Eufy has a smart plan to keep your packages safe
With the two big names in doorbells, Ring and Nest, the competition needs to stick out in different ways and that’s what the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual does. With its dual cameras, you get high-resolution video pointing forwards and a close-up of what’s happening outside of your door. The AI package features are genuinely useful, particularly if you have lots of parcels turning up when you’re out. With no subscription fees, there are no ongoing costs for this camera, although an option to upgrade the onboard storage would have been nice.
Pros
- Clever AI features
- Excellent video quality
- Bottom camera is genuinely useful
- Fast response times
Cons
- Can't upgrade storage
- No HomeKit integration
Eufy, part of the big Anker umbrella, revealed the Eufy Security Video Doorbell Dual back at CES 2022 in January.
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Now on sale for $259.99 / £229, the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual takes the 2K video skills from the original Eufy Video Doorbell 2K but adds in a second, 1080p, downwards facing camera to keep an eye on your packages.
If you think about it, video doorbells don’t tell you what’s going on at your front door but what’s happening on the approach to your door.
That’s fine for visitors but not so good if you want to see what’s happening to packages. The Eufy Video Doorbell Dual tackles this by adding monitoring what’s actually happening on your doorstep.
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Does this make it the ultimate tool to prevent theft?
Find out in our full Eufy Video Doorbell Dual review…
Eufy Video Doorbell Dual: Design and installation
Although it has two cameras, the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual isn’t that much bigger than the regular single-camera Eufy Video Doorbell 2K.
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That’s not to say it’s a small doorbell: long and quite deep, it’s quite a big product; fortunately, it’s not too thick, so should fit on most door frames, plus there’s an angle adaptor in the box if needed.
Although it can be wired into place, the doorbell can be battery powered so needs no cables. It’ll just need removing every few months (Eufy says six months, and I estimate this is about right) to charge it; if you wire it, the internal battery is topped up automatically.
Once in place, the wireless doorbell can’t connect to your home network but connects directly to the Eufy Homebase, a second box that plugs into your router using Ethernet.
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That means one more box in the house, but the flip side is that you get a dedicated wireless signal to boost signal strength, and the Homebase has 16GB of storage included for subscription-free recording.
That should be enough for 90 days of storage, assuming 25 events per day at 15 seconds each.
Getting everything connected and into the app is straightforward and this doorbell can be installed within 30 minutes.
Eufy Video Doorbell Dual: Features
While the Eufy Video Doorbell 2K was smart, the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual is smarter yet, with more AI features.
The most useful of these are the package detection options. While the Nest Doorbell (battery) and Ring Video Doorbell 4 may have package detection, they only warn you about deliveries, not necessarily what’s happened after a package has been dropped.
Eufy goes further, although the Video Doorbell Dual does also send a notification to tell you when a package has been delivered.
Once dropped off, there are three AI features to help. Package Live Check Assistance is available when you use the live view: it highlights a package and then brings up extra information that tells you when the box was delivered and how many times it has been approached. Tap any of these bits of information to view the related footage, such as the package being delivered.
Uncollected Package Alert needs to be set to go off at a set time, and sends a message about any boxes you’ve forgotten to take in (or, if you’re on holiday it works as a useful alert to get a neighbor to pop around).
Package detection is very reliable, although AI and the camera have their limitations. One courier left a box a way out from the front door, so the doorbell’s delivery camera couldn’t see it to keep an eye on it. Still, that’s one case, but in the majority of deliveries the Video Doorbell Dual does a great job.
Package Guarding plays an automated message when someone comes close to a package. That tends to mean anyone else coming to do the door after a package has been delivered, so can be a bit annoying depending on how many visitors you have.
I didn’t find Loitering Detection, which plays an automated message to people who are hanging around outside of your house (within 6ft of the doorbell and for more than 15s by default), that useful either. I prefer the outside of the house to be quieter.
Eufy has added facial recognition into the mix. As with the Nest Doorbell, you can add profiles for detected people and get notifications of who’s at the front door.
The feature is in beta at the moment but worked reliably during testing, letting us know who was at the front door once profiles had been created for detected faces.
For general motion detection, the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual uses radar to detect movement (similar to the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2), and then PIR to pick up body heat.
Combined with the people-only detection mode, the doorbell is resolutely not that annoying only really sending useful alerts, rather than warning about every person that walked in front of the house.
If you need to go further, you can modify the detection range and areas, and set activity zones to watch.
Video clips go into the simple Events section of the app. This isn’t available from the live view, annoyingly, but from the app’s home screen.
Dive into this and clips are sorted by day, and can be filtered by event type: people and packages for this doorbell.
Each clip also has some useful tags that tell you what’s happening in the clip, such as a package being collected or delivered.
When someone presses the doorbell it rings your phone, and the call comes in quickly. I’d say that the short delay is better here than on the Ring Video Doorbell 4.
You can answer the call but quick responses let you send a response without having to talk (“Excuse me, can I help you”, “Please leave it at the door” and “We’ll be right there”). These are similar to the options for the Nest doorbell.
Of course, you can answer the call and have a chat with the person: the video and audio quality is excellent.
Amazon Alexa support lets the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual ‘ring’ your Echo speakers, which is very useful as the Homebase isn’t that loud as a chime.
You can’t answer from an Echo Show, though, as only Ring doorbells support this; you can only ask Alexa to view the live stream from the camera.
Google Assistant support lets you stream video to a smart display. There’s no HomeKit integration, even though some of Eufy’s cameras support Apple’s ecosystem.
In the app, answering a call or viewing the live stream shows you video from both of the cameras at once. It’s quite cool being able to see so much.
Eufy Video Doorbell Dual: Performance
The main video feed comes at a relatively high 2K resolution. I found footage generally sharper than much of the competition (the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 aside) and detailed throughout the picture.
Color balance and exposure were spot-on, too.
The bottom camera shoots at 1080p, but its limited field of view means that the video here looks sharp. This camera is more about keeping an eye on packages, so really doesn’t need more resolution.
As it’s so focused on one area, it’s much easier to use this camera’s view to see the details of the delivered package.
If there’s enough ambient light, the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual can shoot full color at night, although the video tends to get quite noisy. Mostly, the camera resorts to using its IR LEDs, shooting in black and white.
This loses some detail in the picture, but the resulting video is still relatively sharp.
