Netatmo welcomes you to the future with its innovative but slow security camera
Kitchen & Household
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Hi, I'm Andrew Gebhart for CNET.
Today I'm taking a look at the Netatmo Welcome.
This is a WiFi connected camera that can recognize your face.
This thing knows Me.
It also moves my face from the away section to the home section and it does that with any profile you've created.
So, your spouse, your children, friends, family, you can create profiles for them all.
And in theory, Netatmo's gonna recognize them and keep track about whether they are home or away.
The away part may be a little bit more foggy.
It knows your home because it sees you.
It knows you're away because it doesn't see you.
You can set how long before it thinks you're gone.
The default, four hours.
In addition to facial recognition, the Netatmo has a fine list of specs.
1080P video resolution, it comes with an eight gigabyte SB card for local storage.
It has a 130 degree field of view and night vision.
It's going to take the camera a little while to get to know you, and while it does, if it doesn't know, it's going to say that, it's not going to guess wrong.
And I actually appreciate that.
I'd rather go in and say, "hey you know that's my daughter." As opposed to, oh, you thought this stranger was my daughter and there was a problem and you didn't let me know about it.
So, it takes the slow, careful approach when it comes to figuring out faces which I really like.
The problem is it takes that slow approach when it comes to everything, including alerts.
The live feed's about ten seconds behind and with the motion alert, by the time I got the push notification, whatever triggered them had long ended.
They're also a little unreliable and the welcome can be kinda slow to pick up faces.
So if you're pointing this camera at your front door like you're supposed to, if someone's just walking in the door and going about their business It might not recognize as a person.
So this is a pretty good camera, with great ideas that are almost there.
It has me charmed, but it falls short in a few pretty important ways.
So for $200 if you're looking for a security camera, Piper nv is a better option.
If you're looking for a web cam the Nest Cam is a better option.
For more be sure to check out my full review on CNET.com for CNET Appliances, I'm Andrew Gebhart.
