Expert's Rating
Pros
- Wide-angle and telephoto coverage
- Excellent image quality
- No cloud subscription required
Cons
- Pet detection produces many false alarms
- Manual pan-and-tilt responds slowly to input
- No Apple Homekit support
- Not the least bit visually discreet
Our Verdict
The dual-lens pan-and-tilt Eufy Indoor Cam S350 is a great option for anyone who wants to improve their home security without spending a boatload of money.
Best Prices Today: Eufy Indoor Cam S350
Because the spaces inside our homes are generally smaller than those outside them, indoor cameras typically have narrower viewing angles than their outdoor counterparts. But broad camera coverage is important indoors, too—after all, a burglar is unlikely to confine their activity to just one room. So how do you expand the scope of your surveillance without investing in a fleet of cameras?
The Eufy Indoor Cam S350 is one effective solution. It uses a pair of high-resolution lenses to provide simultaneous wide-angle and telephoto surveillance. In effect, it allows you to monitor much more of your home’s interior while crisply capturing the small details that are so important when documenting a crime.
Features
The device features a 4K wide-angle lens with a 130-degree field of view that provides broad home coverage, and a 2K telephoto lens with “8x hybrid” zoom—essentially 3x optical zoom coupled with 8x digital zoom—for close-up views. The camera can also pan 360 degrees and provide floor-to-ceiling views with 75 degrees of tilt. This last feature can be used with AI tracking to automatically follow humans and pets that enter the camera’s viewing field.
This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best home security cameras.
Eufy
Other features include sound detection, motion zone support, black-and-white night vision, a mic and speaker for two-way audio, and a siren. Alexa and Google Assistant smart displays are supported but not Apple Homekit.
It’s nice—and increasingly rare—to find a security camera that doesn’t lock you into a cloud subscription. The Eufy S350 allows you to store videos locally on a microSD card. It only supports capacities up to 128GB, though, which is a little stingy for a camera that captures high-resolution video. As an alternative, you can use the camera with Eufy’s HomeBase ($150), which can host up to 16TB of encrypted network-attached storage via a user-supplied hard disk or solid-state drive.
If you prefer the convenience of cloud storage, Eufy does offer a reasonably priced cloud-based subscription. The Eufy Basic plan unlocks cloud storage for 30 days of recordings for $3/month or $30/year per camera. The Premier plan covers up to 10 Eufy cameras, providing 30 days of recordings for each one, for $10/month or $100/year.
Setup and usage
Connecting the camera to your Wi-Fi network is a quick process guided by the Eufy Security mobile app, during which it scans for your network and prompts you to enter login credentials. Notably, the Eufy S350 supports dual-band Wi-Fi 6, which should translate to better image quality and loading speeds.
You can place the camera anywhere it has easy access to AC power. The camera’s pedestal makes any tabletop surface an easy option, but a bracket and mounting hardware are supplied for wall installations.
The live camera view can be configured to display both lens feeds side by side or one at a time. In the latter case, you simply toggle between the wide-angle and telephoto lenses by pressing a 1x or 3x button, respectively. While operating the camera you can also manually pan-and-tilt it via a joystick-style overlay. It takes a couple of seconds to respond to your touch though, so some patience is required lest the camera overshoot the target.
You can view the camera’s lens feeds side by side or one at a time. Options for customizing detection and other features are provided in the app settings menu.
Michael Ansaldo/Foundry
Image quality is excellent, and person detection generally worked well. Pet detection, however, was a bust in my tests. Not only did it fail to recognize any of my three cats even once, but it also regularly triggered the camera to rotate to a spot where there was no moving object of any kind—it would then push me a notification alerting me that “a pet has been spotted.”
The AI tracking feature does a good job of following moving objects until they’re out of frame. While that can be critical for capturing evidence should an intruder get inside your home, it’s just as useful for keeping tabs on children or elderly adults who still need some supervision when they’re home alone.
Should you buy the Eufy Indoor Cam S350?
The Eufy Indoor Cam costs $129.99. That’s a good value considering the top-notch image quality and ample security features. Assuming the pet detection algorithm improves in future updates, there’s no reason this camera shouldn’t be on your short list of home security options.