Netgear Arlo review: The best home-monitoring system money can buy

Here’s a statement I thought I’d never read (or have to write): IP cameras are becoming cool.

Yep, that’s right. Now Google has put its weight behind the security-cam sector with the new Nest Cam, many more people are going to want one in their home. Excited though you may be, before you stump up the £159 asking price for Google’s new product, I recommend you take a look at Netgear’s Arlo system instead.

Why? Because Arlo may well be the smart home-monitoring system the search giant should have launched all along.

What is Arlo? Features and capabilities

Arlo is the successor to the Netgear VueZone system the company released last year. Just like the VueZone – and Google’s forthcoming Nest Cam – Arlo is an easy-to-setup and use home-monitoring system. Its cameras can record motion-triggered video clips to the cloud where they can be viewed at your leisure, and they can also stream live footage direct to your tablet, smartphone or laptop.

In this sense, Arlo is no different from the thousands of other IP cameras on the market. However, Arlo has a killer feature: its cameras are battery powered.

This means you can place the cameras anywhere you like, without having to find a nearby mains socket to power it – or drill holes in your walls to run cables. It also means you can pick up the cameras and move them around whenever you fancy: you can pop a camera on a shelf to monitor baby when you put them to bed; then move it to the kitchen to keep an eye on the cat when you go away. (In fact, Netgear positively encourages this, supplying two magnetic hemispherical mounts per camera.)

The cameras are even weatherproofed (rated to IP65), so there’s no need to purchase a separate case if you want to point a camera at your front door or keep tabs on the comings and goings in your garden.

The downside of this is that you’ll have to replace the batteries fairly regularly. Each camera takes four CR123 batteries, and a set will last you between four and six months, depending on the quality of video you’re recording and how often the camera is triggered.

It’s also worth noting that these figures relate to “recommended settings and typical usage”; point the camera at your fish tank, the cat flap or a busy bird table while leaving motion detection on 24/7 and the batteries will likely run out much sooner.

Still, this isn’t bad for a camera that records video at a resolution of 720p, and the Arlo cameras have a host of other advanced features I’d normally only expect to see on mains-powered IP cameras.

For starters, each camera is equipped with eight infrared LEDs so it can see in the dark to a distance of 4.5m. And each one has a passive infrared sensor (PIR) of the kind used in burglar alarms, so it can capture motion-triggered footage while using very little power.

Setting up the system

With the rise of the Internet of Things and smart-home technology, complicated browser-based setup is fast becoming a thing of the past, and Arlo shows the way forward.

It’s a doddle to set up: find a spare Ethernet socket on your router, connect the base station to it, pair the cameras with it – which takes only seconds – and once you’ve downloaded the Arlo app and set up an account, you’re ready to go.

This is the point at which I’d normally bemoan the fact that the system can’t be used to its fullest without you having to pay a monthly fee. However, another of Arlo’s strengths is that the basic account – which will store video for up to five cameras, for seven days – is free. For the Nest Cam you pay £8 per month for seven days of footage.

If you want to hook up more cameras, or you’d like to keep your recordings for longer than a week, you’ll have to move up to the Premier or Elite subscriptions. Premier costs £6.49 per month (or £64 per year), supports up to ten cameras and stores your cloud recordings for 30 days. Elite supports up to 15 cameras and three base stations, and lets you store clips for 60 days.

The only gap in Arlo’s long list of capabilities, is that there’s currently no way of recording video to local storage. However, Netgear promises that this will soon be resolved via a firmware update, and that Arlo will be able to record to ReadyNAS network storage devices and USB thumbdrives via the USB ports on the rear of the base station.

Using Arlo

It’s certainly a feature-packed system, but what makes Arlo truly useful is the wireless technology that the cameras use to communicate with the base station.

The battery-powered smart-home networking gear I’ve used so far has employed either the Z-Wave or ZigBee low-power wireless-networking standards, but I haven’t been impressed with the range of such equipment.

Instead, Arlo’s cameras and base stations use a low-power variant of the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard, and the range is far more impressive. I had one camera mounted in the garden on a tripod trained on a bird table, and despite the fact that the signal had to travel through a double-glazed patio door, a floor-to-ceiling cupboard and two plasterboard walls to reach the base station, it was able to maintain a reliable enough signal to stream live footage to my phone at work.

The other advantage of using a variant of 802.11n Wi-Fi is the potential for direct compatibility with your wireless router. Indeed, this is precisely what Netgear is promising to deliver to owners of its Nighthawk R7000 router via a firmware update later in the year. This will allow Arlo cameras to connect directly to the router, cutting out the need for a separate base station.

Image quality, software and apps

Image quality is superb, whether in day or night mode. While it will never match the quality you might record on a smartphone – compression artifacts are all too visible on fast-moving areas of footage – faces are identifiable at a few metres distance and the image is well balanced and full of contrast. And because the cameras have a wide, 130-degree field of view, positioning them for a full view of a room is straightforward.

The software used to access the cameras is pretty good, too. You can access settings, motion-triggered clips and live video via iOS and Android apps, or the browser-based Arlo web portal. Whichever you use, the interface is the same, with thumbnails of all your cameras displayed on the homescreen, and your clip library on tabs beneath. It isn’t a difficult UI to get to grips with, and there are plenty of settings to play with.

You can switch motion detection on or off permanently, or to save battery life, set it to only record video clips automatically at set times of the day: when you’re out at work, for instance, or asleep. Plus, by using modes to group rules together it’s possible to set up different schedules for individual and groups of cameras.

The sensitivity of the motion detection can be adjusted, as can the brightness of the footage recorded, and you can ask Arlo to send out email alerts to a list of addresses when this happens. You won’t need to set this up if you have the app installed, though, since it issues its own alerts whenever a clip is automatically recorded.

One thing you don’t get with the Arlo system is zoned, or delimited, motion detection. Since motion is detected via infrared, you can’t tell the camera to look for movement in one specific area of the frame as you can with a traditional, mains-powered IP camera. This may mean the system isn’t suitable for certain applications: point it at your front garden path, for instance, and if you can’t position the camera without taking in the road, it is likely to go off whenever a car drives past.

It would be nice to see some kind of option to record automatically to third-party cloud storage operators, such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Onedrive. I also think Netgear could do with tidying up the Modes and Rules settings, since they’re tricky to understand; it’s a little too easy to get things wrong and mess your motion detection settings up completely. (Click the cog in the video below to set the quality to 720p.)

Verdict

These small annoyances aside, however, there’s a huge amount to like about the Arlo system. Its battery-powered cameras are more versatile than traditional security camera systems, and both image quality and the level of features are excellent.

I particularly like the fact that the cameras come with weather-proofing as standard; this is normally a premium feature. And the basic, free cloud storage recording option is surprisingly generous, at least when compared with the Nest Cam’s offering.

The only big negative is the overall cost of the system, which at £190 for the single camera kit and £280 for the twin-camera package makes it a pricey way of monitoring your home. For the ultimate in remote camera flexibility, however, it’s worth it.