BT Smart Home Cam 100 Review

A case of the software not doing the hardware justice

by Greg Hook
Tech Review

2

BT Smart Home Cam 100 Review
MSRP: £99.99

Introduction

Home Security has always been a worry for most people and in the past having a system to monitor your home whilst away has been cost prohibitive for the average Joe. The traditional CCTV systems were expensive, wired and not too flexible either. But all that has changed recently with the release of network enabled home monitoring cameras from multiple manufacturers such as Y-Cam and D-Link offering very easy to setup systems with a whole host of excellent features such as Wi-Fi, motion detection and night vision to name a few.

Hot on the heels of our last home monitoring camera review, the excellent Y-Cam Home Monitor HD Pro, comes an offering from BT. Building on their range of 'Connected Home' products, BT have released their Smart Home Cam 100. This home monitoring camera offers Wi-Fi, HD 720p video recording, motion detection, night vision and works with both iOS and Android devices. Coming in at a very reasonable £99.99, a hefty £50 cheaper than the non Pro version of the Home Monitor system from Y-Cam, it looks a pretty promising product on paper. Read on to see it fares...

Design and Connections

Unlike the white finish with the Y-Cam HomeMonitor systems that in our personal opinion made them stand out far too much, this system from BT has an all black finish with just a silver strip to the bottom of the camera to make it stand out from the crowd. The overall look and design is very similar to many single camera home monitoring devices, a portrait orientated camera attached to a bracket via the usual adjustable ball joint. Nothing really to write home about here in the design stakes, but as we've mentioned before the black finish does mean it will fit better in the surroundings and not be as noticeable.

There are no connections on the camera itself other than the power connection. This camera is purely for wireless access and has no wired access ports at all with the Wi-Fi being 802.11 b/g/n on the 2.4Ghz band. It's a fairly small device weighing in at just 155g and including the bracket measures roughly 150mm high, 70mm wide and 90mm deep. The camera itself has a wide angle lens up to 720p HD, 4 infrared LEDs and a microphone. For the techies out there the camera has a focal length of 3mm, F2.0 using digital focusing and the sensor is 3Mp 1/3-Inch CMOS digital image.

BT Smart Home Cam 100

Setup and Features

Both of our previous reviews of the Y-Cam home monitoring systems found the installation and setup procedure as easy as you could wish for. Our hopes were high that BT have provided similar here and we weren't disappointed. The Smart Home Cam 100 offers a slightly different setup system which can only be done via an iOS or Android app. The installation time was still barely a couple of minutes and there were a few more steps to complete than compared to the Y-Cam systems, but the setup was still very easy to follow and presented no problems at all.

BT Smart Home Cam 100


After you have downloaded the free app you then plug in the camera, flick the switch on the rear of the camera to setup mode and then here comes the interesting part, during the setup the camera broadcasts a dedicated Wi-Fi network. Via your tablet or smart phone you connect to this new Wi-Fi network and then launch the app to complete the setup. The rest of the setup routine is reasonably easy to follow and involves naming the camera, connecting your camera to your Wi-Fi network, creating a BT Smart Home Cam account if you don't already have one, logging in and once you've flicked the switch on the camera out of the setup mode you're good to go.

The software is another great positive we found with our Y-Cam Home Monitor reviews, but unfortunately with this BT system we found it severely lacking. Firstly there's the browser based viewer and settings system, which BT clearly don't want you to find as it is not mentioned anywhere on the box or in the user guide (It's myhomecam.bt.com by the way) and took some rather laborious searching in their help section for this camera to find it mentioned. In the browser the basic options are to view the live image, view a friend's camera if they have shared it with you and access the events (premium service only for events). The settings are pretty basic, allowing you to change the camera name, flip the rotation, alter the night vision mode and adjust the video quality.

BT Smart Home Cam 100


The camera is HD, although a maximum of 720p and then only at 10fps. If you want 30fps you have to lower the quality to just 640x360. Via the settings you can change the resolution, frames per a second and also adjust the image quality via a slider. The camera does have motion detection but the settings are extremely limited and pale in comparison when compared to other systems from D-Link and Y-Cam for example. You can only turn the push notifications to your iOS or Android device on or off and alter the motion trigger size from very small such as a mouse to extra large such as car. Missing are any kind of time and date features for setting up motion detection for nighttime only or on a certain day for example, it is simply on or off regardless of the time of day. Also absent is any zone setup that works so well with the Y-Cam system where you can configure a particular zone of detection and anything outside of this will not trigger the motion detection.

The iOS app, which is an iPhone sized app only, is very similar in the available settings but it does have a couple of very useful features that were even absent on the Y-Cam systems. The available options in the app are identical to the browser based system such as viewing the camera, your friend's camera, seeing any events and the settings for the camera itself. The useful features we mentioned above are the ability to take a snapshot of the current view and a feature that is sorely lacking on the Y-Cam systems, the ability to record the video for as long as you wish (available device storage permitting). It's not only home monitoring for which these systems are usual and wildlife enthusiasts, for example, could definitely benefit from the ability to record the video without having to setup any motion detection first. The photo or video clip is stored on your device and can be downloaded or saved as required.

Premium Service

Now we come to what is probably our major issue with the camera and sadly it overrides every other positive by a long way. The 'Premium' service. Out-of-the-box for free there is no recording of any motion detection, if motion is detected you only get a push notification and you have to quickly log in and manually record the video if needs be. Not something that will be any use if you are asleep or away from a decent Wi-Fi or 3G/4G signal at the time of the detection. The 'Premium' features include automatic recording of videos in the cloud (which are stored for 30 days) following a detection along with a push notification and an email with an attached snapshot. These videos can only be downloaded via the web portal, not onto your mobile device. The web portal is easy to use and the videos can be downloaded very simply but it is rather slow and clunky in operation.

Another troubling point is that this 'Premium' service is currently on a free trial basis and BT have not decided what cost the 'Premium' service will command or even if it will continue at all. Their own website offers no help on the pricing and simply states the charge is per camera, various comments on the net seem to suggest £9.99 per month so if you have multiple cameras that cost will soon add up. It's a shame as it creates a level of uncertainty for anyone looking at purchasing this system. For home monitoring purposes the free features are pointless and it makes the 'Premium' service essential. If that Premium service stays free forever then great, but if BT suddenly want £9.99 per month, you have a product that looks extremely expensive.

BT Smart Home Cam 100

Performance and Testing

AS previously mentioned, the camera is a full colour HD 720p (1280 x 720) resolution using a 3Mp 1/3-Inch CMOS sensor with excellent viewing angles of 78 degrees horizontal, 45 degrees vertical and 90 degrees diagonal. As far as the picture quality is concerned we found it to be excellent, providing the best image we have seen to date albeit with a slightly fish-eye look. Whilst offering the same 720p resolution as the Y-Cam HomeMonitor systems, we found BT's Home Cam 100 offered a much clearer image and greater clarity with a noticeable lack of noise. Detail can clearly be identified, especially faces if the need ever arises.

Superb quality video recording

As for the night vision our experiences were not as favourable. The camera has only 4 infrared LEDs and even with the night vision activated, as you can see in the video below, the image is still very dark and not a patch on the night vision image with the Y-Cam systems for example. The quality of the image with the night vision activated is still as good as the daylight captures (once the light improves), but during the night the image is just too dark and very little detail could be seen during playback. The microphone did a reasonable job, not quite up to the quality of the Y-Cam systems, but it picked up even the quietest of noises.

The camera's Wi-Fi is on the 2.4Ghz band using 802.11 b/g/n. Testing in several different locations throughout our home we found the reception range to be on par with other wireless enabled devices. Even with the camera placed a good distance from the router, which in this particular location our iPad for example was down to 1 bar and barely connecting to the net at all, bar a couple of connection losses the camera maintained connection and we could still view the videos in HD.




Motion Detection and Notification

As we mentioned above, the motion detection system is not only heavily dependent on the Premium service, the lack of options such as configuring the detection to a certain zone or a particular day or time is also a real issue and during our testing we found it to be very hit and miss. In our testing location there is activity all day, but with the detection set to extra small in the settings we had no clips recorded or notifications from about 6.30am to 2.30pm on one day and then after that it suddenly seemed to kick in. Then again another day a 3 1/2 hour gap when there was activity that should have triggered the motion detection but didn't.

The notification system also has real timing issues. Unlike the excellent Y-Cam system which gave an instant notification and an instant email, the Home Cam's notification on our iPad for example was often anywhere from 5-10 minutes after the event and the emails even worse taking roughly 20-30 minutes to arrive. This could mean by the time you actually get the notification or email the damage could be done and the intruders may have already scarpered and should you not subscribe to their 'Premium' service you would probably be too late to manually record a video clip anyway. We also found that quite often it would record barely 5 or 10 seconds even though activity was still going on, so instead of getting say a 5 minute clip of constant activity you would have 20 or more individual clips and multiple notifications too.

Conclusion

Pros

  • Superb quality video
  • Easy to install and setup
  • Apps for both iOS and Android
  • Manual record option available

Cons

  • Poor night vision
  • Useless without the 'Premium' service
  • Uncertain 'Premium' cost and package
  • Time delay with getting notifications and emails
  • No tablet optimised App

BT Smart Home Cam 100 Review

The Smart Home Cam 100 from BT is one of the clearest cases we have seen lately where the software doesn't do the hardware justice. Starting with the hardware we were very impressed with the superb video quality along with a decent microphone and reasonably good Wi-Fi range. The setup and installation is simple to follow and can be up and running in barely 2 or 3 minutes. The camera itself has a good build quality, an all-black finish to better blend in with the surroundings and overall we had no real issues apart from the poor night vision settings that caused a mostly dark image to be recorded.

If you don't subscribe to BT's Premium service, the camera is pretty useless and certainly not worth the £99.99 price tag, with basic generic branded 720p WiFi cameras available for sub £50 for example. With the free service you get no recording of video clips and just a push notification, often 10 minutes after the fact, giving you very little chance of logging in and manually recording a video clip. With the Premium service it does look a lot more promising, but the value is still a concern with no real decision as yet by BT as to what the cost for the Premium service will be and, most troubling, if in fact it will continue to be offered at all. Even with the Premium service you still have no options in setting the motion detection to a particular zone or a specific time or day and the email notification often arrives 20-30 minutes after detection.

There is one excellent feature present here that is absent on many systems including the Y-Cam HomeMonitor, that being the ability to record a video clip as and when you require it. Via the iOS or Android app you can take a snapshot or record a video which is then stored on your device, a great feature but one that sadly only glosses over the rest of the shortcomings of the system. The Smart Home Cam 100 from BT shows a lot of promise with a camera providing excellent quality video, but it's just not there at the moment, especially not at £99.99. If BT can sort out the software side to increase the configuration options, remove the time delay on getting notifications and most importantly provide the 'Premium' services for free, or at the very least make a decision on the cost, then this system could look very favourable. Until then, this particular product misses out on an AVForums award.

Scores

Build Quality

.
.
8

Connectivity

.
.
.
7

Ease of Use

.
9

Video Quality

.
9

Connection Speed

.
9

Value for Money

.
.
.
.
6

Verdict

.
.
.
7
7
AVForumsSCORE
OUT OF
10

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