Mi Home Security Camera
The Mi Home Security Camera comes on the market of surveillance cameras with a very aggressive tariff positioning and a formidable technical sheet. A new playground for the King of the Middle Kingdom?
Positive Points
- Motorized head
- Good image quality in good light conditions
- Interesting functions available in the application
- MicroSD slot and possible configuration on NAS
Negative points
- No power supply unit supplied with the camera
- The head does not rotate automatically
- Poor quality of the speakers
- Weakness of the microphone
Xiaomi ip camera
As everyone knows, alongside the smartphones that have made the reputation of Xiaomi include vacuum-brooms and robots, connected bulbs and recently, surveillance cameras. The Xiaomi mi Home Security 360° 1080p camera is a strong force in the surveillance camera sector since it is offered at only 45$ and, at this price, the builder hits hard: sensor to film in 1080p, swivel head to 360°, microSD slot, microphone, speaker, night vision, all controllable from an application that is full of options.
Xiaomi ip camera 1080p review
Of a most common design, the Mi Home Security Camera 360° looks a lot like the Logi Circle (first name) and recalls the webcams of the time. Fully covered with a matte white plastic, it does not really hide its game and fully assumes a surveillance camera. Xiaomi offers the choice of installation: if it is possible to place the camera on a flat surface, the manufacturer has also provided in the box all the necessary to fix it on the wall.
Inseparable from the base on which it is installed, this small ball sees its motorized lens rotate horizontally 360 ° and to a lesser extent vertically. We therefore recommend that you install it in the center of a room rather than against a wall to take full advantage of this feature. Connected to a rather long power cable (2 meters), the Mi Home Security Camera 360° offers a certain flexibility of installation.
Fully connected in Wi-Fi, this camera does not include an Ethernet port. After connecting the camera to an electrical outlet (mains unit not supplied), open the dedicated application - Mi Home - which guides the user step-by-step in the installation process. Then simply scan the QR Code to synchronize the camera with the smartphone and enter the Wi-Fi key. All in all, the configuration takes less than 5 minutes, even for the most refractory to new technologies.
Unlike the Logi Circle, this camera does not have a battery backup, which would at least have allowed it to move from room to room without having to turn it off and wait for it to reconnect. However, it is wisely equipped to accommodate a microSD card up to 64 GB.
Mi Home Security Camera 360°
The home page of the Mi Home application lists all connected devices of the manufacturer. To access the features of a device, simply select it. In the same way as we observed with the Yi Home Camera, we found no latency between the live scene and streaming live streaming as we can see on the app screen .
From the home screen of the camera therefore, the user can activate the microphone, photograph the scene, start a recording manually or choose the quality of the image (HD, Smooth, Automatic). The directional cross underneath controls the camera's swivel head at the convenience of the user. Note that unlike the Bosch Camera 360°, which automatically tracks its subject while in the field, the Xiaomi camera is unable to track the movement of the individual in his field of vision. Too bad.
In order to benefit from optimal monitoring, it is necessary to activate the monitoring assistant by selecting the monitoring period (during 24 hours, during working hours, at night, etc.), the level of sensitivity of the alerts. or the frequency of alerts.
Unlike the vast majority of surveillance cameras, the sequences recorded at each motion detection are not hosted on a cloud. It will necessarily add a microSD card or configure a NAS to access its videos. This should delight many users in hosting their data on Chinese servers. By default, the Xiaomi camera records one-minute video clips continuously every minute. These fade as the SD card to accommodate new sequences.
The camera settings allow certain welcome functions such as the sleep mode (which allows you to avoid drowning in a stream of notifications), the recording parameters of the camera (continuously or when motion is detected), the parameters display (correct distortion or recalibrate the image, etc.), but also Automation. This last tab makes it possible to create scenarios by making the Xiaomi devices interact with each other. Thus, one could imagine that when the camera detects an individual, the connected bulbs of the manufacturer light up in red; a kind of IFTTT.
Xiaomi ip camera 360
The image quality is quite impressive for a camera positioned on the entry level. The Full HD sensor coupled with a 16x zoom proves its effectiveness, especially during the day. Indeed, in good light conditions, the image is clear, fluid, the dynamics is good and the colors remain fairly faithful to reality. The overall rendering displays a good brightness, very appreciable.
Infrared mode turns on below 3 lux. The night vision is a little disappointing. In front of our test scene, we deplore the loss of some details and the presence of a well-marked pixelation that complicate the reading of the image. Faced with a subject, the rendering is still less catastrophic and the infrared lamp does its job well since it is able to detect a silhouette 8 meters away when the faces are easily identifiable at a range of 2 meters. Some cameras do a little better on this terrain, like the Arlo Baby who can identify a face at a distance of 3.5 m. Finally, note that the switch day / night sensor is done in only 3 seconds, which is very fast.
We can not say that the Xiaomi mi Home Security 360 Camera regales us on the side of the audio, that it is for the capture or for the sound reproduction. The captured signal is not clean and clearly lacks power. We must openly increase the volume of listening to perceive what is happening. A noise of parasitic breath and covers a large part of the discrete sounds, but we can still distinguish the metallic noises (small shock with an object, for example) and footsteps on some surfaces (tiling in particular). The sound rendering, totally devoid of treble and therefore very suffocated, does not do justice to the voices. They also have a muffled and muffled appearance. Their intelligibility is not always guaranteed. The person must be really close and in a quiet environment to understand what she is saying.
The performance of the built-in speaker is even less glorious. This one is not powerful and saturates permanently. Add to this a very focused reproduction on the mediums (very nasal sound) and you get a voice extremely difficult to understand when it comes to communication.
The Mi Home Security Camera is quite amazing in terms of power consumption and consumes only 0.040 kWh per day, representing approximately an annual cost of 2.20 €. To date, the most energy-consuming in our comparison is the Netatmo Welcome whose annual electricity cost is around € 6.50 - almost triple.
Conclusion
The Xiaomi mi Home Security 360° 1080p Camera enjoys a very good price / performance ratio. Its installation and its configuration are very simple, the application gives access to many interesting options, the storage of sequences is done locally and, to not spoil anything, the image quality is at the rendezvous (especially in good conditions luminous). One may regret the absence of mains power or that the motorized pivoting head does not automatically track the individual in his field, but the biggest problem lies in the poor performance provided by the microphone and the speaker.
Xiaomi Wireless IP Home Security Camera
