Affordable Home Surveillance- YI Home Camera Review

Six months or so ago it was decided that we needed to put some security cameras inside our office. And I was tasked with finding good inexpensive cameras. I looked at a lot of different cameras: Dropcam Nest Cam, Foscam, Arlo, and others. The last Foscam cameras that I installed in my house work very well for their price point. That is until I found the Yi Home Camera.

I was lucky enough to pick up the Yi 720p Home Cameras for about $20 each. They normally cost $110 for a set of four cameras. I also picked up a couple of the Yi 1080p Home Cameras for $40 each. Even at full price, this is significantly cheaper than even the Foscam.

I was a little skeptical but eager to put them through their paces. I’m excited to tell you that I love these cameras. So much so that I just ordered more.

What I like about these cameras is how easy they are to set up. Sharing access with someone else is just as easy. I think their app functions quite well for a basic camera. The motion-sensing notifications are awesome and work really well. You know when you start to use something like this there are always more features that you want, and I have used other apps with other cameras that had features that I liked that this app does not. I like being able to have 46 cameras on the screen on my device and see all those cameras live. I have not found a way to do that with this camera, but I have not found a way to do this on other plug-and-play cameras either. They also have a downloadable desktop app. Like the phone app, it works adequately, with things I would change if I could.

This is an outstanding value for cameras, and the quality of the pictures are awesome. These are so inexpensive I can’t see anybody who didn’t need a nanny camera or babysitter camera not be able to afford these. We put inexpensive SD cards in them so we can record without having to pay any monthly or yearly cloud service fee, which has worked out great for us. We can look back a week, two weeks, three weeks, or more, depending on the size of the SD card installed. On the 1080p camera, a 32 GB SD card should give you about 100 hours of recording.

Now let me tell you why we went with some 720p cameras and some 1080p cameras. The individual offices where I work are not all that big. So the cameras going into those spaces are not covering a big space, and the 720p is more than adequate for those smaller spaces. We also have a camera shooting down the hallway, and that’s a farther distance. That distance spans probably ten offices, and so we use the 1080p camera so we could clearly see somebody at the other end of the hallway.

I have recommended these to friends and family; I can’t say enough about them. If you want video in your house (or outside your house), and you don’t want to spend a lot of money, these are awesome. The only thing you have to hook up to these cameras physically connect these cameras to his power. Yi also makes outdoor cameras that are waterproof. These cameras all have night vision that works surprisingly well.

There are a few accessories for this camera that you might be interested in. There are a couple of different mounting accessories that give you more flexibility in positioning the camera once it’s mounted. I’ll link to those down below. There are also silicone skins in different colors available for this camera. We use these to help our cameras blend in wherever they are placed. Get them before somebody realizes they’re giving these things away way too cheaply.