Arlo Ultra
PERFECT PICTURE AND SERIOUS SMARTS IN A BRILLIANTLY ENGINEERED PACKAGE.
SIDE BY SIDE with its competitors, you’d be hard pressed to outwardly tell the difference, but fire up the Arlo app and the quality gap between this and others is all too clear.
It starts with connectivity. Setup of the Arlo hub and its paired camera was super fast, and where the others might have you wait a while before reaching a live view, the Arlo gives up the goods quickly and in remarkable quality, and when you’re wondering whether you need to hit the siren (or just use two-way talk to dismiss the cold caller at your front door) that immediacy is priceless.
While it hits the resolution, we suspect there’s a little interpolation on its 4K footage given that the Arlo Ultra’s recordings can tend to be a bit smeary when zoomed right in, but this is still far and away the sharpest security camera we’ve seen in action, wireless or not. You can configure it to capture anything from a sensible field of view right up to a full 180º fisheye, and that HDR picture comes with tremendous colour depth. Testing at twilight on a clear evening, the Arlo managed 20 minutes longer than its competitors at low light before switching to night vision mode, still pulling in a clear and colourful image.
At night, though it lacks the full IR LED array of Swann’s camera, the Arlo captures enough light to see a good distance, and there’s an adjustable spotlight available if you’re placing it outdoors. Which rather neatly brings us to motion detection: it’s great, and super smart. Not only is the Arlo quick to pick out moving items, it’s brainy enough to make a decent stab at working out exactly what it’s looking at. Your push notification might say ‘motion’, it might say ‘person’, or it could even say ‘animal’; we certainly didn’t notice it struggling to determine the difference between a human and a cat. There’s even a package detection algorithm, where a doorstep-pointed Arlo can spot when your latest online purchase has landed and alert you as much. That’s just cool.
If you have an Arlo camera plugged in via its optional magnetic cable, you can configure specific detection zones within its vision, meaning it’ll ignore any motion that happens outside of those areas – handy if you live near a busy road, for example. But the power requirement somewhat nullifies its otherwise wireless nature.
The only real issue we have, though, is with the cost. The package isn’t at all cheap in the first place, but if you want to store 4K recordings in the cloud you’ll need an additional subscription. And additional 4K camera units cost $449 each! Nonetheless, it’s hard to argue that the Arlo Ultra doesn’t earn its price tag.