I tested this pretty porchlight camera. It’s missing something

Floodlight cameras almost always have one thing in common: They expect you to tolerate their industrial appearance for a large pool of light. And that’s fine if you need a lot of light and you’re willing to accept their beastly looks to get it. But if you want something more understated, the Eufy Wired Wall Light Cam S100 might be for you.

Like the $270 Netatmo Smart Outdoor Camera I reviewed way back in 2016, the far more affordable Eufy Wired Wall Light Cam S100 isn’t a true floodlight; it’s more of a porch light with an onboard camera. That camera is somewhat disguised by its placement between its stacked lighting elements.

The middle section housing the camera can be twisted right and left to aim its lens. The two conical luminaires above and below the camera can likewise be twisted independently to cast their light in different directions. You can even turn them around to face the wall on which the camera is mounted to cast ambient light—from a palette of nearly 1 million colors, no less. You can also adjust the color temperature of its white light.

Specifications

In addition to being significantly less expensive than the Netatmo product, Eufy’s light is slightly brighter—1200 vs. 1000 lumens—and its camera captures video in 2K resolution (which Eufy defines as 2048 x 1536 pixels). The camera in the Netatmo product is limited to 1920 x 1080 pixels. Eufy’s camera can also cover more territory, thanks to its 160-degree field of view (the Smart Outdoor Camera is limited to just 100 degrees).

The lights on both cameras are fully dimmable, and both cameras provide onboard storage—4GB of eMMC in Eufy’s product, a 32GB microSD card in Netatmo’s—in both cases eliminating the need to sign up for a subscription plan to store recordings in the cloud. Eufy goes farther by offering network-attached storage in the form of its HomeBase 3 product, which can accommodate up to a 16TB mechanical or solid-state drive.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Netatmo, on the other hand, supports Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video standard. Both cameras are compatible with Amazon Alexa and Google Home. But homeowners who are firmly in Apple’s smart home ecosystem will prefer Netatmo’s product.

The S100 carries an IP65 weatherization rating. Our IP code decoder tells us it’s impervious to dust ingress and that it can withstand water jets projected from any direction. That should be more than enough protection from the elements.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best home security cameras.

Installation

A quirky installation process is another characteristic that Eufy’s camera shares with the Netatmo device, although I didn’t find it to be quite as difficult to install. As with the much-less-attractive Eufy Floodlight Camera E340, setting up the Eufy Wired Wall Light Cam S100 starts with adding it to the Eufy app by scanning a QR code on the back of the light before you connect it to your home’s electrical wiring and mount it to the wall. This entails plugging one end of the provided Micro-USB cable into a socket on the back of the camera and connecting the other end to a USB power adapter, which is not supplied. When the LED on the camera begins blinking red, the camera is ready for setup.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Next, you’ll open the Eufy Security app on your smartphone, click “add device,” and choose “Wall Light Cam” from the products listed. Scan the QR code printed on the back of the device (or in the user manual) and the app will step you through the rest of the initial setup, including onboarding it to your Wi-Fi network (only 2.4GHz networks are supported). Only once those steps are completed will you attach the camera’s mounting bracket to the wall, such that the hot, neutral, and ground wires pass through a hole in the center of the bracket.

As with Netatmo’s camera, the three wires emerging from inside the wall don’t get connected with wire nuts to matching wires on the light; instead, you’ll push them into their respective sockets in a plastic wiring block. When you push the light onto the bracket, hot, neutral, and ground pins will match up with the three holes on the right-hand side of the wiring block. And that leads me to one of my biggest complaints about the S100: It takes significant pressure to push the light into bracket on the wall, and you’ll need to maintain that pressure with one hand while you screw small set screws on the right- and left-hand sides of the bracket to hold the whole thing together.

If you can, find a helper to hold the light in place while you put in those set screws. It will save you a lot of frustration.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Day-to-day use

Michael Brown/Foundry

The Eufy Wired Wall Light Cam S100 is a good porchlight, capable of illuminating a circle of space around it, so don’t expect it to perform like a powerful floodlight. You can program the S100’s lights to turn on and off on a dusk-to-dawn schedule; or if you don’t need constant night-time illumination, you can configure the lights to turn on only in response to motion. The device is outfitted with a passive-infrared motion sensor with a range of 30 feet.

The camera can recognize human motion and can be set to record clips only when it detects people in its field of view. It can send push notifications with thumbnail previews of what set it off. Two-way talk is supported, and you can fire off a 105dB siren if some miscreant won’t bugger off when you yell at them over the speaker.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Launch the Eufy app and you can customize the light’s motion sensitivity, indicate whether you want it to react to human only or other types of motion, and you can also create activity zones in the event there are trees and shrubs in the camera’s view that you want it to ignore.

The 2K camera records crisp, high-quality video with excellent color, so you’ll have no trouble identifying people’s facial features. The camera’s night vision is also very good, although most people will configure its motion sensor to turn its light on at night anyway.

Should you buy a Eufy Wired Wall Light S100?

Installing the Eufy Wired Wall Light S100 requires a little patience, given its tricky set screws, but don’t let that criticism discourage you from buying it—especially when it’s on sale (since it’s been on the market for a while).

While you won’t get a lot of sophisticated features with this camera/light—there’s no facial recognition, for example, and it can’t tell you if someone has left a package on your doorstep, or if a car has entered your driveway—it nails the basics at a very good price, and its attractive industrial design doesn’t scream “you’re under surveillance!” to your guests.

If you need a security cam/light combo at a location that’s not already wired for power, Eufy offers a battery-powered companion product in the Eufy Security Solar Wall Light Cam S120. It’s not nearly as bright, producing just 300 lumens, but it has an integrated solar panel that keeps its battery topped off.