Review: Canary
The second of three cameras that I am reviewing today is the Canary. Here’s what this camera brings to the table:
- A HD quality night-vision camera. More on that in a second.
- Temperature sensor
- Two way audio
- Humidity sensor
- Air quality sensor
- A 90 dB panic siren
- A cool privacy mode. Flip it over and Canary will go to sleep, ceasing all video and audio recording.
Setup was easy. Mostly. I powered on the Canary and entered my Wi-Fi info into the app. It stole that info off my iPhone which was using a 5 GHz network which the Canary didn’t see, thus the setup failed. So I had to switch my phone over to a 2.4 GHz network and it worked. I then plugged Canary into my iPhone using a yellow cable that plugs into the headphone jack. Canary will then “listen” for the Wi-Fi info that I entered into the app. After a few minutes and a firmware update later, I was live.
Let’s start with the camera part. Here’s what you get to see:
It’s a very wide angle lens that allow one to see everything clearly. You won’t have any complaints here. When it comes to the sensors, here are my thoughts. Via the app, you can tap on the home screen’s temperature and humidity readings to access “Homehealth” graphs of the conditions in your home. During my tests, it offered accurate readings of the temperature and humidity. When it comes to air quality, the air quality graph doesn’t distinguish between different toxins. It instead lumps everything together on a graph that charts between “normal” and “very abnormal.” How do I know this? I got one the few smokers that I know to blow smoke towards the Canary to get this result. Having said that, I do believe that this can prove useful for someone who wants to make sure their house is free of carbon monoxide or isn’t on fire.
Another feature of the Canary is that it will get smarter the more you use it. The learning mechanism here is a tagging feature. Pull up a clip from your timeline, and you can tag it to tell the system what triggered it. The idea is that eventually, Canary will start to recognize what’s happening in a specific clip, and whether or not it’s relevant to your security concerns. In theory, that means fewer false alarms the more you use it. Speaking of alarms, you can receive them via push notifications on your smartphone and then you can activate the alarm or watch video live. It also uses the location of the phone to arm and disarm itself. Out of the box, you can store videos for 12 hours for free in the Canary Cloud. If you want to store clips for longer periods of time, Canary has a number of paid plans that may suit your needs.
Canary goes for $249 CDN at your local Best Buy. It’s a very interesting camera that does a whole lot. My feeling is that it will find a market with those who want one device to fully secure their home in every way possible.
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