Pros & Cons of the Aqara G4 Video Doorbell: Everything You Need to Know

it's finally here the acara G4 video doorbell this is the first battery powered video doorbell on the market that supports home kit secure video there is a lot to love about this new video doorbell but there are some things that fell short for me in my testing so stick around we'll discuss all the pros and cons and I'm going to try to help you determine if this would be a good addition to your smart home we've got a lot to cover let's go [Music] yo what's up guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here welcome my name is Shane and this channel is all about building an easy apple Home Smart home with new videos published every Sunday and live streams every Wednesday today's video is sponsored by econet they make the Bulldog robot water shutoff valve that I use this thing is awesome so I have automations set up in my house where if any of my home kit water sensors detects a leak including my little acara water sensors that I kind of have everywhere so if any of those detect a leak the Bulldog robot valve will automatically shut off the water to my entire house with no input from me with water damage it's usually not a question of if but when and you want to be able to shut off the water quickly and doing so immediately can save you thousands of dollars in damage it doesn't support home kit natively but the Wi-Fi version can be integrated into homekit via home bridge and the Z-Wave version can be integrated into home kit using something like the thinka or Hub attack Z-Wave even has battery backup options that allow your Bulldog to still work even if the power goes out check out the link below for more on the Bulldog valve robot and big thanks to econet for sponsoring today's video and supporting the channel there are definitely some pros and cons to be aware of to determine if this would be a good fit for your smart home I'll put chapters Below in case you want to skip around any certain parts of the video because like I said there is a lot to cover today and also full disclosure akari did send me this video doorbell for free so that I could test it out and share it with you here on the channel but all the opinions in this video are my own and I'm gonna be straight up with you as always the G4 is now available to purchase internationally starting today for a hundred and nineteen dollars US it's available in a shadow gray and a black color if I'm able to get a discount code for you guys I'll also put that down below in the video description so check that out it supports Apple home Alexa and Google home as usual on this channel we will be focusing more on the Apple home integration today so some specs real quick it does connect to your network via 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi it's weather resistant with the rated operating temperature of 0 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 18 to 50 degrees Celsius operating humidity is rated at 0 to 95 percent relative humidity they do state that it's recommended to install the G4 in a shaded area like a porch or you know a covered porch which is what I've done it can be powered via six double a batteries or hardwired if you have existing doorbell wiring if you hardwire it the batteries can also serve as backup power it has a 162 wide angle lens with 1080p resolution it comes with a 95 decibel chime repeater you can add your own micro SD card up to 512 gigabytes for local storage and they say eventually you'll also be able to back up footage on a Nas If you have one of those that feature should come through a future firmware update you can utilize up to seven days free cloud storage through acara or up to 10 days Cloud recording via home kit secure video If you have a compatible iCloud plus plan the G4 supports facial detection even letting you create automations based on who is at the door which is awesome it has a loitering and a tamper alarm crazy features like voice changing and custom ringtones are supported which we'll get into all that here in a second when you subscribe to iCloud plus you can use Apple's homekit secure video feature to store video from compatible cameras like the acara G4 and iCloud you can view your footage from anywhere and it remains private and secure it's all end-to-end encrypted and you can access your cameras and footage on any of your Apple devices including your iPhone iPads Apple TVs even Apple watch you can add a single camera if you have the 50 gigabyte iCloud plan up to five cameras with the 200 gigabyte plan and unlimited cameras if you have the two terabyte plan and your stored recordings do not count against your allotted iCloud storage homekit secure video supports motion based recording and has person animal vehicle and package detection you can record only certain types of events or you can record all motion you can get notifications that pop up on your Apple TV when someone Rings your doorbell which is awesome that's one of my favorite features and thanks to facial recognition you can also get announcements on your home pods throughout the house telling you who is at the door [Music] it looks like Shane Watley is at the door and you'll even get those uh Rich notifications on all your other Apple devices of course as well so let's see what comes inside the Box the first thing you might notice is that it's a pretty big doorbell especially the width it has a really big doorbell Button as well here's everything in the Box your user manual mounting screws USBC to USB a cable screwdriver mounting bracket doorbell camera and chime repeater and yours should also come with six double a batteries included in the Box mine just didn't because of some international shipping limitations that were in place when a car sent this to me now let's take a closer look at the doorbell again really big lens and button here there is a little security screw right here on the side you can see our speaker is here on the other side now taking a look at the chime repeater we have a slot for our micro SD card here you have your USBC port for power and our home kit code both the doorbell and the chimer repeater have a large sticky pad on the back if you do need to install this without using screws to set it up the first thing you need to do is plug in the chime repeater and open the acara app add a new device and choose the smart video doorbell G4 press and hold the button until the light flashes yellow then scan your home kit code you can then choose the room and change the name if you need to then you have homekit secure video recording options you can choose when the camera streams and Records both for when you are home and away you get four options here either off completely detect activity which means you can still use the camera's motion sensor to trigger automations and stuff like that but nothing will be streamed or recorded you have stream and stream and allow recording choose who can stream and view recordings in your home turn on or off facial recognition for a home kit you can determine if your home pods will play a sound when the doorbell rings as well as your physical doorbell chime and then we're all done with the setup now let's discuss the power options you slide down the cover to access the battery compartment again it takes six double a batteries if you plan to power this thing with batteries or you can use batteries for power backup if you end up hardwiring it they say that the battery should support up to four months of use now that's based on an assumption of 35 device wakeups and one six second event recording per day so if you have a super active front porch for example constantly recording you might not get that full for months so I tested mine for about a month and my battery life was down to about two-thirds battery after almost a month so you know if you plan to use this only on batteries you'll probably want to keep a nice stash of Double A's close by now once I added the batteries the little LED indicator light came on letting me know that it is recording and there you go we've got not only our live feed working but you can see home kit secure video is already recording we've got a couple of Clips already recorded and it did recognize my face again thanks to that home kit facial recognition in the akar app there are three different working mode settings you can choose from you've got normal mode where all functions are available power saving mode where the camera won't be woken up by motion basically it'll only record when someone presses the doorbell so that would be good if you want to save your battery you know if you're running this on batteries then there's the external power supply mode that will automatically be enabled when you hardwire the camera it can be wired to a 12 to 24 volt AC or 8 to 24 volt DC Transformer if you do this of course you'll have constant power and don't have to worry about the batteries dying and again you can use batteries as backup power which is nice in the event of like a power outage or something like that that it's also important to note that some of the features on this camera are only possible or accessible if you have the doorbell hardwired such as 24 7 recording which kind of makes sense I actually have a hardwired doorbell at my home you can see the wires here but again I ignored them at first because I wanted to test this thing out on the battery for a while so I am using the 20 degree wedge bracket that comes with the doorbell screw that in using the top and bottom screws next you'll put the back plate on with two little screws you will pop out that little square in the middle if you are going to hardwire this and need to run the wires through if you do hardwire it you'll just attach the two wires to the two screw terminals on the back super easy to do I will note if you don't have a lot of slack this can be kind of tough but as long as you have enough slack in your wiring it's really easy to do then just slide on the doorbell and screw in the security screw on the side and installation is complete they do say that you need to have your chime repeater powered and located within 5 meters of the doorbell so this is important you do need a good connection between the chime repeater and your doorbell so let's walk through everything you might want to know first the camera quality again it's a 1080p camera which is the highest at home kit currently supports at the time of this recording anyways you get that 162 degree wide angle view in a horizontal orientation the other home kit doorbell cameras that I've used have all provided a vertical orientation so you know that makes this one a little bit different I suppose that could be either a good thing or a bad thing just depending on your setup and your preference the live stream assuming you have a good connection on your phone is usually pretty crisp and clear I think recorded Clips either in the a car app or home kit are not the greatest there's a little pixelation I noticed when exporting or saving Clips here's a side by side of a recording from the akari G4 next to the Logitech Circle view night vision was not bad either I'll show some recorded Clips right here of uh night vision with no lights on on the front porch one thing I did notice is uh that's not really the best in my opinion when it is when it comes to like the dynamic range you can see in some of my Clips I get some pretty dark shadows with pretty bright highlights on the front porch so sometimes those Shadows makes it a little hard to see who's at the door this is not the worst that I've ever seen but it's not the best either the speaker is pretty clear no complaints there you can adjust the volume in the akara app settings I actually have mine turned all the way up to the max it features two-way audio in both the home app and the acara app as a doorbell should of course if you're doing a two-way talk through the a car app though you actually have the ability to disguise your voice which I must admit is pretty fun you can do your original voice one called Uncle which is kind of a deeper voice foreign you have a robot voice testing one two three robot voice and a clown voice so you can definitely have some fun with these now let's go ahead and take a look at the acara app and just cover some of the additional features that we get in here we're going to kind of just run through these you've got your main screen right here with the live feed along the top you can change the resolution setting pop out the camera feed toggle the audio from the camera feed on or off and go full screen below you have some quick actions to take a screenshot of the feed or start a recording both of these will be saved to your albums in the acara app which is like the acara cloud I'll show you that in a second you can start a two-way call to the doorbell and this is where you'll see those voice disguises as we just covered and you can pause the feed underneath the feed you'll see a list of activity when the doorbell was pressed or people are detected tap more for a more detailed view of the activity and you know filters and dates and all that sort of thing now if we tap on playback you'll see here I have my timeline you can pinch and zoom in and out you can kind of see how mine is all blue here so that means that my camera is recording 24 7. now this is important you have to have two things in order to utilize 24 7 recording on this doorbell camera one you have to have your doorbell hardwired this feature is not accessible if you are powering your uh camera through batteries only which like I said kind of makes sense and two you must have a micro SD card the camera does not come with one again you can use a Micro SD card of up to 512 gigabytes and footage will be stored locally on your card and can be recorded 24 7. you can see here if I slide back far enough on the timeline mine was not hardwired at this point so it was not recording 24 7 and only motion events were being recorded once I hardwired it and put in that micro SD card it automatically switched over to that external power supply mode and started recording Around the Clock if you notice on my timeline here's some of these different colored little spots along the timeline you can set Associated event labels for different things which is really cool this is something you can also do with the other acara cameras for example if you have a car products in your house they can be represented here on your camera's timeline so let's say every time my left gate is opened which is just and a car contact sensor you can choose a color and now if that contact sensor on the gate is ever opened it'll show a little yellow spot on my timeline now let's quickly look at the other features and settings tap the three dots in the corner here you'll see more settings including your albums this is where your manual screenshots and recordings are saved this is also where your certain triggered events are stored over here in the push video album you have when someone rang the doorbell face detection you can choose faces and even create new ones this way or you can select those that you've already set up you can see other recordings from your alerts if you have them configured like someone lingering or forced dismantlement and finally there's an automation tab where recordings will be saved if you create any automations that like manually trigger recordings going back under more settings you can see your doorbell signal doorbell settings here you can select that working mode again mine is currently hardwired at this point so that's automatically selected you can turn off the indicator light on the LED around the doorbell will turn red when someone approaches or it starts recording DND mode which is really freaking awesome man I wish I had something like this when my kids were babies you can able this and the doorbell will not ring within the specified time periods or days this would be awesome if you have you know like a dedicated nap time and maybe dogs that go nuts every time the doorbell rings like I used to when my kids were little some more settings here we'll kind of skim through you can look at your SD card storage now I only have a 32 gigabyte micro SD card in mine right now just for testing but you can see how much storage is currently used and how much is available you can change the recording mode again this whole section here will only be available once you insert a Micro SD card into the chime repeater you can Loop recording which means it'll begin overriding older footage when the card is full and you have the option to reformat the card here here's where you can turn on that Force dismantlement alarm when this is on both the doorbell and the chime repeater will sound off a loud alarm if someone tries to remove the doorbell it also begins recording and will send you a push notification on your phone here you can change your ringtones adjust the volume of the indoor chime and even upload your own custom ringtones which is pretty awesome you can turn on a Time Watermark turn on lens correction which makes up for some of that lens Distortion that you'll you know usually get around the edges with the wide angle lens night vision settings and a privacy area that allows you to black out certain sections of the feed if you want to under alert settings you can create those Associated event labels here just like we did a second ago and here are your facial recognition settings you can get push notification vacations and begin recording When faces are seen you can even set a specific detection period of the day for facial recognition also so that's pretty cool you can change the detection frequency and sensitivity just a ton of settings and options here in the app base management is where you can manage your existing stored faces and add more tap on one and you'll see all Associated recordings and if we go back out in the akar app I want to show you real quick let's go do the automations section you can actually create automations that will only be triggered when certain people are detected for example you can play A Different ringtone or a custom sound when a specific person is detected you can send a custom notification basically control any of your Accord devices you know through an automation based on that facial detection this is really cool and still something that you can't do unfortunately in the Apple home app if you're subscribed to my channel and watch my videos in the past you'll probably know that I historically have been a very big fan of acara products and if you're not subscribed by the way go ahead and hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on new smart home videos and live streams every week but I do love a car products been using them like I said for many years and I typically highly recommend them but there are some pros and cons I think to this G4 video doorbell to be aware of if you've watched this whole video up to this point you've seen clearly there is a lot to love first home kit secure video doorbell that can run on batteries it can also be hardwired and use batteries as power backup I love the fact that it can do both the ability to record 24 7 locally to your SD card if you have it hardwired is fantastic installation was pretty easy it's nice that you don't have to mess with your traditional chime box like a lot of other smart doorbells require but there are some things that fell short for me personally and first of all it's that home kit integration just hasn't been been great a number of times the camera would show as no response in the home app which is never good and often I'd get these like notifications constantly from the home app telling me that the camera was offline and then it was online again like a minute later so it seemed like it was losing its connection to Wi-Fi or the network or something but it did work fine in the acara app during these times with no issues there were no connection issues there or with any of my other homekit cameras so that tells me that it's likely a problem with the home kit integration of the camera specifically and not something like my Wi-Fi network or other issues like with my home kit hubs or things like that often a lot of the motion was not recorded and sometimes motion was just missed altogether in homekit here's a clip from the G4 doorbell alongside another camera on the front porch you can see the full clip from the other camera compared to what the G4 recorded both of these were recording via home kit secure video so I have had other doorbell cameras that have also missed recordings in home kit you know just you know be aware of maybe it's an issue with home kit I don't know just something to be aware of the camera seems to be very stable in the a car app I did not have those connection issues in the a car app I also did do a little bit of testing with the Google Nest Hub Max and it seemed to work fine there too so again just seems to be some issues right now with the home kit integration here at least for me and personally I'm not a huge fan of that horizontal orientation of the camera feed I know this here is completely subjective some people actually prefer the horizontal view over the vertical view but for me the angle was less than ideal for my front porch lots of times I wouldn't be able to see the head of someone who was standing right at my front door making it pretty hard to tell who was there I also often couldn't see any packages that were left you know by the front door on the porch which isn't good and let me know what do you think would you prefer a vertical feed or a horizontal feed for your doorbell camera do you think the pros outweigh the cons on this thing I am super happy for sure to have another home kit secure video doorbell for us to purchase uh the price is very reasonable it has more features than any other homekit secure video doorbell by far that I've used and it's the only one that can run on batteries I know I've covered a lot today there was a ton of things to talk about if I missed anything or you have any questions or comments leave them down in the description below and I'll do my best to respond I've got a playlist right over here featuring other videos on homekit secure video cameras if you want to check that out and if you want to support this channel even more consider becoming a channel member and get access to some cool perks like behind the scenes and our members only Discord Community thanks again to equinet for sponsoring today's video use that link below to check out the Bulldog robot water shutoff valve thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Shane Whatley

Views: 87,870

Keywords: homekit, Apple Homekit, smart home, homekit apple, homekit devices, homekit smart home, affordable homekit, affordable homekit devices, home automation, smarthome, Aqara G4, G4 HomeKit, Aqara G4 Doorbell Camera, Aqara G4 camera, Aqara doorbell, aqara doorbell camera, homekit secure video doorbell, homekit secure video battery, homekit battery doorbell, homekit secure video battery doorbell, battery homekit doorbell, homekit battery camera, aqara video doorbell

Id: nDFTvAEPRMs

Length: 22min 49sec (1369 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023