No monthly fees, 2k video, and smart alerts make this a good doorbell cam
There's a lot to love about the Eufy wireless doorbell, especially the 2k video, local storage, and no monthly fees for advanced features such as person detection. While we had some issues with video quality when trying to talk with visitors, it's not alone in this - battery-powered cameras struggle to keep up, especially with high-quality video. If you need a wireless buzzer, and the Ring 3 Plus is too bulky or pricey for you, this is a great option.
Pros
- No monthly fees
- Excellent, 2K video
- Local storage
- Works with Alexa, Google
- Smart alerts
Cons
- No 3-second buffer
- Missing audio on recordings
- Have to take off to charge
- Video had interference issues
We’re not huge fans of completely wireless video doorbells here at Ambient Towers, but if we had to have one, Eufy’s latest offering – a 2K battery powered video doorbell – would be a good choice. And, at £129 (if you already have a Eufy HomeBase, £189 if you don’t), it’s the cheapest model on the market.
A wire-free doorbell gives you loads of flexibility for installation, but you have to remember to charge it and they suffer from the “back of the head” problem – where the doorbell takes so long to “wake-up” all you get is a recording of your visitor walking away.
Our top pick in this category – the Ring 3 Plus – fixes this problem (for a heftier price) with its pre-roll feature that uses extra, low-powered cameras to get the early action. Unfortunately Eufy hasn’t got a fix, but it does cost less, has 2K video, and offers local storage. Plus, because of the latter, its notifications are super speedy, which can help with making sure you don’t miss too much.
Essential reading: Best smart video doorbell cameras
There’s also – and this is the killer feature for a lot of people – no monthly fee. You don’t have to pay for cloud storage of your videos as you do with Ring, because it’s all stored locally on Eufy’s HomeBase.
The battery also claims a 6-month life and you can hardwire it to avoid having to charge it (a feature Ring also has). But if you have wires, get a wired doorbell (Eufy has one, which we’ve reviewed).
Double bubble: Eufy Video Doorbell Dual review
We’ve been living with the Eufy Video Doorbell 2k (Battery-Powered) for close to a month now. Read on for our full review and to see how it stacks up against the other battery-powered bell pushers, the Ring 3 Plus and the August View.
Eufy Video Doorbell 2K: Design and installation
The Eufy wireless doorbell has a pretty standard smart doorbell design. Slim and black, with a large button at the bottom and a round camera mimicking the button up top, it also has a big Eufy logo in the middle, which we hate, but they all do it.
HomeKit rival: Logitech Circle View Doorbell review
It’s quite large, taller than the Ring 3 but slimmer, and heftier than its wired Eufy counterpart. It feels substantial, made from quality plastic, and comes with an IP65 weather-resistance rating, so should stand up to pretty much anything Mother Nature can throw at it.
The big difference from any other doorbell we’ve tested is that it requires a Eufy HomeBase. Yes, another white box to plug into your router (although it will work off WiFi – 2.4GHz only – so you don’t have to give up a permanent spot on your router).
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The HomeBase looks nice enough and isn’t too large, and it also acts as an indoor chime for the doorbell (with a nice range of chime options) and can be the base for a whole Eufy system. It supports up to 16 of the company’s smart home devices, which includes a wide range of security cameras.
The base also acts as a siren for Eufy’s security system, plus it comes with a charging cable for recharging your doorbell.
Setup is straightforward and Eufy lays out all the steps clearly in a printed instruction book (a rarity nowadays). We appreciate all the labelling too – it can be hard to figure out exactly which screw goes where and Eufy helps with a color-by-numbers approach, as well as a few “This Side Up” labels (yes, we’ve managed to mount doorbells upside down before!).
An included mounting wedge lets you get a better angle for your setup, and as the doorbell is wireless you can put it anywhere you can get a screw in.
Smart lock verdict: Eufy Smart Lock Touch & WiFi review
There’s no included drillbit or screwdriver as there is with Ring, but everything else is here.
Pro tip – this doorbell takes a while to charge, so get it juiced up first – it charges from the HomeBase. You’ll also need to set the HomeBase up first, and it does need an ethernet connection to begin with. Once it’s wired up, use the Eufy app to scan the code on the doorbell and the HomeBase will emit a chime to sync to your buzzer and you’re up and running.
Eufy Video Doorbell 2K: Features and app
The Eufy battery powered doorbell can live stream in top quality 2560 x 1920, 2K resolution, with WDR (Wide Dynamic Range, a variant on HDR) to help illuminate shadows in poorly lit or backlit areas, it also has IR night vision, a 160-degree field of view, and a 4:3 aspect ratio. All this adds up to a very clear picture of your front door, and while not deep enough to get the entire front porch, it does show you a more head-to-toe view than Ring’s wider 16:9 option.
Rival: Netatmo Smart Video Doorbell review
The accompanying HomeBase acts as a charger (you need to remove the entire doorbell to charge it every 6 months or so), an indoor chime, and a local storage device, holding up to 16GB of recorded footage.
There are no monthly fees for viewing recorded video (which both Ring and August charge for), although you can opt for offsite cloud storage for $2.99 a month for 30 days of video history for just the doorbell, or $9.99 for up to 10 feeds.
Eufy’s app also offers customizable activity zones and a “human only” detection mode for no extra charge (you pay for these with Ring). Pre-recorded quick responses (which you can customize in the app) and the option of thumbnail notifications are two nice features that neither August nor Ring offers. You can also connect the Eufy to an existing mechanical or electric chime.
A privacy feature we like is that you can set the doorbell to turn off recording and/or notifications when you are home either on a schedule, using geofencing or by arming your system through the app. The app also has automation options, where you can have your other Eufy cameras start recording if your doorbell detects motion or if the button is pressed. This is something Ring offers too.
Budget option: Ring Wired Video Doorbell review
Overall the app is solid and speedy, and has a handy events view that shows you all motion or answered rings sorted by date, along with a clip and a close-up of any “human” it spotted, so you can see at a glance what’s been happening at your front door. There’s no scrollable timeline as there is with Ring though, and you have to click into each video to watch it.
The Eufy doorbell also works with Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa to allow streaming of your doorbell footage to a smart screen. Plus, Alexa integration works with Routines and doorbell announcements, so you can have a Routine start when someone presses the doorbell, as well as have any Echo speakers announce you have a visitor.
Eufy Video Doorbell 2k (wireless): Performance
We were very impressed with the responsiveness of the Eufy doorbell. Motion notifications came in super quick, followed by an alert that someone was ringing the doorbell that took us straight to a live view of our front door – with a clock running in the top of the screen showing how long it had been since the person pressed the doorbell.
All in it was a matter of seconds before we were able to see and talk to the visitor. We also really liked the option to enable rich notifications to send a snapshot of your visitor to your lock screen.
But once we answered the doorbell is where things started to fall down a little. While recorded video and regular live viewing footage was really crisp and clear, thanks to that 2k capability, footage from answering a “ring” often had flickering and distortion, particularly when we tried to have a conversation with the visitor.
Two way audio, while clear, was significantly delayed (4-5 seconds, an issue with all the doorbells we’ve tested), but the audio seemed to create some type of interference in the video feed.
You also can’t hear your audio on recordings, so if you record a visitor you just hear their side. The default recording lengths are set to very short following someone ringing the bell, meaning unless you manually start a recording from the app the video cuts off right around when you answer. You can tweak recording lengths in the app, but doing so will cause battery life to “decrease drastically” warns the app.
While the alerts were speedy, the lack of any pre-roll feature to record your visitor a few seconds before they press the doorbell (something Ring 3 Plus and Eufy’s wired counterpart offer) does mean we missed a few seconds of what could be crucial footage if you were dealing with a porch pirate.
Night vision on the other hand was superb, really bright and clear with barely any noise. If top quality images are your main aim, Eufy does deliver both in daylight and nighttime.
As to battery life – we are nowhere close to getting the 6 months Eufy optimistically promises (its HomeBase uses a proprietary communication protocol that’s more power-efficient than WiFi to help extend the buzzer’s battery life).
After 20 days, 1,205 detected events, and 352 recorded and saved events we are at 67% battery life – which is closer to 3 months of battery life. Still, that’s better than the mileage we get out of a single charge for Ring 3 or August View, which we have to charge every month (we have a very busy front door!).
However, we did not enable the Optimal Battery Life mode on Eufy – which turns off motion detection so you only get alerts when the doorbell is pressed – because that sort of takes away half the usefulness of the device – and our delivery drivers rarely ever press the doorbell.
Finally, the ability to store all your recordings locally is a huge privacy bonus. If you’re worried about your front door being beamed up to the cloud every day, Eufy is the one for you. It stores everything on the HomeBase and its 16GB of storage is ample to keep an eye on your porch for well over a month before writing over old videos.
