Nooie Cam Pro review: This little camera needs some software updates

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$299.99

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Portable, battery-powered and versatile, with excellent image quality and multiple night vision modes – the Nooie Cam Pro ticks a lot of boxes when it comes to security cameras, at least on paper. If it worked much better, this could be a category killer. As it stands, the Nooie Cam Pro, sold in a two-pack with a base station, feels like a work in progress.

There’s very little the Nooie Cam Pro doesn’t like based on its specs. The pint-sized device (3 x 2 x 1.5 inches) is not much bigger than a deck of cards and offers a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels and up to 8x zoom. It’s IP65 rated, which means it’s impervious to dust and can withstand spray from a garden hose, so it can be deployed indoors or outdoors (you can read all about IP codes in the link above). You can power the device via a USB cable or connect wirelessly and let the 5000mAh battery take the wheel (the camera mounts on a magnetic base, making it easy to point and remove to recharge its battery). Nooie says that a full charge will last “for months.”

This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best security cameras, where you’ll find reviews of competing offerings, plus a buyer’s guide to features to consider when purchasing this type of product.

The unit includes infrared illumination and a spotlight that allows you to choose between black and white or color night vision, respectively. Two-way audio is also available, as is compatibility with video-based Alexa and Google Home devices. About the only thing I didn’t love after unboxing the Nooie was its color: the company calls it “nature-inspired,” but I call it “brown.”

Nooie

Like I said, everything seems solid until you start working with Nooie Cam Pro in earnest. The main issue is how your wireless system is managed. Up to four Nooie cameras work by communicating with a dedicated bridge that must remain connected to power and nearby. The bridge, in turn, communicates with your router via Wi-Fi (supports 2.4 and 5 GHz networks) or Ethernet. If you’re using local storage, the bridge is where the microSD card slot resides; all cameras record on the same card. Alternatively, you can opt for Nooie’s cloud storage service, which offers 7 days of clips for $1/month or $10/year, 14 days for $1.90/month or $20/year, or 30 days for $3/month or $30/year. (No trial plan offered.)

The camera-bridge-router system is often fragile and doubles the risk of something going wrong, which is why many manufacturers have retired it. In Nooie’s case, the design is problematic both for setup, which required countless attempts to complete successfully, and for everyday use. Here, the system exhibits a frustrating performance issue: accessing recorded clips or even making configuration changes is slow as molasses as it waits for Nooie to finish buffering and navigating hops to your router and back. As a result, playback of recorded clips is often choppy and jerky. After waiting several seconds for them to load, clips would often stutter, sometimes pausing for several seconds in the middle of the stream. I often found that I had to wait up to 45 seconds for the live stream to load and sometimes it never loaded, forcing me to try again. Strangely, I found that moving the camera plus from the bridge was useful for improving performance, but this requires a considerable amount of trial and error to be of much help. Even with hardware relocation, I was never able to completely improve the situation.

Christopher Null/IDG

Other problems with Nooie’s infrastructure are built into its design. The biggest one is that clips are limited to 20 seconds in length, with a cooldown of about a minute between successive recordings. This will be too insufficient for many users. Nooie’s app is easy enough to navigate (although it’s prone to spouting occasional attacks of Chinese when something goes wrong), but again its responsiveness is problematic, suffering from the same lag issues as watching recorded clips. The clips appear in a daily timeline, each with a timestamp, but the system doesn’t provide clip thumbnails, which will leave you guessing (and wasting a lot of time) if you’re trying to break up a family member. of a porch pirate. I found Nooie’s motion detection to be so-so (it can also be set to filter based on “human forms” to help weed out animals, which it does with modest success), but I did occasionally find the camera recording when nothing moved absolutely. On the plus side, notifications are delivered quickly if the app is set to send them.

Nooie

While daytime image quality is excellent, the Nooie’s night vision is acceptable but not great, in both IR and spotlight modes. IR range is limited to about 12 to 15 feet before things get too dark to discern; the small focus offers approximately a similar range. The Nooie Camera also has a very bright status light on the front of the camera that lights up when it’s active; this cannot be disabled unless recorded over. Finally, you’ll need to use Nooie’s included microUSB cable to charge the device; the camera port is recessed into a narrow depression that prevented a generic cable from being plugged in entirely.

Overall, Nooie’s limitations, most of which are self-inflicted, make the camera simply too restrictive to be that useful. $300 gets you a pair of cameras, a base station, various accessories, and a sticker that says “Protected by Nooie.” Stickers are always a nice touch, though given what we know about the camera’s limitations, I’m not sure who this one will scare off.