A while back I wrote this blog about web cams. It included information about Wyzecam, which is now officially my favorite webcam. In that post, I got the prices wrong (at least I hope I did). That post says 39.99 on Amazon and 29.99 on wyzecam.com. The price was 29.99 on amazon (retail price) and 19.99 on wyzecam.com. That is still the price, but now the camera is better. Wyze came out with version 2 (v2) of their webcam (hence the name of this post) and the tech is better, but the price is the same.
The tech:
So what is better about the technology in version 2, you might ask (I certainly would)? There are several things, but the ones I like the best are that now when there is movement, the camera identifies it for you by drawing a box around the moving object. There are some great videos of the motion tagging, among other things on their homepage (https://www.wyzecam.com/). Another excellent aspect of Wyzecam v2 is it is in 1080p. It is really excellent clarity for a camera that costs 19.99 USD. I liked the v1 so much, I bought 8 of them. I have now purchased 4 of the v2’s for a total of 12 (although we gave 4 of the v1’s away as presents).
Below is a clip from the wyzecam website showing the various different attributes of the WyzeCam v2.
The only downsides to this I have found so far are:
- It needs to be plugged in. Because it needs power, you can’t always put the camera exactly where you want it.
- AFAIK, it can’t be put outside (remember the need for power)
- It is really nice that you can set it to rotate 180 degrees, so that if it is upside down the image is right side up, but I would love it if it could rotate the image in 90 degree imcrements.
- For a reason I have yet to determine, 2 of my cameras were losing connection every few weeks. This is not a big deal, except when it happens and you can’t fix it for at least a week (it happened while I was out of the country).
Which brings me to a couple of things this little camera helped me with. While we were out of the country, we were able to communicate with our pet bird, an amazon grey named Kali, although he didn’t do much talking back. When we returned I was showing someone how the alerts worked and I was treated to the sight of a mouse running across a pipe in my basement! I have since setup 2 more cameras down there. I will see if I can determine where the mouse is getting into the house.
