For a while now that I’m pretty upset about the performance of my Eufy cameras.
While I have decided in one of the properties we are going to replace the whole setup with Tapo cameras, I still wonder if Eufy can work out a way to keep from having to replace the remainder ones.
Our setup’s are mostly overhead cameras, covering a large area (one side of the house) so these won’t see people’s face’s directly, unless they look up. The cameras are either Eufy outdoor cams or Indoor 2K pan & tilt.
Mainly I can relate to the following issues:
- Sensitivity issues
The cameras seem to only be able to detect a person where the face is visible. For pets, they need to be within a certain range for the ‘AI’ to do it’s magic. Anything else is detected as ‘other motion’. The problem with activating the ‘other motion’ tab is that even with sensitivity levels reduced to minimum, we get a ridiculously high level of false alarms:
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- car headlamps,
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- Shadows (when using zones to delimitate areas, the shadows in the main area still activate the trigger. took me a while to figure out this!)
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- Animals
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- Three branches
The list goes on, to the point, the notifications become plain useless (either too much or none). Having animal or human detection then only works in very limited scenarios. Vehicles are also not detected unless ‘other motion’ is activated, so a person coming out of a vehicle (how could you miss that 
) can be missed!
- Corrupt SD card
This one seems to be happening along various of my Eufy cameras. I want to get to a certain time of continuous recording and the camera fails to, sending me to midnight on that day or something similar. I also seem to loose or randomly not be able to access the footage for notifications. This started to happen about 6 months ago across various of my cameras and changing the SD cards doesn’t seem to help.
- Missing notifications
This one is a mix between the camera’s ‘AI’ not detecting certain events (unless ‘all motions is activated’), not being able to access the footage (potentially due to corruption on SD card, or the camera randomly not responding to Wi-Fi) or simply not being able to access the camera for a given time period and not having any notifications when it comes back online (Eufy claims local ‘AI’ - but a few years experience will second the camera does more online that it appears too - or the lack of connectivity results in no notifications)
- Connectivity issues
One of the properties we have is relatively large. We have a distributed WiFi mesh network running on a wired backend. No problems getting Wifi signal on smart plugs, laptop, phone… But with Eufy cameras, we always had random drop outs. We replaced the mesh, tried different (independent) routers, tried special antennas, tried powerline repeaters with Wifi Access points sitting on the outside distribution box, close to the camera) Noting really helped. I seem to have had better success with separate SSID’s for each camera, but it may well be anecdotal, as they can be working fine now and not at all in 2 hours, or vice-versa.
I also noticed that when trying to use RTSP, cameras often go blank… This is internal, with static IP addresses assigned to each camera. In fact, I can reproduce the lack of video on the DVR (or VLC player) with the inability to access the camera via the cloud. We also have one (wired) Hikvision that worked flawlessly, so we initially thought that the WiFi was the problem, but having tested a tapo C325WB for a couple weeks we experienced no such issues with WiFi.
Another strange thing regarding connectivity is that often I can access the live view, but I’m unable to access anything recorded on the SD card. I can see and navigate the footage from continuous recording, but completely unable to see the notifications, as it they were randomly deleted. The yellow markers on the timeline also disappear. This seems to happen, mostly, after we reviewed the original notification, although not always the case (and sometimes reviewing something clears earlier events)
Further - we disable continuous recording - So we expected these notifications would stay on the card forever (32GB card should store MANY 30second clips) - but sure enough - same problem after a few days.
This results in a zero confidence on the product.
We like the eufy and it’s really nice to get a rich image notification from the app as 99% of the cases we can rule out a false alarm without having to open or review the footage, but the product is clearly not fit for purpose and I have enough of these cameras that I can rule out a hardware fault as they all behave similarly.
So would be nice if some Eufy support team member would get in touch to figure out if there is anything that can be done before deciding to retire the remainder of the cameras.
Thank you.