Wyze has been making a name for itself in recent years by releasing highly-featured security cameras (among other smart devices) at surprisingly low costs (generally under $40). In this case, we’ll take a look at their most recent camera (as of this writing), the Wyze Cam v3, and some of its pros and cons.

Wyze Cam v3 website: https://wyze.com/wyze-cam.html

The Wyze Cam v3 is a wifi camera (powered by USB) that is currently selling for about $36 (shipping included), making it very affordable. And as most articles around the internet would probably say, it’s an amazing value. And I would agree—in theory. The list of features is quite long, especially for such a cheap unit. Unfortunately, my experience with previous Wyze cameras (Wyze Cam v2 and Wyze Cam Pan) left a sour taste in my mouth.

The Bad

To be clear, I haven’t actually bought a v3. And that’s because the biggest issue with Wyze cameras that I’ve had in the past is that they simply just don’t work most of the time. I bought 3 Wyze Cam v2s and 3 Wyze Cam Pans, and within 2 years, all 6 of them have broken (at least partially). One of them just turns on and off repeatedly, barely ever actually recording anything. 3 others stopped working entirely; they seem to just never connect via the app any more (yes, even when right next to my router). 2 of them now only seem to connect via the app about half of the time, and often take multiple retries, which means it can take several minutes to actually view the video feed (rendering them useless in any emergency situation). And I was using them all indoors in ideal conditions.

And that’s just the issues on the hardware side—on the software side, the app is pretty bad. Many users are frustrated at how it is riddled with popup ads for other Wyze products. And it’s also pretty unresponsive most of the time, constantly reconnects to cameras unnecessarily when viewing feeds (slowing things down), and doesn’t make it convenient to view the footage immediately before and after a 12-second “clip” (e.g. from detected motion), even when you have it set up to record 24/7. All in all, these cameras are pretty terrible if you are relying on them in a situation that is potentially life-or-death.

Oh yeah, and in my experience, the person detection (which comes with Cam Plus at $2 per camera per month) isn’t super reliable either; it will miss people pretty often, particularly if the camera is getting a top-down view of people. But you still pretty much need to buy Cam Plus anyway, because even the regular motion-based event recording is severely limited without it.

Is the v3 any better when it comes to these issues? Hard to say. It’s possible that things have improved a bit, but from what I have read (e.g. on forums), people still seem to be having reliability issues with the v3 as well. Which is to be expected for a budget camera.

The Good

On the other hand, we should give the Wyze team some credit for providing such an affordable camera with so many useful features. Here are some of the great things about these cameras:

• Good night vision
• Decent weatherproofing
• Ability to get a phone alert (along with a short 12-second video clip) based on any detected motion event, or an event triggered by another connected Wyze device (such as the door/window opening sensor)
• Allows setting “zones” for where to check for motion
• Free cloud storage of event clips for 14 days
• Ability to record 24/7 (in addition to saving clips to the cloud) to a local SD card, and stream earlier recordings off the SD card while it’s still in the camera (directly in the app)
• Easy mounting
• For $2 per camera per month, you get Cam Plus, which includes features such as:
  • Reduced cooldown between event clips from 5 minutes to 0 minutes (basically required for the notifications to be useful, in my opinion)
  • Allows event clips to keep recording until motion stops, rather than just 12 seconds at a time (also basically required, in my opinion)
  • Allows the cameras to give more intelligent notifications, e.g. only notifying you if a person or package is detected
• Ability to stream via RTSP (if you flash a special firmware) so that the Wyze cams can work with other existing security camera systems

Conclusion

The Wyze Cam v3 basically has most of the features that an average person would probably want. Combine that with the cheap price, and it’s actually not a bad deal for someone who is new to cameras and just wants something to mess around with. And hey, who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and yours won’t break so quickly like mine did. Or maybe you could just have two of them covering every spot, so that you still have full camera coverage in case one fails. But eventually, you might still want to graduate to something more reliable (and yes, probably more expensive).