NEOS SMARTCAM

It’s a perfectly good smart camera for £20. We’re in no-brainer territory here…

A security camera that only costs £ 20 can’t be any good, right? Um, you might want to sit down for this…

Smart security is one of the biggest areas of home tech because, well, people don’t like the idea of getting robbed very much. That may sound a little flippant, but it’s a simple truth. Neos is a home insurance company that provides smart security and safety tech as part of its packages, and it has now made one of these products, the SmartCam, available to anyone for the ludicrous price of £19.99 (plus a fiver for delivery).

One vision

What you get for that price is on the more basic end of the smart-cam spectrum, but we can’t complain about the quality. The Neos SmartCam is an indoor-only camera with 1080p recording through a 110-degree lens.

Lots of equivalent standalone wide-angle cameras offer 180-degree vision, which is more flexible for seeing more with a single camera, but comes at a trade-off of detail (since the same amount of pixels have to show more stuff) – the SmartCam’s footage was a little sharper than the D-Link Omna 180 cameras from the very same corner position, for example, and still caught our whole room.

In terms of smarts, you get motion detection and noise detection (with notifications), the sensitivity of which can be tweaked. The motion detection lacks face or person detection, so you’ll get false alerts from rapid light changes or pets (there’s no way to set zones, either). That’s no surprise given the price, but more expensive options will give you extra control.

It also arms and disarms itself automatically based on location (which means it won’t send you notifications when you’re at home). This worked perfectly for us, and you can always arm or disarm manually in the app if you want.

The app itself is easy to use and supports multiple cameras. Recordings are 12 seconds long, triggered on detection, and are saved for 14 days in the cloud for free (with end-to-end encryption, according to Neos), but you can also record to microSD card.

The quality of recorded images is solid, and there’s night vision, which we’ve found roughly equivalent to other cams on the market that cost around £100. You also get two-way comms.

And that’s the gist, really. It’d be an average smart camera if it was more expensive… but it isn’t. In fact, it’s so cheap, the only reason not to get one is if you want a more expensive one.