Smart Indoor Security Camera - Netatmo Welcome, Gold

This camera is the only one on the market that recognizes faces, which is a great feature that dramatically reduces the amount of alerts you would otherwise get, because as long as it recognises the face, it does not need to send you an alert. You can set up and customize alerts however you like to meet your needs. For example, if you want you can set it to ONLY notify you when an "Unknown Face" is seen. Or when you're on vacation, you can set it to alert you whenever ANY motion is sensed. Or maybe you just want a notification each day when your kids get home from school; if so you can set it to alert you when each kid arrives home, and you'd get an alert on your phone like "Jimmy seen" with a thumbnail snapshot. If you get an "Unknown Face Seen" alert, you can jump on the app and watch the recorded video footage within seconds, to identify who it was, or watch any of the other recorder incidents, or the live feed to see what's happening now. These alerts come to you by means of an app that installs on your iPhone or Android. But if you want to get creative, you can also install IFTTT on your phone and then use it to make other things happen when the alerts come in, such as sending a text or email every time an "unknown face" is seen, or even integrate it with other home automation products such as turning on a light whenever no one is home and motion is detected.The Facial Recognition technology is not perfect, but it is a lot better than nothing, and this is the ONLY product that has it. I say "not perfect" because it takes a while to train it to recognize the faces of family members, and even still it does not always recognize them. If it doesn't recognize a face, it will alert you and show you a snapshot, which you can then identify through the App to help it "learn" to recognize that face. But if I come in the house wearing a winter hat for the first time, it will likely not recognize me, until I "train it" to recognize the picture as me. This process can require lots of training, but it is easy, and it does get substantially better in the first couple weeks of use. Netatmo is supposed to be improving the recognition technology, and once they release the new version, the devices will automatically update on their own to use the new technology. You can already send photos off-site with existing IFTTT software, and soon they are also adding FTP support, so you will be able to configure it to send video to your own FTP site, thus giving you a "free" way to have a backup copy of the video security footage.There are lots of good articles and reviews out there about the differences between this and competing products, and I would read those thoroughly before deciding which product is right for your needs (and if you don't have time for that, this may not be your ideal product). But if you like the facial recognition idea, this is the only one offering it so far. I love it, but I am not expecting perfection, and I have time to work with it to customize to my needs. And I do NOT want to pay another monthly fee, so for me this is perfect enough, and meets my needs better than the competing products.I use this camera as a supplement to a standard security system. What I love is that if I ever get an alarm, I can immediately check to see what the Netatmo saw, and also get a live feed. Last time, it turned out to be my wife who set off the alarm, so this helped me figure that out and cancel the police dispatch right away.UPDATE: A few days ago, my Netatmo automatically updated itself, adding some great new features. One was Second Generation Facial Recognition, which seems to have a lot less "Unknown Face" issues. Another great addition is that it now supports FTP storage of all video (for free)! This means that as long as you have a home router supporting plug-and-play USB drive access via FTP (such as the Netgear Nighthawk R6700), you can configure the Welcome to automatically send all video to a mass storage device via FTP within your home network. This provides a secondary backup of everything that gets recorded on the Welcome. I connected a 4TB drive which will hold a lot of video! Competing products charge a monthly fee if you want to store the video, and Netatmo lets you do it for free.

After doing extensive research on stand-alone security cameras, I decided to purchase this one. It’s the only WiFi-connected camera with both local video storage and face detection, and it’s well-reviewed.Reduced Price - Warehouse Deal**************************************Amazon offered a warehouse deal at $152.10, a good price compared to $169 for a new unit at that time. I placed the order late Thursday, January 7. It shipped the next day.Poor packing - Arrived Broken***********************************When it arrived today, January 12, I noticed the unit was packed rather loosely in its box, and that the white plastic end-cap was loose and came off very easily. This cap covers the Bluetooth and WiFi antennas.When I tried to set up the unit with the Netatmo app on an iPhone 6, the phone paired fine with the Welcome through Bluetooth, but when it went to connect the Welcome to the internet through either my WiFi or wired Ethernet networks, a dialog appeared stating it had lost connection with the network, and the app routed me right back to establishing a Bluetooth connection.It did this at least 30 times, first with my iPhone 6 and then with an iPad Mini 2.Netatmo Support - Email Only***********************************Netatmo support is offered through email only, not too surprising for a company headquartered in France. I sent an email from their website detailing my problem, and got an autoresponse to acknowledge receipt.I tried connecting the Welcome to the internet a few more times after that, and finally concluded the product was most likely damaged and nonfunctional.Sudden Amazon Price Increase*************************************I re-checked Amazon for the price of a new Welcome. It was now listed as $199. When I called to initiate the return of the defective unit, I explained that I was now unable to order a new unit at the price in effect when I ordered the defective used one, and asked if Amazon would honor their previous price for a new unit. I was told NO, since the defective unit came from Amazon Warehouse deals, a separate entity, and they were unwilling to turn around and ship me a new one at the previous $169 price. I was not about to buy another warehouse deal.Customer Service?**********************This was a **giant customer service failure**. I had tried to save a little money, then was penalized when I wanted to instead to buy a new unit at the price from three days ago to replace the defective used one. I felt a bit like a bait-and-switch victim.**Conclusions****************So there are a few conclusions. *One, the Netatmo Welcome may not be as robustly built as its competition. Yes, they need to cover antennas with a material that's transparent to RF, but they could have done this a little better. *Two, beware Amazon Warehouse deals for anything that isn’t extremely robust, like garden hand-tools. *Three, watch out for Amazon price changes – they may force you to spend more if you delay even a couple days.I think I’ll be buying electronic products elsewhere in the future.