Are you going on vacation in a few days and want to equip your household with a connected camera before your departure? From
many models available on the market, the camera
Pan and Tilt (ref: SV-DPFX-B_EU) from Yale obviously has serious advantages: it is motorized, offers Full HD vision, 16x zoom and an integrated siren.
But are the promises made on paper kept? That’s what 20 minutes checked before packing.
Laborious implementation
Pan and Tilt. In French: Pan and tilt. Yale’s new indoor surveillance camera wants to reassure its users by offering complete functions, including a remotely controllable motorized camera on board. Once the camera was unpacked and plugged in and our account was created in the Yale View app, setting up the device was more complicated than expected. Retorse, the camera had the worst difficulties in the world to connect to our home network, despite a good WiFi speed (136 Mb / s upstream and 263 Mb / s downstream).
We had to do it a dozen times before the Pan and Tilt became more docile. Isolated case ? Obviously no. Other testers, like our colleague from techradar.com, obviously encountered the same difficulties as us. In short, be persistent, it pays off!
Immediate alerts
Once installed and connected, the Pan and Tilt needs a few adjustments. It’s a bit of a mess in its application that clearly lacks intuitiveness. In a few minutes, however, we figure out how to activate sound detection, human detection, detection sensitivity, motion tracking, etc. Do not forget to place a microSD card (not supplied) at the back of the camera, which will allow video sequences to be recorded in the event of an intrusion.
Sensitive in its detections, the camera immediately alerts its owner that something abnormal is happening. Notifications received on our smartphone as well as on our Apple Watch are immediate, but in English: Human detected, Abnormal Sound. Reassuring for the speed, too bad for the language of Molière.
Decibels to modulate
To be chosen in SD or Full HD depending on the speed available, the image transmitted by the camera is of good quality. Depending on whether or not you have programmed the automatic recording, it is possible from the application, either to watch the live or to view the recordings. You can also talk remotely through the built-in speaker, but our tests show poor sound quality. Not enough to scratch the friendship with his burglar …
For its part, the alarm volume can be adjusted from 50db to 90db (the latter value corresponding to the volume of a classic security alarm). It can obviously be deactivated.
Swipe, zoom, check, alert
You can directly modulate the orientation of the camera up to 355 ° (pan) with an inclination of -5 ° – 80 ° (tilt) from a small joypad on the screen of our smartphone. This function allows, if the device is well placed, to really monitor a large room from a distance. No problem in our case to check that everything was fine in a dining room with a mezzanine.
From the front door to the top of the stairs, we had fun doing full sweeps. By zooming in the image received up to 16 times, you can check a detail, a door, a window… it’s very practical. More impressive: automatic movement tracking. Known here as “Smart Pursuit” (we’re almost in a detective film!), It can be activated in the event of detection of human presence. As long as the intruder is in the field that the camera can cover, the camera will follow him. The traveling will be a bit choppy, but the service well done. But a face detection system with an automated zoom to identify a possible thief would be a plus.
Local storage
Attention, here no recording system on the cloud, but on a microSD card. Make sure, if you equip yourself with the product, to offer it a card with sufficient memory (32 GB, for example). If you leave pets at home, unwanted motion detections can quickly fill the map. Reassuring: you can check the status of the memory card in the application, or even format it.
In the end, the Yale Pan and Tilt camera does not lack much to make it a very good product: a less laborious implementation and a redesigned application … Defects that plague a general feeling, however positive. At 69 euros, the relatively affordable price of the camera, however, deserves attention.