Arlo Pro 3 Spotlight Camera - 2 Camera Security System - Wireless, 2K Video & HDR, Color Night Vision, 2 Way Audio, 160° View, Wire-Free, Works with Alexa, Black - VMS4240B

The 2K video is great - a little contrasty overall but no issues really. Smart motion detection is not a smart as it could be. I filter out vehicles but they still register. I filter out other motion but it still registers. Night vision is not really an improvement over the 1080p camera though it does have higher resolution. the low contrast makes things hard to see. So much improved clarity and resolution, smart motion needs some tweaks and about the same for night vision as before, although in colour.

Setup is a bit clunky and if you want more than 7 days of video (which you would want if you are on vacation, etc.), you have to buy their cloud offering. You can TRY to add storage using USB 2.0, but their own support forums contradict the manual. I tried to attach an SSD drive, but that failed miserably. The call to support was maddening to say the least.

I bought the whole program - The Doorbell, The Floodlight, 2 Cams and the Hub:Doorbell - wired per instructions with the resistor into my existing Broan/Nutone doorbell system with the help of my Magna Cum Laude, Stanford Masters in electrical computer engineering son - we couldn't get it to work. Broan/Nutone chime kept going off. Looked online for advice - no help. Sent it back. Even if it had worked, doubt the utility of it as all the other devices take so long to respond to an alert that the "talk" feature would be useless.Floolight - Hooked to one of their solar panels. Motion detection is fine but amount of light generated is only fair. Solar panel is marginal in terms of keeping up charge - forget running on the battery pack - battery life is horrible. Better solution is to buy a few motion sensing floodlights for 20 bucs and use one of their cameras to record. If I didn't have the floodlight camera installed, I would replace it with a camera and send it back.Hub and Cameras - work fine once they are finally sorted but initially they were very buggy - constantly going offline even though the hub said it was online and the cameras had good wifi connections to the hub. Arlo help was little to know help and by the time they responded after a nasty email, the system had settled down - maybe because they did something on their end. MUST be plugged in - the battery life is awful.App - Just fails and frequently requires reboot as it loses connection to the cameras and hub. I also do not like that I can only mute notifications for up to 24 hours. Got tired of getting an alert every 5 minutes about a moth flying thru.Cost -To run the outdoor cameras, you MUST buy one of their outdoor cables. None of the aftermarket cables work. A ripoff at $50 plus per cable. BTW, their indoor cables work outdoors - save the money.The subscription is a ripoff. I am not going to buy it. Frankly, with the hub, everything gets recorded. You simply can't view it online (Arlo for "pay for our subscription")Frankly, after having it for two months, I would rather not be bothered by all the notifications of moths flying by or a deer in the backyard or an Amazon package delivery. If something bad happens, I can call up the recording on the memory stick on my hub. I really do not need their service or AI (which actually works quite well).The "talk" to people at your door is worthless as there is too much delay. All criminals - even less than smart ones - have that figured out.Bottom Line - If you want a system that is going to record goings on around your house without bugging you, this will do the job if you have the hub and a memory stick. Forget about "real time" - I have Xfinity wth high speed up and down - it still is useless. If you forget to turn on the mute feature every 24 hours, it will drive you nuts (or maybe shut down the app).Would I do it again - probably not given the overall costFollow Up - The Floodlight battery life is awful and the solar panel charger is next to worthless. In summer it barely keeps up and in winter - forget it. I finally turned down the flood intensity and installed two motion sensing spots in a permanent fixture I have near by. They illuminate things far better and are just as sensitive detecting motion. The solar charger still won't keep up.The free Arlo subscription is now expired and I won't buy the paid version. Frankly, the constant notifications from moths flying by, cars on the street and animals are just plain annoying. I started turning off alerts but the app will only let you do that for 24 hours at a time and I got tired of doing it every morning. So I deleted the app from my phone.I have an Arlo hub installed and it was a pain to find a location where all the cameras connected to it - range is at best fair. I also have a USB thumb drive inserted on it. All events are recorded to the thumb drive. Arlo does not let you view those events thru their app unless your phone is on the Arlo network. No big deal as you can view all the events by inserting the thumb drive on your computer - anyway, it is easier to see on a computer than on a phone. As the drive fills up, the oldest events are deleted so you do not have to worry about clearing the memory stick.So if there ever is a real incident at my house, the cameras will see it and the event will be recorded to the thumb drive so I will have a record of it.As far as I am concerned, that is the best use for the system - acting behind the scenes without bugging me while it records events that might be important to have a record of. No subscription required.Would I buy it again - NO

The quality of these cameras is good. Great night time vision quality. You can set up the motion detection to target specific areas of view. It detects animals moving like dogs, cats, etc. and will tell you as much in the alert it sends you. It also does the same for passing vehicles. The battery life depends on how much you have it doing I guess. I purchased an additional battery for each camera and have been switching them out about every 12 days or so. When you purchase the camera you get 90 days to try out their features. Those features include 2K video recording, motion alerts, setting up zones to detect motion, all that jazz. The fee depends on what you want and increases in price based on video quality. To retain the 2k video recording and the alerts, etc., the cheapest plan for a single camera is $3 monthly or $10 monthly for up to 5 cameras. If you forego the subscription then you can still use these cameras with live streaming and video quality is dropped to 1080p from 2k.

If you want to record every leaf movement or bug flying by this is the system for you. I have set motion sensitivity near the lowest level, i.e. 2, and still get minute by minute recordings of leaves moving in the wind and the shadows of leaves moving in the wind. The only relief to constant notifications is to turn the thing off. I have an Arlo Pro 3 and regret this purchase on a daily basis. What a waste of time.Update: If I could remove a star I would. 3 days ago the smartphone app recognized the USB drive in the Base Station and I could see videos in the Library. Now it does not. The desktop app does see the USB drive in Settings and shows it has over 100GB of available storage, but for some reason the desktop app also does not show USB videos in the Library. This "piece of junk" is now costing me considerable time to troubleshoot.