Eufy Floodlight Cam 2

The Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 combines a high-definition outdoor security camera with motion-activated floodlighting. Footage is saved on the camera’s own 4GB of storage, and there’s no way to upgrade or save footage to the cloud. Video quality is excellent and the camera easy to configure, but the motion sensor for the floodlight is a little sensitive, so position this camera carefully. If you’re after a well-priced, subscription-free outdoor camera with a floodlight, then this is a great choice.

Introduction

Eufy’s Floodlight Camera 2K , now rebranded as the Floodlight Cam 2, is the perfect security upgrade for existing external lighting. Combining two powerful, posable LED floodlights with a high-definition security camera, it provides light for your security and convenience, and a deterrent to would-be thieves. Infrared lights let it record unobtrusively at night, while its motion-activated floodlights enable full-colour video – and act as a highly visible deterrent. Unlike Google’s Nest Cam with Floodlight, you don’t need a subscription to get all its features, but while that means no ongoing costs, this camera isn’t without limitations.

Design and installation

• Good quality junction box and metal floodlights
• Relatively simple installation
• More visible than a standard outdoors camera

The Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 makes a good first impression. Mounted onto a large junction box, its two metal floodlights are highly poseable thanks to two ball joint connectors, similar to those on the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro. The camera is on the large side, in part due to its wide infra-red motion detector, but the whole thing feels well made. Although much more visible than a simple outdoors camera, its all-white finish should look smart on the side of most houses or outbuildings.

This camera is designed to connect to external wiring suitable for any outdoor light. This makes it particularly easy to install if you’re upgrading an existing floodlight or light: simply switch off the relevant lighting circuit at the fuse box (or the whole house if you want to be extra cautious), remove the old light, and connect up the Floodlight Camera’s baseplate.

I found the wiring and installation straightforward with help from the setup guide. However, if you’re unfamiliar with electrical wiring, you might want to enlist help from an electrician – especially if you don’t have existing wiring.

You certainly need to be careful when connecting the camera cables to its backplate connector – I didn’t engage the supplied hook properly and dropped the heavy camera to the ground. That this resulted in only a minor cosmetic mark on one of the floodlights is testament to the quality of their spray-coated finish.

Once connected, the junction box is closed using a long central screw, enclosing the wiring and leaving a professional looking finish. When powered up, the camera is easy to connect through the Eufy app, where it will appear alongside any other Eufy security devices.

Features

• Bright floodlights
• Reliable motion detection including human only filtering
• On-camera video storage

If, like me, you’re using the Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 to replace an underperforming outdoor light, you’ll be extremely pleased with the result. It’s easy to pose its two floodlights to provide full illumination to a patio area, or good light to the rest of a small to medium garden. They’re powerful lights, but using the manual controls you can adjust them down to quite a low level, more suitable for an evening gathering outside.

On the surface of it, the camera itself offers comparatively basic motion detection features. You can add up to two activity zones, letting you exclude, say, a public path next to your front garden. There’s a choice of All Motion detection, or human-only filtering through the on-camera AI. This won’t recognise a specific person, but it does let the camera filter out pets or the movement of shrubs or litter.

I configured the activity zones to exclude a parasol that billows in the breeze, after which I found I needed to drop the sensitivity by one notch. After that, switched to human-only detection, I experienced no false alarms and no missed events over a period of several weeks.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same for the motion-activated floodlights. These are controlled by a separate infrared sensor for which you can’t set up exclusion zones or adjust the sensitivity. Our parasol triggered so many false alarms that I had to disable the feature. The lights’ sensitivity was fine with the parasol removed, but it’s a shame that they’re not controlled by the same AI and exclusion zones that work so well with the camera, or have separate motion control as you get with Ring’s Floodligth Cam.

When triggered by motion, you can set the floodlights to remain on for between 30 seconds to 15 minutes. You can also set their brightness independently of the other triggers – useful if you want to send a full-beam message to prowlers, but keep the lights low at other times. I also liked this camera’s ambient light feature, which lets you configure the lights at your chosen level on a schedule, or between sunset and sunrise. It’s a useful feature to have if you want constant visibility of a dark drive or pathway.

Eufy says that this camera’s 4GB of onboard storage is enough for almost three weeks’ recording of 30, one-minute clips a day. Covering a private garden, it’s more likely to be months before the camera starts overwriting older clips. You can download any footage from the Eufy app if you need to store it permanently.

Like other Eufy cameras there’s no ongoing subscription cost, but the Floodlight Cam 2 does miss a couple of tricks. It can’t transfer recordings to a Eufy HomeBase, which is a shame if you’ve got other Eufy security products such as the Video Doorbell 2K. More significantly, it doesn’t support the ONVIF or RTSP protocols, so you can’t use it to constantly stream video to a NAS or other surveillance controller. On the plus side, it supports both Alexa and Google Assistant, so you can use either to show you live footage.

Video quality

This Floodlight Cam 2 is an upgrade over the cheaper Eufy Floodlight Camera, which offers only 1,080p recording and doesn’t have human detection. Both cover a 130-degree field of view, which is plenty if you’re mounting in the inside corner of an area, but might leave unfilmed regions if mounted in the middle of a wall. Faced with the latter issue, I managed to find an angle that covered a back gate, and the vast majority of a small urban garden.

This camera connects to an existing wireless network and, compared to some other devices, it coped well with signal attenuation from our thick property walls. It was comfortably able to stream 2K colour footage at 15fps without stuttering. Video quality was high, with sufficient resolution to clearly capture facial details and fine movement, if not the outright crispest video I’ve seen from a security camera.

At dusk, the Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 switches to infrared illumination and black and white video, unless its floodlights are on due to the schedule or manual control. As with most cameras, infrared mode works best when there are no nearby objects to reflect back a portion of the light – with our parasol in place I found the camera struggled to resolve more distant objects.

With the parasol gone, infrared footage was sharp and detailed, without too much blur on moving objects.

This camera’s floodlights allow it to capture extremely clear colour footage on even the darkest nights. With its motion-triggered lighting at its maximum, the camera happily captured anything up to several metres away in glorious detail. Only at the dimmest settings did videos suffer some softening and lack of detail, while far-flung objects were much less visible.

This camera’s speaker lets you chat with or challenge whoever’s in range. But while the camera’s microphone can capture quiet conversations from several metres away, it’s not well-shielded against wind. On a south-facing, south coast wall, our recordings were often punctuated by the bluster of sea breezes.

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