Yale Smart Indoor Camera

Verdict

Cheap and with acceptable image quality, the Yale Smart Indoor Camera is a good choice. The Motion detection settings are a little fiddly to adjust, and there’s no option to get alerts for only people, even though the camera can detect them. Where this camera really shines is with its integration with the Yale Smart Alarm, which can enable and disable the camera automatically. If you have other Yale products, then this is a good indoor camera to get.

Introduction

Having worked on its disparate apps to bring them all together, the new Yale Smart Indoor Camera fits into a fully integrated system that includes an alarm system and smart locks.

That makes this a more powerful product than previous Yale cameras and one that’s a good choice if you have other products from the company.

Design and installation

• Wall or shelf-mounted
• Works with the Yale Home app
• USB-C powered

Small and light, the Yale Smart Indoor Camera is easy to find space for. There’s no battery in this model, with power provided by a USB-C connection. There’s a long cable in the box, so it’s not too hard to locate the camera.

Its stand can be used on a bookshelf, but it also operates as a wall mount if you’d like to put the camera in a more permanent position and avoid any issues caused by people knocking it.

Installation is easy. Using the Yale Home app, which is home for the company’s other smart products, I soon had the camera connected to Wi-Fi and working inside the app.

Features

• Offline or cloud recording
• Integrates with the alarm and door locks
• Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support

Unlike the similar Ring Indoor Camera (2nd Gen), the Yale Smart Indoor Camera doesn’t require a cloud subscription. Thanks to its onboard storage, this camera can store between two and four days of event history; Yale doesn’t quote how much onboard storage the camera has, and there’s no microSD card slot for upgrading.

If you need more storage, you can add the Camera Plan subscription service, which costs £3.50 a month per camera, for 30-days of history. Alternatively, there’s the Secure Plan (£9 a month), which gives you cloud storage for an unlimited number of cameras, plus 4G backup for the Yale Smart Alarm, and automated calls to up to three people should the alarm get triggered.

Overall, the Yale Secure Plan is similar in price and features to the Ring Protect Plus plan, and shows how the company has finally managed to better integrate its products.

Out of the box, the camera will ping an alert every time it spots motion. There’s no filter on how many alerts can be generated, so just walking into a room where the camera is active had my phone pinging repeatedly.

The app has some settings to fine-tune the experience. First, there’s a Motion Re-Trigger Time option that lets you set a delay between the end of one recording and the start of the next. That helps reduce the number of alerts that the camera sends.

There’s on-board human detection, too, although the feature isn’t quite what I expected. I thought turning this one would let the camera only send alerts when people were detected, but it doesn’t. Instead, if a person is detected, the alert tells you that; all other motion is still sent as an alert. With a subscription plan, there’s also an option to turn on pet recognition.

What the system really needs is a way to filter notifications to show just your choice of people, pets and other motion.

There’s a Detection Zone option, but it’s a little confusing to use. Rather than being able to draw a box around the areas of interest, Yale’s version shows a grid over a live preview; areas you shade in red are where the camera will ignore motion. It’s good to have zones, but the implementation could be easier to use.

There’s also an option to enable or disable the camera, turning it on and off. It would nice if this feature could be automated via a schedule.

If you do have the Yale Smart Alarm, then the Home Integration option will turn the camera off when the alarm is set to Home or Disarmed. It’s a shame that there’s not more granularity: you might want your camera turned on when set to Home mode, say because the camera’s downstairs and you want video monitoring while you’re asleep. Still, this kind of integration is appreciated and shows how far Yale has come recently.

A further Home Integration lets you link a smart lock, such as the Yale Linus, to a camera. When done, the lock/unlock button appears at the bottom of the live view feed, so you can unlock the lock without having to leave the app. That’s arguably less useful on this camera, but it’s a neat feature with outdoor cameras, such as the new doorbell.

Recordings are available through the activity feed. I found that the camera could be a bit laggy when trying to access locally stored clips, with the app often timing out before I could access a clip. It generally took a few goes to access recent clips; cloud storage was more reliable. Video can be played in the app, or downloaded and saved to your phone’s photo gallery.

Performance

• Needs to be pointed away from strong light
• Good night vision
• Average day vision

With a 1080p sensor and 110-degree field of view, the Yale Smart Indoor Camera is a more entry-level product than some of the competition, such as the 4K Eufy Security Indoor Cam S350. I found that the camera was best placed so that it wasn’t pointing towards a window, as the incoming light confused the sensor and made objects very dark.

As you can see from the image below, it’s hard to see details on people’s faces when the camera was pointing at my office doors. To be fair, that’s the same problem that I had with the Ring Indoor Cam (2^nd Gen).

Moving the camera so that the doors were to the sides improved things. Exposure is good, and it’s easy enough to see what’s going on, but the video is quite noisy and has multiple compression artefacts.

At night, the camera turns on its IR lights and shoots in black and white. The range of the IR lights is good enough to light up pretty much any-sized room, and the video quality is solid. There’s still some noise and the image is softer than during the day, but you can clearly see what’s going on.

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