Rating: 3.5
Author: Paul Lamkin

Great value 2K security camera put to the test

Pan-and-tilt certainly has its place, but it’s slightly frustrating that the Ezviz C6 2K+ doesn’t have a home position to return to. Point the camera in the wrong direction and it’s possible that it will miss motion. If you’re careful with it and always remember to refocus on the areas you want, then the camera is pretty good. Smart object detection is reliable, particularly for detecting people and only delivering relevant alerts. Image quality is pretty good, too, shooting at a high 2K resolution. With offline recording as an option, the Ezviz C6 2K+ is good value and can be run with no ongoing costs, even if the clips are a little fiddly to download.

Pros

Smart object detection
Smooth scrolling
Subscription free recordings
Great value

Cons

Fiddly to download video
No home position for camera

Pan and tilt cameras can make a lot of sense, letting you adjust what you can see remotely to see what’s going on in your house; no more annoying situations where the action has taken place just out of shot.

The Ezviz C6 2K+ is the Chinese company’s latest, and smartest home camera, adding some clever automatic tracking into the mix, alongside 2K video.

At $129.99 / £89.99, it’s more affordable than the Ezviz C8PF and the Ezviz BC1, sitting around halfway up the Ezviz line-up.

If you’re after a budget option from the brand, check out the likes of the Ezviz CTQ3N or the C6CN.

Affordable rivals: Best budget smart security cameras

The competition: The best smart home security cameras

The option for cloud or microSD card recording adds flexibility, but the lack of a home position for the camera does somewhat limit its usefulness.

Ezviz C6 2K+: Design

About the same size as a baseball, the Ezviz C6 2K+ is a handful of a camera.

It’s designed to rotate on its base, while the central section that holds the camera lens can move up and down; it even shows a cute sleepy fast while in the privacy mode with the camera moving behind the fascia.

With the Ezviz C6 2K+ in this mode, you can get to the microSD card slot, used for offline recording. There’s no card in the box but you can add one yourself up to 256GB.

Although the camera has a nominal 92-degree viewing angle, the ability to pan 351-degrees and tilt 133 degrees means that you can capture a full 360-degrees plus a good range of up/down, too.

The C6 records footage at 2K+, or 2560 x 1600 pixels.

Where you place this camera isn’t that important, then, as you can always use the app to adjust the view.

As with the outdoor Ezivic C8C, the C6 2K+ has an Ethernet port if you want to go wired, although this disappointingly lacks power over Ethernet; for most cases, using Wi-Fi is far easier.

Ezviz C6 2K+: Features

This camera is controlled through the Ezviz app, which makes it quick to add the C6 2K+. Once in there, it appears in the same way as any other camera from the company, with a thumbnail preview that you tap to go into live view.

As with Ezviz’s previous pan and tilt cameras, there’s an on-screen joystick to move the camera’s lens, with it smoothly moving around to capture a different view.

You can also record a 360-degree image of your room, and tap where you want to move the camera.

Pan and tilt is the main reason to buy a camera like this, with the novelty never quite wearing off.

Once again, the big shame is that there’s no option to set a home point for the camera to return to: automatically would be best, but even a manual option would help.

If the camera can’t move back to a position, there’s a chance that it will be facing away from an important area that you want to monitor.

When the Ezviz C6 2K+ detects movement, there are two tracking options. The first is to have the camera physically move and follow the movement around.

That’s pretty cool, although the lack of a home position to return to may mean that the C6 2K+ ends up pointing in a random direction.

The second option is to track and zoom without moving the camera. I think you’re better off capturing everything at maximum resolution and zooming in manually.

To prevent too many alerts, the camera has Intelligent Detection modes. Human Shape Detection picks up people only and is pretty reliable in my experience. Pet detection picks up humans and dogs.

There are no activity zones, but as the camera can’t return to a home position they wouldn’t be that useful: as the camera moves, the zones also move. Overall, smart image detection (people in particular) makes more sense.

Then, there are a couple of modes that probably aren’t so useful. Image Change Detection simply looks for any changes in the picture, but this can lead to a lot of notifications.

Likewise, Sound sensitivity isn’t that useful. On the Medium setting, the app says the camera will pick up ‘speaking loudly’. I’d leave these two off.

Footage can be recorded to the cloud if you have a subscription (it costs between $3.99 and $15.99 monthly for cloud storage, depending on how many cameras and the length of storage you require). Go with a more expensive camera from a bigger name and the cloud costs are more reasonable.

You may want to stick with a microSD card. Clips are displayed as thumbnails that you can tap to view, and hit the Download button to save.

Video saves to the app’s library, and I had to into this to save the video to my phone’s photo library. That feels like an extra step that doesn’t need to be there.

Gesture recognition is the final type. Turn this on and when someone waves at the camera, it triggers a call through the app.

Notifications can be scheduled so that you can have quiet time when you don’t want alerts. And, the camera can be manually placed into privacy mode, although the option to schedule this would be more useful.

Ezviz C6 2K+: Video quality

Shooting at a 2K resolution, the Ezviz C6 2K+ has plenty of detail in its images. During daylight, the picture is very detailed, right into the background.

When pointing directly at a window, the picture lost some detail, making the interior look dark and the window bright, but re-angling the camera fixes that.

At night, the camera uses its IR lights to shoot in black and white. The detail is pretty good, even if the image gets a little softer.