Eufy Video Doorbell Dual Review: Are Two Cameras Really Better?

Speaker 1: It was only a matter of time until somebody thought, why not slap two cameras on that video doorbell? Yes. The UFI video doorbell. Dual has two cameras, plus a bunch of other premium features for 260 bucks, but are those cameras gimmicky or truly game changing? Let's find out Speaker 1: Video doorbells are blowing up right now in the last few months, we've seen some genuinely good wireless devices under a hundred [00:00:30] bucks. And now thanks to UFI. We're also seeing competition on the higher end of the market. Starting to get a little bit Spier too. So let's talk about UFI first. We'll talk a little bit about the spec because the dual has a lot more than just two cameras. Next. We'll give it a vision test. And then finally, we'll see how it actually picks up and notifies you of packages, delivery people and porch pirates. Let's roll Speaker 1: U's video. Doorbell is [00:01:00] high end. This costs 260 bucks, which is more than most smart buzzers on the market. And normally that would give me pause, but for that price, you're getting two cameras and 16 gigabytes of local video storage on this home base, which also acts as a chime add in the premium secondary features like two K resolution four, three aspect ratios alerts, facial recognition, Alexa and Google assisting compatibility. And you've got a pretty solid little gadget here. Now, what I really [00:01:30] do like about that local storage is that you don't have any of those monthly fees. So that means that yes, 260 bucks up front is kind of expensive, but if you use it for a couple of years, you could be paying less overall than some of those devices that you have to pay three or six bucks a month to operate. Speaker 1: Plus if you really want cloud storage, you can get 30 days of rolling storage for only three bucks a month. Now I've got a note here too, that this is battery powered with up to six months of battery life, according to UFI, [00:02:00] but it can also be wired to extend that battery life and use some existing doorbell chimes. A wired only version is releasing soon, but the big scene Steeler here is the second camera, cuz what's better than one camera. Two cameras know this thing. Doesn't give you 3d vision of your front stoop. It gives you a front facing view of the delivery person at your door and a downward angled cam to capture the package they're dropping off now is that second camera strictly necessary. Not really other [00:02:30] video doorbells accomplish the same thing by giving you a one to one aspect ratio and a really wide field of view. Speaker 1: But UFE does avoid the fish eye effect of some of those cameras by simply providing two separate feeds. You can even angle the package cam to their side. If you wanna adjust where it's focused. That second camera is a little less beefy than the front facing one with 10 80 P resolution, a 97 degree field of view and an identical four to three aspect ratio. Okay. This thing seems pretty cool in theory, but let's see how well it [00:03:00] actually works in reality. The first test we wanna run on this is a basic vision test. Now up close, you get a nice sharp image. I can even read that bottom row when I zoom in back up a little bit and the image is still sharp enough for me to read down to line seven, back up farther, and you can get down to line three. Speaker 1: And then at the farthest distances, you're mostly just gonna get fuzz below that top line. One weird thing is in some clips, whether due to lighting conditions or bandwidth issues, we couldn't determine the [00:03:30] image was a lot muddier. That's really disappointing, especially given the local video storage next we'll repeat the test at night up close. We're gonna a nice sharp view all the way down to line 11 now back away 10 feet. And we can see down to line seven again, but Chris is really starting to fade into the night already. I'm curious to see what happens if he steps back any farther. And just as I suspected, he's really fading into the dark. You can make out the top line if you look, but [00:04:00] he's looking mighty ghostly out there and he basically disappears at the last two distances, frankly, all this night vision kind of sucks right up close. Speaker 1: You get a solid image, but as soon as you're farther than 10 feet from the camera, you might as well be invisible. Just out of curiosity. Chris tried creeping up to the camera in the center of the frame no less to see when it, him up and he could get within like 15 feet or so before it registered him. That's not good. It's weird to see such a weak, basic feature on a camera. That's as feature rich [00:04:30] as U visas, but we'll get back to that at the end for now. Let's take a look at how its notifications work. First. Chris is going to approach the door and leave a package without ringing doorbell. A notification pops up and we get a nice full clip of him dropping it off. But it's not in real time. I get it about 10 seconds after the fact. Speaker 1: Let's see if ringing the doorbell speeds things up, okay? Chris rings the doorbell. And by the time the app opens up this time with a live feed, Chris is already long gone. I think [00:05:00] I know it's gonna happen here, but let's say Chris comes back to steal a package. So we open up the app. We get the full clip, but he's already gone. And any ability to activate two way talk and intervene. Isn't gonna happen. Finally. I want to test facial recognition. So Chris comes up and rings the doorbell and the app tells me it's Chris. Only a couple of seconds after the doorbell, not Vic comes up from here. I can activate, two-way talk and chat with him. Now, interestingly, UFI offers some different personalization here, [00:05:30] letting you turn on radar sensing to get earlier notifications and letting you connect the dual to other motion, sensors out in the yard to trigger it recording. Speaker 1: You can also change the settings to make the app send you simpler notification that are marginally faster and to make it so emotion notification brings you straight to the live feed rather than saved clip. When I activated all these settings to aim for the fastest response time possible, it didn't really make a difference. As you can see here overall, it seems like UFI runs into some of the [00:06:00] same latency problems that plague other wireless video doorbells. It takes a few seconds to be able to sense motion notify you, open the app and retrieve the live feet. Those crucial seconds mean that you can't intervene in the case of a porch piracy, as immediately as those advertisements on TV boast, that said, I really like the flexibility in the app. And for most use cases, I actually like the default settings. So I'm not always just catching someone walking away from my porch. Speaker 1: I'm actually getting the full story of what they did when they approached, [00:06:30] even if it's delayed by a few seconds, but let's shift now to the bottom camera. Now, this thing isn't doing as much fancy stuff, doesn't have facial recognition. It has lower resolution, but it does need to be able to recognize packages. So let's find out if it can do that, we'll start simple with a small box check, medium box check, large box. Perfect. All right, easy enough. But let's try boxes. We with different colors or exterior features. [00:07:00] Okay. It gets the apple TV box and it wait, it doesn't get the echo show box. Interesting. Okay. Pizza box check, Walmart box check other random box. Perfect. Okay. So other than that one bright blue who box, which it actually picked up in subsequent tests. It's pretty much a hundred percent on detecting boxes, but can it not detect stuff? Speaker 1: That's not a box fruit platter. Nope. [00:07:30] This log I found no, a decorative Gord, nothing. A pool noodle, no dice. This cute little stuff, dog. No. This little package, the little dog left on the welcome mat. Uh, still nothing. Okay. This bottom camera seems to really know its stuff. Last thing we want to try here is our usual pole test. It's a simple yes or no. Can this thing get ripped off a wall by an ambitious thief kind of test originally? We didn't think that this tough was gonna tell us that [00:08:00] much, but we've kind of discovered recently that a lot of video doorbells are very easy to steal, so let's give it a shot with UFI. Speaker 2: Okay. So what do we think? Is this gonna come right off? Speaker 3: I think so. Oh, Speaker 1: Okay. UFI actually does really well here. Chris keeps trying and he can't budget. Speaker 2: No, I [00:08:30] stand on. Hey. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 4: Excuse me. Can I help you? Speaker 2: Why? Yes you can. Speaker 1: U is offering a great video doorbell. It's expensive, but it's got an included chime and local storage. It's packed with genuinely useful features, lots of personal liability and its two camera approach is simple, but smart. Those really cool features make the garbage night vision. Even more mysterious to me on an otherwise really solid video doorbell. [00:09:00] This is maybe one of the worst night vision tests we've run in recent memory. Add that to notifications that are a little slower than would be ideal, especially on default settings. And what could have been an editor's choice is instead just a solid, smart buzzer. Maybe next time. UFI thanks for watching. If you enjoyed the video, make sure to like and subscribe for more. If you're interested in purchasing the UFI video, doorbell dual, there's a link down below. You can also find a link to a review down there. If you wanna read more about it.