TP-Link Tapo Smart Video Doorbell Camera with Chime, Battery or Wired, 2K QHD Color Night Vison, No Monthly Fee, 180° Ultra-Wide Head-to-Toe View, Ring Call, Free AI Detection, Local Storage (D225)

Fantastic camera with no required monthly fees! 24/7 recording option too!
I have been waiting on a better doorbell camera option and this camera has met my needs quite well so far. This camera replaces my Arlo doorbell cameras, and before that I had Ring. This, for me, is beating them both quite easily. I bought this the same day it was released with my own money. This is not a sponsored review, I’m just a happy customer sharing my thoughts so far.As background I had 5 Arlo cameras, two doorbells and three cameras just a week ago. Before that I was a Ring user. Ring would be my choice over Arlo, and Tapo over them both.I was able to get this camera installed quite easily, and I absolutely loved that the camera came with a 15 degree angle wedge to point away from the wall, and there is a second wedge included to angle the camera down if needed too. Very nice to have them included, and they worked well. I was for some reason confused on how to reverse the angle wedge as there is only one way for it to mount to the plate and lock in. After looking I found you just press the mounting plate out with a finger and reverse it on the wedge and you’re all set. Guess the manual might have helped me there, but who reads manuals? Apparently me and I’d not be feeling dumb! Included photos to show what I mean for others that might find manuals optional.It comes with mounting tape to just stick on if you’d prefer, screws, a separate doorbell chime I forgot to put on my photos, and everything you’d need. Super complete kit and other than my wedge mounting plate thing I had it setup and working in 5-6 minutes. I had the Tapo app for a couple light bulbs and a smart plug already, so I just clicked the plus in the upper right to add a device and it was super easy. No issues of any kind during setup. Very smooth setup, anyone can get through this easily as it guides you perfectly through the process.After setting up the camera it will then next walk you through connecting the included chime. Also worked fine, no issues. Neat features on the chime are selectable chime tones just by pressing a button on the side of the chime. You can also adjust the chime volume right on the chime. Easy, nothing in the app needed at all to adjust the chime how you want. Plenty loud, first time pressing to change the chime tone succeeded in scaring my cats to death and cause them to seek the security of under the bed so it does work well.Once done I screwed it to my door and I was I business. See a photo I included of the rear of the doorbell, the buttons are a sync/reset button on the left, power button on the right, the middle one is a tamper button. If someone pulls the doorbell off it detects the removal and will alarm. That can be disabled in the app if you want I saw.See photos of my actual images after install, one during the day and one at night. It will do color at night but my door walkway is quite dark with zero light and I opted for infrared as it’s clearer for my area. If someone is detected it will turn on the built in LED spotlight and switch to color mode which works well when a person is there to as the light hits the person lighting up the image better, not quite enough light for full color all the time in my area. I’d need to keep a porch light on I think to make me happy, but infrared is fine. Extremely happy with the image. My only desire would be for them to add HDR to the daytime images. Would make it better in the bright areas at the end of my images I think. 20fps recording day and night!App performance and notifications work amazingly fast. I’m coming from Arlo whose notifications took forever for me. It was so slow to alert on my phone as to be useless. Delivery driver would be driving off before I got the first alert someone came. Sometimes they were totally gone, I would think no one even came but there would be a package sitting there. Gee thanks. This Tapo camera is not slow at all, 3-5 seconds to get an alert in my testing on an old iPhone. (EDIT – This was when on battery power, once hardwired it a virtually instant. Absolutely crazy fast, under a second to pull up live view in the app too!) Subscription is completely optional, you get cloud backups of your videos, and a snapshot in your notifications and not just text. That’s it. Snapshot was critical for me on my Arlo and Ring devices, with this it’s so fast to open and show video I feel I have no need for the subscription at all. That’s a major win for this product. Great AI with people, pet and package detection working well so far in my use, all included and no subscription needed for those features either. You can set separate detection zones for each of the AI detection types, I used the same for all. My detection zone gets the street you can see at the end of my entryway, but I have vehicle detection turned off and have not had a single false alert, or a single person missed on my entryway since installing.I liked this camera so well I purchased another Tapo camera for my back door and the end of my first day of testing. It’s not perfect as I’m sure none are, but this is perfect for me.Cons: It is large. Biggest doorbell cam I’ve ever seen personally. Do not like the black face, would prefer all white to blend in with my door frame better and to keep cooler in the sun. HDR should be added to the camera, seems they could add this in a firmware update easily and I hope they do. They could also include a tiny screwdriver to use on the tiny screws to attach mounting plate to the wedges. They are super small, I had a tiny screwdriver handy so no big deal but I could see some not having one around.All minor quibbles. I can happily recommend this as it is currently. Much better for me than the many others I’ve tried, I hope it works well for you too! I will update again as I use it more and find more things out about it.EDIT – I enabled 24/7 recording now, after hard wiring the camera. You can view the timeline and see recording from anytime you choose. Hard wire is the only way to enable this for obvious battery life reasons, but it works fantastic. Hard wire also causes the camera to catch 10 seconds before the alert was triggered automatically too, so you miss nothing from the event. No fees, 24/7 recording and an AI that has been 100% accurate so far in testing and has filtered out all the cars and such driving by my image? This is surprisingly fantastic even to me as a user, no qualms recommending this to others at all! Hard wire recommended if you can, great when on battery, but even better wired. I bought a $10 power cord from Amazon to power it and plugged it into the porch outlet and hid the wiring.

Great video doorbell. But then again, are you surprised? It is TP-Link, after all.
I’ll write more below, but here’s the bottom line: Yes, you should buy this doorbell. It absolutely beats the competitors in this area, including the one made by the company whose shopping platform you’re using right now (rhymes with “Sing”). I can’t say I’m surprised this doorbell is so good, though. TP-Link clearly thinks carefully about its products and works hard to put out high-quality stuff (I have several other items from TP-Link, and I’ve always been pleased at how reliable and high-quality their stuff is).Additional details:-Price point is excellent. Extremely fair.-Set up and installation are a breeze and connectivity is great.-Motion detection is great, and you can configure sensitivity and areas for detection. It also supports person detection, vehicle detection, and animal detection (each of which can be further configured with the same options, either as a group so everything has the same settings or independent from one another). I’ve not tested the vehicle or animal detection, but the person detection is quite good. And if you’re getting false positives, you can give the doorbell feedback and it will improve. You can also, of course, tweak the sensitivity of detection. But it’s nice to see TP-Link include the option to help train the doorbell. The training occurs locally, for your doorbell only (i.e., it doesn’t mean your images will then be sent to the cloud or their servers and used to train their algorithms centrally; they respect your privacy).-You can opt in to their subscription service if you want cloud recording, but I specifically sought out doorbell cameras that permitted local storage only (which is what I favor). Even with local storage, the doorbell is very responsive.-Video quality is excellent. The camera also has an “auto” feature when live streaming to give the highest resolution that makes sense for your connection speed and strength at the time of viewing.-Audio quality is similarly great. It also supports different modes of talking through the doorbell. One works sort of like a walkie-talkie, and one works more like a video call. Answering doorbell rings works like a video call. But you can sneak a peek at who is at your doorbell before “officially” answering (it’ll turn audio and video on on the doorbell, but keep your mic muted so they won’t know you’re screening who’s at your door).-Battery life is good. I’ve seen some complaints about battery life, but I suspect this comes from people not fully charging their doorbell or using it all the time. There’s no such thing as infinite battery!Bottom line: If you buy this, I’m confident you’ll wonder why you didn’t make the move sooner. Say goodbye to whatever competitor version you might have and come on in, the water’s just fine. Or, if this is your first foray into smart doorbells, you’re in for a treat with this as your introduction.

Bueno

Order came through quickly and without incidentGreat doorbell