Energizer Smart Doorbell & Chime, Wired 1080p Video Doorbell Security Camera, 2-Way Audio, Night Vision, Cloud & Card Storage, Works with Alexa & Google Home, Motion Sensor, Requires Existing Wires

Not Perfect, but Good Value and Works
Decided to buy a doorbell camera since Amazon never rings the doorbell on deliveries and we wanted to combat porch piracy. We chose the Energizer camera because we didn’t want a doorbell that required a monthly subscription or batteries that needed to be recharged. We mostly just want to know when someone drops a package on the porch.Installation was fairly easy. The camera and angle adapter easily replaced the existing doorbell button. There is also another small, self-adhesive box (1.5 inch x 1 inch x .5 inch) that mounts inside the doorbell chime, so make sure you have room inside the doorbell cover for it. The doorbell connects to your 802.11n (2.4 GHz only) WiFi and communicates with an Energizer Connect app on your phone or tablet (iOS or Android). Video with audio can be saved by installing a MicroSD memory card in the doorbell device or by paying a monthly fee to have it stored online.I installed the Android app on both my phone and a tablet. The app works OK, but is a little buggy and usability is typical of low-budget software development. I don’t recall the exact pairing process, but I followed the instructions at the time and don’t recall having any issues. If memory serves, I think I had to hold the phone up to the doorbell camera so it could see a QR code or similar to complete the communications connection. Once connected, you can view the live camera video, turn on/off the speaker and microphone, and view recordings as well as save images and recordings to your device. In the settings, you can set up either full-time recording or motion detection recording and notifications. The motion detection settings includes the ability to define a rectangular area within the camera’s view where it should try to detect motion (activity/surveillance area setting). For my setup, I have the activity area limited to the bottom 1/3 of the image and it is set to only record when it detects motion.After a couple months worth of use, here are some notes about it. The app does not support screen orientation well, it is always in portrait mode except when you expand the video display and it flips to landscape mode only. Video playback only has controls to select the video segment, a time slider, and a pause/play button…no fast-forward or rewind. The time slider is low-resolution so it is not effective as a fast-forward or rewind of less than 10 minutes or so. Setting the activity area on the tablet would not let me select an area of less than about 2/3 of the total image, while on the phone I could select a much smaller area…but it would not show me the camera picture…just a black box…which made setting the area a “challenge” where I had to set it with the phone and then check the coverage using the tablet. Since the activity area is rectangular, I cannot set it to completely exclude the street in front of my house (see picture) so this results in some false-positive notifications when cars drive by (a bit annoying when a neighbor comes home late at night…so I typically turn off notifications at night). At night, car headlights can overload/wash-out the image if pointed at the camera. The IR night vision seems to work OK, range is a bit limited…but in my suburban neighborhood there is typically enough light in the street that it doesn’t switch to night-vision very often. I don’t tend to use it, but the microphone and speaker did seem to work fine when tested…but you have to unmute the speaker and enable the microphone as two separate operations (a bit cumbersome – would be better if they had a single “communicate” button). On a windy day, the shadow of the bare tree branches in my yard caused numerous false-positives to the point I turned off the notifications for the rest of the day. On a couple of occasions I had some temporary glitches where the app would not connect to the camera for several minutes…not sure if it was my camera or router (typically, the signal strength display shows between 75 and 95%). Application navigation on the phone and tablet is a bit cumbersome at times, requiring more clicks or tricks to work around poor interface design. The doorbell has a slight delay (~1 second) between the doorbell button push and the ring of the doorbell inside. It is kinda cool to see your front door view when you are not home.Much of the above is rather nit-picky in nature, and overall we are happy with the performance of the camera. For a $50 doorbell camera and a $20 memory card, it more than serves our needs and is better than $70 plus $3/month for a Ring doorbell. If I had to pick things to improve it would be better support for Android tablets and a the ability to set the activity area using a more irregular shape (a 4 or 5 point polygon like a trapezoid shape would greatly improve the option).

Not worth it
Very impressed by the quality and price point. Enjoy it even more knowing it does not require any subscription or fees! Took less than 20 mins to install and no issues connecting with the app.Update: 3 week review update. it’s not worth it. The auto night mode sensor won’t switch back to day time. Tried resetting it and still same issue. Got a replacement one and the camera on the new one is such low quality and shows everything in pink…

This is a replacement door bell, the previous one didn’t like the heat and stopped working.

The picture is dark making facial recognition very poor. Surveillance area setting too broad causing too many motion alerts.Biggest problem is that the mechanical chime function failed after several weeks. Don’t know that someone is at the door unless your cell phone is on and the Energizer app is running.The most unfortunate thing is that it failed 4 days after the return date window closed. I am now stuck with a piece of junk that I can’t return.Definitely, do not buy this.

The installation is a little bit tricky if you will not read properly or understand. Installing the apps and using 2.4G network is a bit of a challenge but once installed, it works perfect and the night vision is awesome. It is so clear. I did not activate the motion as it will continuously send messages.