Wyze’s new safety digicam is connected to a lightbulb. The good house firm has devised a genius, if janky-looking, resolution to illuminating your porch or patio with gentle whereas additionally keeping track of potential prowlers. The Wyze Bulb Cam ($49.98) is a motion-activated good gentle and safety digicam that doesn’t require any energy cables or batteries and is powered by a lightweight fixture.
In accordance with Wyze, the specifically designed digicam could be put in immediately right into a appropriate E26 gentle fixture, eliminating the necessity to discover energy retailers close by or mess with photo voltaic panels or recharging batteries to maintain your safety system up and operating.
The corporate can be promoting appropriate Wyze Accessory Bulbs ($16.98). These dimmable, 800-lumen, 3000-kelvin lightbulbs are IP20 rated and may pair with the Bulb Cam by way of Bluetooth to create a motion-activated good lighting system. Each merchandise can be found now at Wyze’s online store.
The Wyze Bulb Cam has the identical lighting specs, and its digicam is motion-activated. It contains a 160-degree subject of view, 2K decision with broad dynamic vary, and shade night time imaginative and prescient. It additionally has two-way audio, works over 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and gives native storage by way of an onboard microSD card (offered individually, as much as 256GB). The machine works with Wyze’s app, and the corporate gives cloud recording beginning at $3 a month, which provides good alerts for issues like folks, packages, and pets.
Wyze says the digicam can be appropriate with Wyze’s new AI-powered options, together with descriptive alerts that summarize movement occasions and its “NBD” Filter that goals to chop down on notifications — however you’ll have to pay for Wyze’s $20 a month Cam Unlimited Pro subscription. The digicam and lights are appropriate with Amazon Alexa, Google House, and IFTTT.
This isn’t Wyze’s first try at leveraging present outside lighting to energy cameras. The corporate sells a lamp socket solution for $17 that may energy a Wyze Cam v3 or v4 and turns any linked bulb into a wise bulb. The Bulb Cam is barely extra elegant because it does away with the wires.
Whereas there are a number of no-name bulb / digicam combos accessible on Amazon, only a few established safety digicam firms provide this resolution. Lorex just lately launched a 2K Wi-Fi Smart Lightbulb Camera, with the digicam embedded within the bulb, which appears to be like rather less odd, but additionally makes for an enormous lightbulb. The Lorex can robotically rotate 360 levels, whereas the Wyze cam can solely be manually adjusted. Lorex’s bulb digicam does value extra, at $70, and doesn’t have the choice of native recording.
The draw back of connecting a safety digicam to an present gentle fixture is that gentle might be managed by a change, so that you’ll face the identical downside good bulbs inside the home have: when somebody turns off the change, the ability to the digicam will probably be minimize, as nicely.
Nonetheless, Wyze’s good bulbs could be activated by movement by way of the digicam or set on timers and to a schedule, so that you shouldn’t have to function them with the change. One other subject you may run into is that plenty of exterior lighting in the present day makes use of embedded LEDs and never a screw-in socket, so verify yours earlier than contemplating a product like this.
