Why You Can Trust CNET Netatmo's outdoor cam distinguishes between people, cars and animals
The Netatmo Presence will monitor specific zones for people, cars, and animals to keep a diligent eye out while minimizing false alarms.
Once installed outside your home, the Netatmo Presence will watch specifically for what you find suspicious while ignoring the commonplace. A connected outdoor cam attached to a floodlight, the Presence knows the difference between people, cars and animals, and lets you create zones within its 100-degree field of view, so you can tell it what to watch for and where to watch for it.
Introduced in Las Vegas during CES 2016, the Netatmo Presence will be available this summer for an undetermined price. It'll work with both iOS and Android, and will have a computer interface as well.
Shop for Netatmo Presence
See all prices
A security camera beneath a flood light.
Via its intricate level of recognition and customization, the Presence will try to strike a balance between keeping you informed and your place secure, while not bombarding you with countless notifications. The combination of customizable zones, and its ability to distinguish between types of moving objects should go a long way toward hitting that mark if both work as promised.
For example, you can tell Netatmo to ignore people and animals on a public sidewalk in front of your house, but you might want to know if a car drives across that sidewalk. Similarly, if anyone comes wandering or loitering closer than the public pavement, you can set Netatmo to send you an alert and start recording.
The Netatmo Presence won't include the face recognition of the company's indoor cam, the Netatmo Welcome, most likely so it can focus on quicker responses to broader categories. The Welcome was certainly an ambitious product -- and it almost succeeded -- but it was slow and took a long time to learn faces. Alongside the launch of the Presence, Netatmo's promised a significant learning speed and response speed improvement on the Welcome, and hopefully the Presence comes out of the gate thusly refined.
You'll supposedly be able to install the fully weatherproofed Presence yourself if you have an existing floodlight. You can just swap that with Presence, hook the cam to your Wi-Fi, and you'll be ready to monitor the exterior of your home. If you don't have an installed floodlight to replace with Presence, Netatmo does recommend that you call an electrician, which hinders its DIY charm somewhat.
Still, with free rolling storage of clips, and the specs of a good security camera to match, the Netatmo Presence could surge ahead of the limited offerings of outdoor connected cams, where really only the Netgear Arlo has stood up to our scrutiny so far.
Here are the specs of Presence
- 1080p resolution
- 100-degree field of view
- 65-foot/20m range of detection
- Pinch-to-zoom functionality
- Infrared night vision
- 8GB included storage (upgradable to 32)
- Wi-Fi enabled
- Fully weatherproofed
- Integrated floodlight
- 4MP CMOS sensor
Find all of CNET's CES 2016 coverage here.