The IT Nerd

I’ve been looking to get a pair of HomeKit compatible cameras because long time readers of this blog will know I’ve been robbed in the past. And HomeKit compatibility is important as my wife and I are on Team iOS. So seeing as I review products, I decided to do a two part shootout. Today I will be reviewing the eufy Indoor Cam 2K. Tomorrow, I will review the Eve Cam. But first let’s look at the eufy Indoor Cam 2K.

You can mount this to the wall or ceiling with the included hardware:

It’s got a microSD slot as it has the capability to store video locally.

On the back is a reset button and a Micro USB connection for power.

So, I’ll get this out of the way up front. This the cheapest HomeKit compatible camera that I have come across as I found it on Amazon for $60 CDN. You get some other features as part of the deal:

• 2K HD resolution (though you only get HD resolution if you are using HomeKit)
• Two-way audio
• Local storage via a microSD card (max 128gb and it doesn’t work with HomeKit)
• 2.4ghz Wi-Fi
• Night vision
• 125° field of vision
• HomeKit Secure Video support
• Alexa and the Google Assistant support

The eufy Indoor Cam 2K are somewhat easy to set up:

• Place the camera in the desired location
• Plug it in
• Follow a few steps in the eufy Security app which includes scanning a QR code
• If you want to add it to HomeKit, follow the prompts to do that. At this point I should mention that there’s no way to directly add these cameras to HomeKit. You are forced to use the eufy Security app. More on why this is bad in a minute.

It took about 5 minutes to set the camera up. After that, you can use the Home app to monitor the camera. The eufy Indoor Cam 2K’s image quality goes above and beyond its price tag with crisp detailed visuals. And that was true even at night. The 125-degree field of view isn’t ultra-wide like some of its competitors, but it works fine as you have a wide field of vision. Audio was equally impressive, with the microphone and speaker combination making a conversation through it feasible, with voices coming through loud and clear, and with a minimal amount of lag.

Now where I had issues with this camera is having the camera stay online. The camera would drop off my network frequently requiring a power cycle to bring it back online. Sometimes it would only stay online for five minutes or five hours. Sometimes it would come back online by itself. Most of the time it wouldn’t. It was completely random. Doing some searches in places like Reddit and eufy’s own forums I found that this was not an uncommon problem. It appears that Internet connectivity is an issue with these cameras under certain circumstances. For example if you have a mesh router like my Asus ZenWifi mesh router. That’s bad if you are using them for home security purposes.

But the other issue, and perhaps the more important issue with the eufy Indoor Cam 2K is the fact that eufy has issues with privacy. Recently eufy had an issue where users could see other people’s cameras without any effort. The issue was corrected quickly. But it wasn’t the first time something like this has happened. That backed up by the fact that this camera seems to connect to a bunch of eufy controlled servers on Amazon Web Services is a major red flag for me. And you can’t do anything about it on your own because there’s no way to run this camera as a HomeKit only camera which bypasses the infrastructure run by eufy. You instead are forced to use the eufy app alongside the HomeKit app and have the camera connect to both the infrastructure run by eufy and the infrastructure run by Apple. Which means that you’re potentially stuck with a privacy risk in your home in the case of the fact that you are forced to connect to the former. To be fair to Eufy, they say that they will do better going forward. But in my mind, that’s not good enough given the fact that this camera is inside your home and can see anything and everything.

The WiFi issues combined with the privacy issues make the eufy Indoor Cam 2K impossible for me to recommend. Cameras like these need to be rock solid and secure to be useful as a home security device. This camera wasn’t either based on my testing. They also have to ensure your privacy as having an indoor camera could expose you to miscreants that could do anything and everything to you. This camera doesn’t provide that assurance either. All of that makes this camera a hard pass for me. And it should be a hard pass for you as well.

Tomorrow I will review the Eve Cam and let you know if that’s a viable option. Please stay tuned for that.

This entry was posted on May 25, 2021 at 9:00 am and is filed under Products with tags eufy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.