Tend Secure Lynx Pro review: Tend Secure's Lynx Pro is a decent camera with disappointing facial recognition
Tend Secure's facial-recognition-enabled Lynx Pro security camera struggled to pick up on faces during my testing.
Tend Secure's $150 (£115/AU$205) Lynx Pro is a weatherproof 1080p HD livestreaming security camera with facial recognition capabilities that I ultimately can't recommend to most people.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The good stuff: This camera has a lot of features, including facial recognition, free seven-day event-based cloud video storage, a weatherproof exterior, built-in local storage, battery backup, motion and facial recognition alerts and Alexa and Google Assistant support.
The not-so-good stuff: Its standout feature, facial recognition, didn't work very well. The camera struggled to correctly identify the people I added to my database and would instead label them "unknown." Other times, it didn't even pick up that there was a person walking by the camera and simply labeled it as a regular motion alert.
Take a peek at the chart below to see how the Tend Secure Lynx Pro compares with Wisenet's SmartCam N1:
Comparing facial recognition cameras
Tend Secure Lynx Pro | Wisenet SmartCam N1 | |
Price | $150 | $150 |
Color finish | Black or white | White |
Weatherproof | Yes | No |
Connection type | Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi |
Power source | Adapter, battery backup | Adapter |
Resolution | 1080p HD | 1080p HD |
Livestreaming | Yes | Yes |
Continuous recording | No | Optional with select cloud storage plans |
Cloud storage | Free 7-day event-based video history, optional 30-day event-based video history for $10 per month | Optional, starting at $5 per month for 5 days of event-based video history, $8 per month for 7 days of continuous history and $20 per month for 21 days of continuous history |
Local storage | Yes, built in | Yes, microSD card not included |
Mobile app | Yes | Yes |
Web app | No | Yes |
Night vision | Yes | Yes |
Alerts | Motion, face recognition | Human, face recognition, audio |
Activity zones | No | Yes |
Third-party integration | Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant | Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant |
The Lynx Pro differentiates itself from the SmartCam N1 with its free seven-day event-based video clip storage, built-in local storage and weatherproof casing. At the same time, you're missing out on a web app and activity zones.
But let's talk about facial recognition with the Lynx Pro. Inside the Tend Secure app you create a database of familiar faces. Take a photo of yourself and anyone else you expect to regularly visit your home and add them to your database. I added myself and two colleagues, Chris Monroe and Ry Crist.
While the camera did a great job of sending me prompt notifications, it was very hit-or-miss at correctly identifying us. And, regularly, it didn't even notice a face at all, either one in the database or a new face, and counted it as regular motion alert. The app gives you an opportunity to help the facial recognition feature improve over time by letting you name faces it previously marked as unknown. But even after several days of testing, the Lynx Pro's facial recognition didn't improve and still required my input to identify many of the faces. The Wisenet SmartCam N1 did a much better job of picking up on faces and telling me who it saw.
I was able to get the camera working with Alexa and Google Assistant fairly easily, though. Both voice assistants let you turn the camera notifications on and off, which is a handy feature, as well as check on the status of your camera.
Unfortunately, this camera is simply too expensive for one that struggles so much with facial recognition. That said, if you want the other features -- free video storage, a weatherproof camera and battery backup -- it might still be worth it to you. Just keep in mind that there are better indoor/outdoor cameras out there (without facial recognition) like the Netgear Arlo Pro 2. And, if you don't care about the whole weatherproof thing, consider Tend Secure's own Lynx camera -- it costs just $60 and has the same free cloud storage and better facial recognition performance.