Imou Ranger IQ

Affordable security cam that does some things well

here’s a lot of smart camera tech crammed into this little sphere.

The Ranger IQ is a smart security camera with motors so that the lens can pan and tilt, following a person around the room if it spots them (and returning to its original position after). That’s paired with being able to identify humans, so it won’t track the cat, unless you want it to. It also has two-way communication, so that you can yell at the burglar/cat from anywhere. You can view footage from it live (and can control the camera’s view) in the app or via Alexa/Google Assistant, and it will notify you and record video when it detects motion.

There are smart features connected to the motion detection, beyond just the panning of the camera. You can choose specific zones in the frame you want it to monitor (so that it can ignore a window, for example), and you can set the sensitivity. It doesn’t have face detection, though; it’s due to be added later, we’re told.

The packed feature list is rounded out by colour night vision, geofencing (so it can turn

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off motion notifications when you’re home), offline storage on microSD cards as well as paid cloud storage, a siren, a privacy mode (that turns the lens down so the camera can’t see anything), and a noise sensor that you can adjust the sensitivity for, so it could be only loud enough to hear alarms in the house. It’s a packed list, and everything worked well for us. The HD video quality is good, the app is quick to respond and load cloud video, the alerts arrive in timely fashion… functionally, it’s great.

But we struggled with the app. Again, it works fine – it’s snappy and reliable – but we found the way it lays out its options to be quite unintuitive – actually finding all of the features above to customise and activate them left us scratching our heads a lot. There were also some instances of the English on the app being imperfect, which can confuse things further.

And while it’s excellent value in terms of features per pound, it weirdly might do too much. There are smart cameras with these features but without the rotating lens (still with wide fields of view, though) for half the price. Or even with the moving lens, but without advanced night vision. Do you need these features? If so, and you don’t mind the app issues we’ve mentioned, we recommend this. But there are easier, simpler options.