Ad disclosure: This product was sent to us free of charge for the purpose of this review, and represents our honest opinion of the product.
Product: Kami Security Cameras
Price: Wire-Free Camera – £79.99, Outdoor Camera – £64.99
Manufacturer’s Description: Kami Wire-Free Outdoor Camera is a 100% wire-free HD camera with advanced motion detection. Featuring a truly wireless design, this cutting edge Wire-Free Outdoor Kami Camera doesn’t require any external base stations or hubs. Just use the included rechargeable batteries and your camera is ready to use.
The Kami Outdoor Camera is one of the best security camera of it’s category to secure your home in just every condition thanks to the impressive color night vision, the reliable human motion detection and the IP-65 water-resistant design.
Rating: (5/5 stars) Review: Living where we do in South Birmingham means that we have to be mindful of our home security. While we don’t live in a terrible area, we do hear of minor break-ins & people trying their luck with car doors at night. Kami got in touch and offered us two of their outdoor security cameras to review, and the timing was perfect. With a new car sitting on our new drive, we knew it was a good time to upgrade our security in front of our house, and these cameras seem like the perfect solution. We’ve been putting both the wired & wireless cameras through their paces, and have been pretty pleased with them both. Both of the cameras came well packed in cardboard boxes, without too much plastic or excess packaging. The Outdoor Security Camera comes with a USB power adapter, cable clips, mounting screws, wall anchors, a small screwdriver, the user manual, and a mounting template. It has a fixed 3 meter U5B cable, which has a flat shape, making it easier to dip to the wall and run through windows. We have fitted the camera to the front wall of the house, and it covers our entire front garden with a 1080p video resolution. we were pleasantly surprised by the 110° wide angled lens which allows us to see our whole garden including the footpath along the side, and the access point from our neighbours’ driveway on the opposite side. Also impressive is the “Starlight Night Vision” technology, which boosts low light vision so that the video feed & recordings remain in colour for longer. It does also have full IR night vision, but it doesn’t flip to this until it is really dark. We were surprised to see a detailed colour video feed of what seemed like very dark front garden to the naked eye! This camera has a human detection feature with a fairly smart AI & the ability to highlight areas which you want to be monitored. We have it set up to record all movement, but only send alerts when it thinks a human is in range. We get some false positives, but not too many. It was easy to fit thanks to the mounting template which allowed James to mark & drill holes in the right places, and easily check he was in the right spot as he went along. The included clips made it simple to run the wire tidily & securely down the wall to the window. A ball joint on the base makes it easy to reposition the camera. The wire-free battery camera comes with a wall mount base, screws & wall anchors, a user manual, and four rechargeable 18650 flat-top batteries. It doesn’t come with a charger, so you have to purchase that seperately (although Kari did send us one for the review). The battery powered camera has a PlR sensor, IR night vision, 1080 p resolution, and a 140° wide angle lens. The front of the camera unscrews to reveal the battery compartment, making it easy to change the batteries without removing the camera from the base plate. We mounted our wine-free camera on a post in the front garden, so it is next to our drive, providing a much closer view of theat end of our property, whilst itself being within the view of the wall mounted camera. To install it, we screwed the base plate to the post, then the base of the camera locked into place on the plate. You can reposition the angle of the camera by twisting the base & unlocking the ball joint, then re-locking it once you’re happy with the angle. This is a little trickier than the wired camera, but once you’re happy with the position you shouldn’t need to touch it. Both cameras are completely weatherproof with an IP-65 rating, and an operating temperature range of -10°C – 50°C for the wire-free camera, and -15°C – 50°C for the wired camera. Both of them upload footage to the cloud if you have a subscription, and can save to a microSD card also. The app, although it could use a little improvement, is fairly easy to use. You can view your alerts history, scrub through all recorded footage, take snapshots (both of the live view & recordings), save alert footage to your camera roll, and view the live feed from each camera. Both cameras have microphones and speakers, allowing two way communication, although due to the positions we have the cameras in we don’t use this feature. Overall we’ve had a fairly good experience with these cameras; they were straightforward to set up and use, and we like that we can bring up the live feeds on our phones and also on the new Amazon Echo Show we’ve got. We had some problems with false alerts on the wireless camera which also drained the batteries as it was being constantly triggered all night, but after repositioning the angle so it wasn’t bouncing light directly off the car back to itself, this has been resolved. We’ve already got some Blink cameras so we have some previous experience of ‘smart’ home security cameras. I think the motion alerts for these cameras are better than the Blink cameras as they don’t filter for humans or have any AI alert modes, so we get an awful lot of cat alerts! The new Kami cameras are recording a lot of cats and foxes in the garden, but not sending alerts for these motion recordings. Blink also requires a hub whereas both the Kami cameras are stand alone products that connect directly to your wi-fi. Ironically, considering Blink is an Amazon product, the Echo Show seems to connect to & display the Kami cameras’ live feeds quicker and more reliably than the Blink cameras. We have a great wi-fi router and have a decent signal in our front garden, but we were impressed at how well the cameras stay connected even though we are using them well outside the recommended distance from the router. In the case of the battery camera it is halfway down our 20m+ front garden, and the router is several metres inside the house, too. This might be causing the batteries to drain slightly faster than the optimum battery life, but we are delighted to have a camera covering the new drive & James’s precious new car! We are really happy with these cameras and would definitely consider buying more if we were looking to improve our home security. I think they are well priced and worth what you pay for them. We give the Kami Outdoor Security Cameras 5 stars.
