My favorite security camera is $170 during Amazon’s Black Friday sale

What are Black Friday deals?

The Ufi Security Floodlight Cam E340 My favorite security camera in my home and it’s down to $170, thanks to Amazon’s Black Friday sale.

Why this deal is ZDNET-recommended

“Is it a man?” No, Euphy, that lawn chair on the deck is not a person, as I’ve told you ten times today. All right; We both know you’ll ask again in two minutes.

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The Floodlight Cam E340 From Ufi Security, which I’ve been testing for the past week, it’s one of four new security cameras the company has launched recently. It’s equipped with an ultrawide and telephoto lens to capture more distant subjects, and the camera works really hard. Sometimes very difficult. Let me elaborate.

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Ufi Security Floodlight Cam E340

The Eufy Security Floodlight Cam E340 is the latest from Eufy’s line of dual cameras. It has two floodlights for a total brightness of 2000 lumens, movement tracks and records in 3K resolution, all with no monthly fee.

First, some housekeeping: The Eufy Security Floodlight Cam E340’s wide-angle camera captures 3K-resolution video, while the telephoto camera records up to 2K resolution and can capture detail up to 50 feet.

To test the Eufy Floodlight Camera E340, I replaced one of my backyard floodlights, which was already in an ideal location for surveillance. My husband and I turn on these lights whenever we take the dog out at night or whenever we hang out on the side of the yard where the grill is. The lights got a lot of use, and replacing them with a floodlight camera was a no-brainer.

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We had a set up before Wise Cam And then Arlo Pro 5S On the larger side of the yard, but, until the Eufy Floodlight E340 came along, we couldn’t find a solution that covered the entire space.

Setting up the Floodlight Camera E340 was as easy as replacing an outdoor lighting fixture, especially since we were installing it with existing wiring. This camera requires a wired installation to work, so if you don’t have existing wiring where you want to put the floodlight, you’ll need to run electrical wires to that location.

Once the camera is installed, the rest of the installation process runs through the Ufi Security app. We already have one Ufi Homebase 3 Home, which is the local storage and hub for this camera, but if this is your first Ufi camera, you’ll need to buy one to work with Floodlight.

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Because it’s connected to power and can be set up with expandable storage, it’s possible for this floodlight camera to record 24/7, although you can also choose to record only events. Recordings can be stored up to 128GB on the Homebase S380 or a microSD card. With Homebase, you can expand SSD support up to 16TB, which makes a big difference.

By far, the most impressive features of this camera are the coverage and image quality. Our yard stretches all the way into the woods, which can be pitch black at night. But even with my camera on the second floor and more than 30 feet from the fence, you can still clearly see detail in wooded areas, no matter what time of day it is.

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Day or night, I can see if a squirrel is hopping along a fence or a deer is walking through the woods, and I expect the same level of detail if there’s ever an intruder in the distance. The camera tracks movement very well, keeping subjects in frame as they move around different areas, which is essential for a large yard.

One downside of the Floodlight Cam E340, which I mentioned earlier, is that it gets a lot of false alerts for human detection. HomeBase 3 not only uses AI to recognize people but also learns to recognize people and recognize vehicles, pets and other moving objects.

The Floodlight Cam E340 unit I tested falsely detected a human on our deck every two minutes when no one was there; Wonder if you believe in ghosts! The extra amount of caution has been enough for me to see a noticeable drop in battery life on both my iPhone and Apple Watch. And I’m sure my elderly neighbors don’t appreciate the human detection alarm at 7:15am on a Saturday morning.

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My husband, ever the optimist, believes this is not a problem; You just need to train the system to recognize what a “person” is. I believe that should be a better solution than waiting for the camera to fix itself.

How I deal with the problem is to report misidentifications through the Eufy security app, which we sometimes do to discourage the camera from figuring out what’s human. More effectively, I’ve since reduced the sensitivity of the motion detection feature, which now gives about one false alert every hour versus every two minutes. It made a big difference.

There is also an option to temporarily silence notifications while recording events, but this detracts from the purpose of the surveillance camera.

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This doesn’t seem to be an issue with the Homebase as it’s the only camera of all our Ufi products at home that does this. The good thing is that this can be fixed with an over-the-air firmware update and it’s not a dealbreaker for me. It’s not very pleasant, but it’s nothing a few adjustments can’t fix.

ZDNET’s buying advice

My experience with Ufi Security Floodlight Cam E340 Overall has been positive. I love seeing my yards in 3K resolution and getting an awe-inspiring level of detail from so far away. The 2,000lm brightness alone rivals some of the best-selling PAR38 bulbs and can be set on a schedule or automatically to ambient light from dusk to dawn.

For $170 during Amazon’s Black Friday sale, you get a lot of bang for your buck with a system that you’ll never have to pay monthly fees for, charge, or replace batteries. And it includes a motion-tracking duo of high-resolution cameras. If you don’t want to spend extra on the HomeBase S380, you can add up to 128GB of in-camera storage on a microSD card.

If Eufy Security can solve my one problem with people detection alerts, the Floodlight Cam E340 will be the best outdoor security camera I’ve tested, bar none.