Review: EufyCam 3

The EufyCam 3 is by far the most accomplished camera system from Eufy yet, with a combination of features that will catapult it to the top of many wish lists. Anker’s smart home security brand has always offered local storage and a subscription-free model, but this is its first security camera that can reliably recognize faces and do so without connecting to the cloud. Subscription-averse folks with privacy concerns, this might be the camera you have been waiting for.

The EufyCam 3 delivers crisp and detailed 4K footage, has onboard AI capable of accurately identifying subjects and even faces, and boasts built-in solar panels to keep it fully charged. The Homebase 3 hub allows for local storage, with 16 GB inside and the option to expand up to 16 TB by adding a hard drive. But all this comes at a hefty price. The two-camera kit is $550, while the three-camera kit will cost you a whopping $680.

The headline feature here is facw recognition, so let’s deal with that first. Eufy’s machine-learning AI (called BionicMind) spots and flags faces, and you can tag them in the app. When it recognizes a face, the name pops up in the alert on your phone; when it doesn’t recognize a face, it says a stranger has been detected. You can also add familiar faces manually and help train the system using a photo from your phone’s gallery or by taking a new shot (these need to be passport-style).

With BionicMind, you can quickly distinguish between one of your kids coming home and an unknown visitor. I only bothered to check videos when a stranger was flagged, which really cuts down on false positives and wasted time. But the system takes a while to learn what people look like, and it requires a clear look at their faces to identify them.

If someone is wearing a hat, has their hood up, or passes the camera quickly without looking directly at it, BionicMind often fails to recognize them. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the EufyCam 3 is not the quickest camera to trigger. I often found recordings started with someone halfway through the frame. That said, I’ve only been testing for around a month, and it has grown noticeably more accurate. Now that it has multiple images of my mug, its hit rate at correctly identifying me is improving (from 50 percent or less, to around 80 percent).

Notifications with names attached are reassuring, whether family and friends or other frequent visitors like window cleaners or mail carriers. Face recognition also allows you to filter all videos of a particular subject, making anything you might need to investigate that much easier to find.

Like previous Eufy security cameras, the EufyCam 3 also has people, pet, and vehicle detection. You can define activity zones and tweak the detection sensitivity to suit your chosen spot. I tend to set detection to humans only, and I have had only two false positives in a month of testing (both were a close-up of my cat climbing the fence right next to where the camera is).

These are 4K cameras, and the footage quality is excellent. The video is crisp and detailed, and the 8X zoom enables you to enlarge areas without losing too much clarity. By default, the cameras record in 4K, and the quality adjusts automatically for streaming depending on your connection. (Remember that 4K streaming requires a lot of bandwidth, so this system won’t suit you if your home internet speed is limited.) Speed is also an issue if you try to play back recorded videos away from home with spotty connectivity.

Night vision is a weakness, and the recognition rate drops with the sun. I have one camera set up with a wide view of my backyard, and the night vision works fairly well, but the camera that points down the side path struggles to see more than a few feet at night. You can set motion to trigger the spotlight, which means better-quality color footage, but the range is limited (perhaps 25 feet). The two-way audio works well enough for a short conversation, but you get some distortion from the microphone, especially when it’s windy.

The system was quick and easy to set up. Everything you need is in the box. The HomeBase 3 hub has 16 GB of storage, enough for around three months of video clips. I fitted a 1-TB hard drive that Eufy supplied, and it estimates this is enough for 15 years of clips for the two-camera system. Sadly, there is no option for continuous recording, but you can configure it to record 120-second clips with short gaps between.

While you must plug in the cameras and give them a few hours to fully charge before you mount them, there’s no need to worry about charging them again. Eufy says the integrated solar panels only require a couple of hours of sun a day to keep the cameras topped up. We will see how they deal with deep winter, but through October, both my cameras have remained at 100 percent. Solar charging is a neat addition, and one less thing to worry about.

Since the cameras record to the Homebase 3, it must connect to your router via Ethernet cable. Past hubs have allowed connection via Wi-Fi, and Eufy plans to bring that option to the Homebase 3, but currently, it has to be wired. You will need a spare Ethernet port on your router. Sadly, the new hub is not compatible with all existing Eufy cameras and devices (here’s a list with scheduled estimates for compatibility). If Wi-Fi connectivity for the hub or backward compatibility is important to you, I would hold off on buying this system.

Compared with previous Eufy security cameras, the EufyCam 3 feels slightly faster to load the live stream (though this may be due to the improved Homebase 3). The Android and iOS apps worked well for me, and they are easy to navigate. The only persistent glitch I experienced was a failure to display the number of new unwatched videos under each camera, but the alerts came through correctly. There is support for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and it also seems much improved. It took less than five seconds to load the live stream on my Nest Hub.

As feature-packed and accomplished as the EufyCam 3 is, there are limitations, so it’s not for everyone. Without fast internet (above 100 Mbps), you may find streaming 4K and video playback problematic, and the lack of comprehensive backward compatibility with older Eufy devices or continuous recording is disappointing. If you don’t mind using the cloud and paying a monthly subscription, our favorite outdoor security cameras right now come from Arlo, and they are slightly quicker to respond to motion and offer richer notifications.

But the killer feature here is face recognition, and it's rare to find a camera with this capability on-device without a subscription. It's not perfect, but I'm finding it very useful so far. I'm keen to see how much further it improves over time. The EufyCam 3 is an obvious choice if you prefer local storage, and the built-in solar panel is an undeniably smart touch.