Nest Cam IQ Outdoor Review: Good Features for a Steep Price
Our Verdict
The Nest Cam IQ Outdoor is a well-constructed, tamper-resistant, intelligent photographic camera that's function of the Nest Home security ecosystem. However, it'southward expensive, and most of its great feature set is bachelor only to paying subscribers to the cloud storage plan.
For
- Generally adequate to excellent video
- Clean, easy-to-navigate web portal and mobile apps
- Tamper-proof design
- Deep characteristic fix
Against
- Central features (including video history) available simply to subscribers
- No local storage
- Expensive
Tom's Guide Verdict
The Nest Cam IQ Outdoor is a well-constructed, tamper-resistant, intelligent photographic camera that's part of the Nest Home security ecosystem. Even so, it's expensive, and most of its great feature set is available just to paying subscribers to the cloud storage plan.
Pros
- +
By and large acceptable to splendid video
- +
Make clean, easy-to-navigate spider web portal and mobile apps
- +
Tamper-proof design
- +
Deep feature gear up
Cons
- -
Cardinal features (including video history) available only to subscribers
- -
No local storage
- -
Expensive
Nest has justifiably gained a reputation for making adept-quality smart home devices. The Nest Cam IQ Outdoor is a worthy add-on to the product line. It's nicely designed; offers generally acceptable to excellent video quality; and provides a broad range of security options, including one of the all-time tamper-resistant designs nosotros've seen. But it isn't competitively priced or packaged. In fact, unless y'all pay monthly for the Nest Aware cloud-storage plan, you can't even view your video history. Despite its price, information technology'southward still one of the best dwelling security cameras you lot can observe. It's one of the best Google Dwelling compatible devices out there, too.
Editor's note (Aug. 2021): Nest has discontinued the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor. In its identify is the Nest Cam (battery), which has a 1080p camera and includes for complimentary 3 hours of rolling video storage besides as person, creature, and vehicle detection. For more details, please bank check out our Nest Cam (bombardment) review.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Design
Big, heavy and clunky, the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor is even bigger than the Nest Cam Outdoor. The white, conical IQ Outdoor is about 5 inches long with a face that's three.6 inches in diameter and blackness, and it weighs 1.2 pounds. Four 850nm IR LEDs (for night vision) are arrayed evenly around the lens. The IQ has three microphones, two of which are on the face up and one below information technology. The speaker is underneath the face, designed to reflect off the wall.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor specs
Video Resolution: 1080p with HDR
Field of View: 130 degrees
Night Vision: 4 infrared LEDs
Network Connectivity: 802.11a/b/g/nac, 2.4 GHz or 5GHz Smart Dwelling Connectivity: Google Domicile, Alexa, IFTTT plus Nest API
Audio: Two-way Mobile Devices Supported: iOS nine.0 or later, Android 4.one or later
Spider web Browsers Supported: All major browsers
The camera'south bending can be easily adjusted. Information technology rotates a full 360 degrees on its base and pivots up and downwards on the neck of the base about 75 degrees. In addition, the conical case of the camera rotates almost 65 degrees.
Designed for deterrence and tamper-resistance, the IQ Outdoor's large size and the pulsating neon-bluish light band effectually the lens bezel are quite conspicuous, and so that strangers should realize at a glance that the belongings is protected. (Yous tin turn off the light band.) Unauthorized removal of the camera is more difficult than with most cameras, because the IQ is secured to the round, silver mounting plate not magnetically (as the Outdoor was) but locked in, requiring the supplied hex key to remove it.
The 25-pes apartment power cable plugs in to a USB port in the base; the locked mounting plate fits snugly over the port. Unfortunately, the large 2.five-inch round ten one-inch thick ability-adapter cake isn't weatherproof. The cablevision is meant to be threaded through a hole in the wall and plugged into an inside outlet. That ways cut a small hole in your wall (ideally where the IQ Outdoor's mounting plate will cover it), and then threading your cord through that hole and plugging the photographic camera into an indoor outlet. This counters a cardinal vulnerability of outdoor cameras — the IQ's hidden string tin't be cut — but involves a bit more work.
Like the previous Outdoor model, the IQ is IP66-rated for weather resistance, but the IQ has a wider operating temperature range: minus xl to 113 degrees Fahrenheit versus minus iv to 104 F.
More: Best Smart Home Hub
All Nest cameras use two,048-bit RSA private keys, AES 128-bit encryption and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to connect to the deject service. Customers can implement an optional ii-gene hallmark.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Video and audio quality
The IQ Outdoor's 1/2.5-inch, eight-megapixel (4K) CMOS sensor and 130-degree broad-angle glass lens creates clearer, more detailed 1080p video than yous get from the Nest Outdoor (which uses a three-megapixel sensor). This is achieved by first capturing video in 4K, applying HDR (high dynamic range) algorithms, so encoding down to 1080p.
The IQ's daylight videos are very good to excellent, providing a brilliant, clean, nicely exposed capture and good detail fifty-fifty when zoomed in.
While the IQ'due south night videos illuminated past the four IR LEDs are generally acceptable and are significantly better than the Outdoor'due south, the IQ withal had difficulty with exposure against a very night background. Faces are discernable from about 10 feet away from the camera, only as the person approached the photographic camera, the face tended to be overexposed, blurring details.
In our tests, the IQ'due south triple microphone array captured very good to excellent recorded audio fifty-fifty when the person wasn't facing the camera.
The IQ'due south full-duplex communication allows two-way sound to be sent and received simultaneously. (The Outdoor had half duplex.) Even so, the real-time two-manner audio wasn't as strong or reliable every bit the recorded sound.
When a person spoke through the mobile app to the camera'southward speaker, the audio tended to exist a bit noisy with some breakdown, but it was mostly quite audible. When I listened through the mobile app to someone speaking within 5 feet of the camera, the audio was clear and loud; farther away, it became quite soft and not equally piece of cake to hear.
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Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Movement and audio detection
As with all Nest cameras, the IQ Outdoor's motion and audio detection are intelligent, robust, flexible and easy to use. However, central features are bachelor only if you subscribe to the Nest Enlightened deject plan.
The one exception is that the IQ offers person alerts out of the box to all users, non but Nest Aware subscribers, considering it can exercise the processing in-camera. In our testing, the IQ Outdoor's person alerts reliably recognized the difference between people and animals. In add-on, when the IQ detects a person, you can select (but in the mobile app) to accept the camera zoom in at a user-defined magnification for a close-upwards that will pan with the person. At the same time, an inset window in the corner displays the full scene. However, we had difficulty turning that selection off.
The IQ Outdoor consistently identified people nosotros had named in our Nest app Familiar Faces library (for Nest Aware subscribers only). You tin at present hands merge duplicate profiles of the same person.
Person-speaking and dog-barking alerts are also available only to subscribers, every bit is Nest's excellent Action Zones tool, which defines the areas in a scene you desire the photographic camera to lookout. However, Netgear's Arlo cameras offer this feature for free.
Given the variety of alerts available, it's helpful that you have the option to toggle what notifications yous will receive. For example, you might want to go person alerts merely not full general motion alerts. What'due south more, each family unit member on the account can set up their own preferences.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Cloud storage & playback
The IQ Outdoor records video 24/7. But the IQ has no local storage, so if you want to view your video history or download clips, you take to buy the Nest Enlightened cloud plan. If you don't subscribe, you will have access to your live video and a rolling three-hour history of warning-related still images, plus optional email alerts with snapshots — and that's all.
Nest updated its Nest Aware cloud storage plans for its home security cameras and video doorbell; for $6 per calendar month (or $threescore annually), you lot can shop thirty days of effect history from an unlimited number of cameras at i location; if you upgrade to Nest Enlightened Plus ($12/calendar month, $120 annually), you go 60 days of rolling deject storage, plus 10 days of 24/7 video history.
MORE: Which Security Camera Has the Best Storage Programme?
Subscribers have a nice selection of history-viewing options. On both the mobile app and the web portal, nether the live video is a timeline to indicate when events (such every bit person-speaking detection) occur. If you have Activity Zones defined, the dots will be color-coordinated according to zones.
On the mobile app, those events are also bachelor as split short videos in the Sightline view, with captions indicating what triggered the alert. These outcome videos are great shortcuts for finding and playing warning videos. Y'all tin filter them to display those triggered by movement, person, familiar confront and/or specific Activity Zones.
The spider web portal's time-lapse tool is helpful in pinpointing when an event occurs. It displays the key action (such every bit a person walking through the scene) of each video that was captured during a user-defined time period.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Scheduling
Scheduling when the photographic camera volition turn on or off is intuitive, though it requires too many taps and clicks. You can have several dissimilar on/off periods per twenty-four hour period, and y'all tin can use check marks to set each menstruation to recur on several days.
In addition, Habitation/Away Assist uses geofencing to turn the camera on or off, based on when you lot (and your phone) go out habitation.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Sharing
Nest has several sharing options: Family Accounts, password-protected live view sharing and public video streaming.
Up to five friends or family members can have a Family Account on your camera. They volition have access to the livestream and notification alerts, and if you're a Nest Enlightened subscriber, they tin can also view your video history. Additionally, it gives them the same command over your photographic camera as you have, including the ability to change settings and share with others.
You can share a link to your camera'due south video (password-protected or publicly) on your calculator through the web portal. Family Accounts may exist ready upward in either the web portal or the mobile app.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Mobile apps & web portal
The Nest software is clean and piece of cake to navigate; the scattering of icons are mostly self-explanatory. The Android and iOS mobile apps are almost identical. The web portal and mobile apps accept important differences, with some features bachelor in only i or the other.
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The online Help is 1 of the best we've seen for security camera software, with clear explanations besides as easy-to-follow, stride-past-step instructions.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor: Smart dwelling house integration
Nest's thermostats, alarm systems, fume detectors and cameras (including the IQ Outdoor) communicate with each other in a security ecosystem that'southward called the Nest Home. What's more, hundreds of third-party smart dwelling products work with Nest products (including the IQ Outdoor) through the Nest API. In addition, Nest cameras back up Google Dwelling, Alexa and IFTTT.
Notwithstanding, if you lot migrate from a Nest account to a Google Assistant business relationship (which y'all must do in guild to take advantage of the Nest Aware pricing), you volition lose most, if not all of the smart habitation interactions with third-party products that were available with your Nest business relationship.
Nest Cam IQ Outdoor review: Verdict
The Nest Cam IQ Outdoor is a quality, tamper-resistant device with lots of useful features and acceptable-to-fantabulous video capture. However, information technology'south expensive. The initial toll is loftier, at $349; a 2-photographic camera pack costs $598. Plus, you lot'll have to pay for a Nest Enlightened cloud subscription (at to the lowest degree $five/month) if yous want to have reward of the total value of the camera's nice feature fix. Instead of the IQ Outdoor, we recommend buying a Netgear Arlo Pro or Pro 2, which is less expensive, offers a great assortment of features and includes a free seven-day deject program. Just if you desire to leap for Nest's photographic camera, you won't be disappointed.
Credit: Tom'southward Guide
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/us/nest-cam-iq-outdoor,review-5373.html
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