all, the last thing you want is lots of notifications for the neighbour’s cat passing by.

Human detection is another feature whereby you can put a name to a face, this aids notifications by telling you who is approaching the door. This, along with several of the other features can be customised within the EUFY app. Carrying on with the features, there is the fore-mentioned two-way audio that works from your phone app as well as voice assistant compatibility. If you have an existing doorbell chime you can choose to wire your battery doorbell into that if you prefer.

Putting It To The Test

I have had the EUFY dual doorbell for a few months in order to write as accurate a review as I could. The initial installation of the devices was a cinch via the EUFY app that guided you through it all in a simple fashion. I ended up using the angled backplate as I felt that it gave a better view of the garden entrance and doorstep.

Once all was running well, it was down to fine-tuning everything via the app. My homebase is around 6m from the doorbell and behind 2 wooden doors and a stud wall. Quite surprisingly, the wifi signal was very strong. At any time you can hit the play button and see a live view of what’s happening outside. I did find that both the picture quality and audio were very clear. The ways that the cameras appear together on the screen can be altered, although I left them how they were as they looked pretty neat and stacked on top of each other. The black bar across the middle can be a little annoying however I didn’t find that it detracted that much from the views.

First thing in the morning the sun shines straight onto my front door and directly into the camera. I was amazed to see that it could still pick up who was at the door in a quality image. I was expecting severe lighting flares or over-exposure at least. Similarly, at night the quality albeit in black and white was great, offering high-resolution footage of people approaching the door.

When it came to detection I was amazed to see that you could alter the range of how far the motion detection would stretch. This was particularly helpful given that there are cars and people going past each day and my path from the front door is not that long. The device can also self-learn, while activity zones can be set to only record events when in that area of view. There is even a setting to prevent people loitering whereby after a set duration a voice can play a pre-recorded message such as “Can I help you?” You can of course customise this to your heart’s desire.

From the app, you can alter the chime ringtones for the homebase as well as set up routines of when auto-responses can be played to the doorbell. The power manager is very useful to see how many events have been recorded since the last charge. After 42 days I was at 1068 detected events with 156 of them being identified as false ones. 912 were recorded. Now while that seems like a lot, the mistake I made was to not put the doorbell to sleep when my wife was out watering the garden! From postmen and couriers to visitors, everybody was captured.

When it comes to functionality, the motion detection notification was a very handy feature to have. Regardless of whether anyone has pressed the doorbell, you can be made aware that somebody is walking up the path or hanging around. Now while this is all well and good when it comes to security, the proof in the pudding is also in how the doorbell works when actually being used to answer a call.

Now I must say this is where I struggled a little bit. When the doorbell is pressed, your app and other devices such as my Amazon Echo immediately spring to life for me to answer the call. When I answered via the EUFY app on my phone I could see the caller and hear their audio. The problem that I had was there seemed to be an almost 5-second delay in my speech reaching the doorbell. This meant that by the time your line had been delivered, the caller was on the next line and there was a bit of an overlap. A bit like the old long-distance phone calls. At first, I put it down to maybe not having a good mobile network signal however it still did the same when on WiFi at home. Despite resetting the homebase and doorbell, the issue persisted. This did make some conversations tricky.

Final Thoughts

From a security point of view the EUFY Dual Camera Doorbell 2K is great when it comes to blissfully watching what is going on outside your door as well as letting you know. The battery life is great as is the quality of the visuals. Storing the information locally on the homebase ensures that there are no ongoing subscriptions to cloud services. It is a shame that the device seems to let itself down when responding to a doorbell activation. Hopefully, this can be rectified by a software update. The EUFY Dual Camera Doorbell 2K gets a Thumb Culture Silver Award.