Netatmo Welcome review: This camera promises personalized security, but its facial-recognition feature falls short
In the real world, however, the Netatmo struggles to get to know your family, and it’s missing many of the features that other cameras in its price range deliver.
The Netatmo Welcome looks nothing like a home-security camera. The indoor/outdoor device is housed in a tall, thin aluminum cylinder with a metallic finish much like its sister product, the Netatmo Urban Weather station. The design makes it blend easily with other knick-knacks in your home, and it reduces that feeling of Orwellian dread more-conspicuous security cameras can produce in your family and guests.
Netatmo Welcome must be plugged in to a power outlet as it doesn’t have a battery backup. The camera also has a USB port, so you can connect it to a computer, and though it’s designed for Wi-Fi, it includes an ethernet port if you prefer a wired connection.
The camera’s 1080p streaming, 130-degree field of view,m and infrared LEDs for night vision put it on par with the Nest Cam, but that’s where the similarities to the current gold standard in home security-cameras end. Netatmo Welcome detects motion, but not sound; and it has no two-way audio for remote communication.
It’s marquee feature is facial recognition that can distinguish up to 16 people. Once the Netatmo Welcome “learns” faces, you can customize the alerts triggered by each individual. Ostensibly, this is so you can keep tabs on children and elderly parents, but it should also help cut down on false alarms when a “known” person passes in front of the camera.
Unlike most other home-security cameras at this price point, the Netatmo Welcome doesn’t support any cloud recording plans. Instead, all video is recorded locally to an included 8GB SD card that slots into the back of the camera. The benefits of this setup are obvious: It eliminates the cost of monthly storage fees, and keeps the security of your video in your hands. But it also means that if an intruder takes your camera, you lose all forensic evidence of the break-in.
The Netatmo Welcome had one of the easiest setups of any camera I tested. Other than the peculiar requirement to turn the camera upside down for the duration of the setup process, there was nothing remarkable about adding the camera to my Netatmo account and home Wi-Fi network. The Netatmo Welcome mobile app (there’s no web option) walked me through the steps and the whole operation was completed in less than two minutes.
Netatmo doesn’t include any wall-mounting or magnetic accessories, so you’re limited to placing it on flat surfaces. I positioned it on our living room entertainment center one bustling school morning, and within minutes it was sending regular motion alerts.
It also immediately started trying to recognize faces. When I first opened the app, the home screen presented me with a series of snapshots of myself and each of my family members, each with a question mark next to it identifying them as unknown faces. Each of these snapshots represented an event where the camera picked up human features. Tapping on a face takes you to the video clip of the triggering event. Long-pressing a face, allows you to identify that person.
When you start the face-identification process, you’re presented with three options: “identify,” “forget this person,” or “not a face.” As the camera never recognized my dog or a lamp as a face, I never had to use the last one. Selecting “identify” gives you two choices: Build a new profile, or correct the camera if it didn’t recognize someone it should have.
Building a profile allows you to name the person and add a photo, either the snapshot taken by the camera or a different picture. If there are multiple shots of the same person marked as identified, you can add each one to that person’s profile. This will help increase their “profile strength,” represented by a meter of one to five bars that indicates how well the Netatmo system knows them.
Based on my usage, building that strength takes time. The system learns to better recognize a face as it’s increasingly exposed to it at different angles and in different lightings. I also had to do a fair amount of correcting the system when it marked an previously identified face as unknown. According to Netatmo, it can take a couple of weeks to build a full-strength profile. But considering it “learns” primarily by capturing fuzzy images of people in motion, it’s tough to imagine its recognition will ever be as foolproof as we’d like.
All recognized faces are designated as either Home or Away. Anytime the camera sees a face, that person is identified in the app as being home. “Away” is a misnomer; the system says a person is away if it hasn’t seen them for a certain period of time, even if they’re actually home but out of view of the camera. The default is four hours, though you can change this in the app to be anywhere from one to 12 hours in 15-minute intervals.
You can also personalize settings for each person in their individual profile. By default, you will receive notifications for each person when they arrive home, but you can turn this off. You can also set a time range for when you want to be notified, say between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. when your kids usually arrive home from school. Recording parameters for known faces are also set here: You can have an individual recorded always, never, or “only on arrival.”
The camera’s included SD card can reportedly hold up to 100 clips and delete them, starting with the oldest video, when it nears capacity. Given that the camera only records when it detects an event, it’s unlikely you’ll fill the card quickly; but you can always swap in a new card if you do. Just be aware that each time you take a card out, the camera loses its memory of who’s who, and you’ll need to retrain it to recognize all those faces.
The point of face recognition is obviously to make sure the camera understands who should be in your home and who shouldn’t. But the system offers several customization options for dealing with the latter as well.
You can tell the Netatmo Welcome to always record unknown faces or only when no one is home. You can also choose to record and/or be notified of motion detection “never,” “always,” or “only when nobody is home.”
The camera’s live-feed screen is similar to that of other home security cameras. A video window sits on top of a timeline of motion and face events. Pressing an event takes you to video of the incident. Live video is exceptionally clear with no fish-eye distortion in either day or night modes. There’s no digital zoom feature, though, so you can’t hone in on specific areas of the panorama. Video playback is crisp and smooth.
Aside from managing profiles and recording settings, the app can be used to turn the camera on and off. You can set a four-digit security code for accessing the on/off switch to ensure unauthorized people can’t deactivate your camera.
The Netatmo Welcome gets points for trying to make the home-security experience more reassuring than alarming. Everything from the product’s name to the extensive personalization options seeks to remove—or at least to downplay—the creepy surveillance aspect of home monitoring. Unfortunately, the system’s lynchpin—facial recognition—is far from reliable and results in exactly the kind of vague alerts it promises to eliminate.
Add to this the fact that the camera lacks many common home-security camera features—including sound detection, two-way audio, and cloud backup—and it becomes a really tough sell, especially compared to such stronger competitors as the Nest Cam and Simplicam.