Smart Home Camera for Virtually No One

SwitchchBot, the company behind a button-pressing robot that turns dumb buttons into smart ones, has been rapidly expanding its catalog of smart home devices in recent years. Those range from the super niche—things like a smart candle warmer—to the practical and compelling art of a smart hub with an IR transmitter that lets it act as a Matter-powered remote control. In one of the company’s newest products, the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell, the gimmick is a connected indoor display that functions as a chime, digital peephole, and video storage device, among other things.

SwitchchBot isn’t the only company that offers such a combo, but it’s the cheapest I know of at $149.99. That’s compared to something like the $380 Eufy Smart Display E10 and Video Doorbell E340 combo or the $100 Google Nest Hub and $180 Google Nest Doorbell Cam pairing. And it has many great ideas beyond the ones I listed above.

It’s a shame then that the Smart Video Doorbell itself is one of the smartest smart cameras I’ve ever used. Its biggest problem is that the company drove it to the actual doorbell part. The camera produces muddy video, which is bad at the wrong scale, the speakers for both the doorbell and the display are bad, and the whole story is driven by unreliable smartphone software, at best. Despite all this, I still think this camera might have a place. But that place is nowhere near my front door.

It’s good on paper, and nowhere else

I had many reasons to check out SwitchBot’s Smart Video Doorbell. Its supposedly 2K video resolution recording is local by default; it is battery powered but can also be wired; it’s compatible with Matter (with a big star which I’ll get to); it has a 165-degree field of view (again, a star). If you have a paired SwitchBot smart key, the Smart Video Doorbell can read the NFC chip on your smartphone or SwitchBot tracking device to unlock it.

The indoor monitor part is what caught my eye, though. It’s a small, square device with a 4.3-inch display that can be wall-mounted or placed on a table using a built-in kickstand—near the power outlet, though, since it uses a four-foot-long power cable. Below the display are four buttons, including one to view the camera’s live feed, one to lock or unlock your door (assuming you have a SwitchBot smart key), and one to display a list of standard, robotic responses that ask visitors to leave a message or tell them someone is coming through the door soon. A feature in the SwitchBot app supports user-recorded responses, so, obviously, I turned to YouTube to catch the audio from “Angels With Filthy Souls,” a fake movie inside Home alone. Then I asked my child to knock so that I could answer with him. We laughed and laughed.

The display comes with a microSD card slot pre-populated with a 4GB microSD card for local recording, which I think is enough, but the device officially supports memory cards up to 512GB for those who need more. Having a memory card live inside the home device is nice, and not something that all the original video doorbells do, so kudos to SwitchBot. It’s part of why this doorbell works without an internet connection, another nice feature. In fact, you don’t really need to connect the Smart Video Doorbell to the app or the Internet at all, since the monitor comes paired with it. Although, in my testing, the camera didn’t actually record video while I was using it without connecting it to the SwitchBot app.

Beyond the video monitor, a SwitchBot camera appears to slide off the rails. I’m not a fan of the camera design, and I can’t stand the scratchy, tiny speakers on it or the video monitor. Its video quality is atrocious, and the camera didn’t seem to produce recordings anywhere near the resolution the 2K SwitchBot claims it’s capable of. The ones I tested on the microSD card were 640 x 360 at most, actually. If there are situations where the camera will capture 2K video, I haven’t come across them. I’ve asked SwitchchBot for clarification on this, and I’ll update this review when I get a response.

Shortly after setting the Smart Video Doorbell up, I noticed another problem—its 165-degree FOV is great on paper, but SwitchBot’s choice to use a 16:9 aspect ratio meant that the edge of my porch floor was visible, despite the camera being mounted at the low end of SwitchBot’s recommended height of 1.5 to 1 feet. Compare that to the Google Nest Doorbell, which uses a square measure and captures nearly the same area as the SwitchBot’s camera while getting more above and below it.

Not being able to see much of my porch meant I couldn’t look at the camera to see if, say, a package was there—one of the main reasons I even wanted a video doorbell for my porch in the first place. That wouldn’t be a big deal if I could rely on the Smart Video Doorbell to always pick up when someone delivered a package, but it always missed people approaching my porch, especially when they were coming in and out as quickly as most drivers do.

Solid, lazy software

Not much better on the software side of things. The SwitchBot app is quick to tease about promoting its cloud storage service. Thankfully, you can turn off its annoying reminders if you explore the app’s settings deeply enough. However, there are some strange options, such as motion detection and recording are both turned off automatically, or that the video recording is scheduled to end after just five seconds.

At home and on the same Wi-Fi network, it takes several seconds to load the live feed, sometimes failing. When I was gone for a few days while updating it, I couldn’t get it to load at all. And while I can get the live feed to load from the Alexa app, I never can from Google Home after adding the camera there. That’s in stark contrast to a video monitor, which displays a live feed as soon as the doorbell button is pressed. It’s also a struggle to upload recordings to the SwitchBot app, by navigating the camera timeline through the app, or by tapping a motion notification on my phone. Most smart home security cameras have these issues here and there, but for the Smart Video Doorbell, it was constant.

Third party support is a bit confusing all around. Smart Video Doorbell has a settings menu labeled “Third Party Services,” but this appears to be a way to connect your standard SwitchBot ecosystem to others. That is, the hidden bell appears when I connect the SwitchBot with Google Home or Amazon Alexa, but not Samsung SmartThings or Siri Shortcuts. Apple Home is not supported. Also, although this package has support for Matter, that only refers to the ability of the video monitor to integrate the SwitchBot smart lock into other ecosystems by using a universal standard. Matter just got smart home camera support in version 1.5 standard, and as of this writing, only Samsung SmartThings has been updated to that version.

Finally, the SwitchBot app is a little light on the usual features of a smart camera. You can set a detection zone for one by changing the size of the rectangle on the video feed, but there is no privacy feature. The app has a scheduler and sensitivity slider, but you can’t turn off, or adjust the brightness of, the blinding LED lights that flash when someone approaches the camera at night. And human detection is the only motion detection feature included with the free program; you have to pay for another SwitchBot cloud subscription for car and pet detection (both things my Netatmo camera has been able to do for free since I bought it in 2019). That costs at least $3.99 per month for one camera—which isn’t bad!—and doesn’t include package discovery.

Whose doorbell could this be?

All my complaints aside, there is a video doorbell tutorial here. The local storage, the fact that it works without Wi-Fi, the easy setup, and its smart Switch lock integration are good things. But the problems I listed make it a bad choice if you want all the home bells and whistles that come with most home security cameras.

But there is one type of person that a Smart Video Doorbell might be perfect for. Its home video monitor makes it perfect for non-tech people, especially those who can’t walk, as it means they can see who’s at their door without getting up, and they don’t have to futz with an app to do it. And if you don’t care about having a recording and just want a high-quality digital peephole and intercom, that’s fine, too. Poor video quality, inconsistent event detection, and fancy algorithmic detection features don’t matter.

But everyone else should look elsewhere. There is a lot of competition from the likes of Eufy, Reolink, and their other cameras and they prioritize local video storage but produce better video quality, offer more features, and can see, record, and display events with greater fidelity. I’ve never used a smart home security camera that I thought was good, doorbell or otherwise, but the SwitchBot Smart Video Doorbell misses the mark in many areas, making it a doorbell camera for almost no one.