Arlo Ultra Security Camera 4K HDR (2nd Gen, 2020 Release) + SmartHub, Battery Power, Emergency Response, AI Event Captions, 1-Month Trial of Secure Plan, 180° Field of View, 2 Cam, White

Where do I even begin with the Arlo Ultra 2 Spotlight Camera? Let's just say it's my new favorite reality show. Move over, Kardashians! This camera has become the star of my life. Not only does it capture crystal-clear video, but it also has a hidden talent for catching unexpected 'performances' in my neighborhood. I've had a long-standing suspicion about my Karen-of-a-neighbor's misdeeds, and boy, was I right! Thanks to the Arlo Ultra 2, I finally have the proof I needed. It not only caught her dogs doing their business on my lawn but also exposed her doing something I can't unsee. Let's just say she was mooning the world with her pants down. The image quality is so good that I could practically count the daisies on her underwear. It's like watching an episode of 'America's Funniest Home Videos,' except my yard is the stage. I've never laughed so hard and simultaneously cringed in my life. But hey, it's not all about my neighbor's embarrassing escapades. The Arlo Ultra 2 is a top-notch security camera too! With its spotlights and advanced features, it's like having a mini Hollywood set in my backyard. And the best part? It's super easy to set up and control, even for tech-challenged folks like me. So, if you're tired of boring security cameras and want some entertainment with a side of surveillance, the Arlo Ultra 2 Spotlight Camera is the way to go. Trust me, you'll never look at your neighborhood the same way again!" L

My review is two part: (1) the product itself, (2) Arlo overall. In summary, the product itself is not really worth it unless you just want to be able to check in on the live feed and get motion alerts for things happening immediately in its focused area. Otherwise, expect to pay out the nose trying to get a system working the way you want it, only to find out it doesn't work the way you think it will. The product: 4K recording is good during the day. When cars pull directly into my driveway I can make out the license plate number fairly clearly. The same cannot be said for the night time footage. A license plate could only be clearly read if the floodlight turns on and the car headlights aren't reflecting too brightly. The motion detect is hit or miss, I'm not sure why some days it does great and others it struggles. It took me 2 weeks of daily adjustments to get the motion areas just right so it didn't trigger when cars would drive by, but it would trigger when I had people walking passed or up onto the property. The service: I can't speak to what the experience is like without paying for Arlo. I imagine if you plan on using this for free, it is worthless. I wanted the full functional experience so I opted to pay the $15/mo for Arlo Secure Plus. This allowed for the ability to have 4K cloud recording, 30 days of cloud history, custom activity zones, smart (and rich notifications). The smart notifications is this product/services only redeeming quality. When motion is detected, Arlo sends you a notification letting you know if the motion is a person, animal, vehicle, or just general motion. This was really cool, at first, until it triggered a notification for something overnight that I wanted to follow up on. Unfortunately, the motion detection triggered a person prowling around, but I was not able to see all of there activity or see where they came from or where they went because the camera only recorded the motion trigger and about 30 seconds after the fact. Frustrated by this, I went to Arlo support to find out that a service option for continuous video recording (CVR) was available for $9.99/mo per camera. I figured I only really needed my main camera to be opted in to keep costs down. Well, I looked all over Arlo support and spent days, if not a few weeks e-mailing back and forth with Arlo to finally find out that the only way you can opt in to CVR is if you have an Arlo smart base. Frustrated by this, I gave in and purchased a kit that included 2 - 4k Arlo Ultra 2 cameras and a smart base. Got the smart base all set up with no problem and even opted to insert a class 10 SD card into the base of it to backup video clips. Fast forward a few months and disaster strikes again, this time for my neighbor, who asked me to see if I had captured anything. I reviewed the camera I had opted into CVR and found that I had captured the entire crime from start to finish. Then, I tried to export the video to provide it to them and law enforcement, but ran into my next big headache... there was no option on either the app or while logged in on a browser to export the video. Again, I found myself researching for an answer for an hour or so to find that the consensus was to use a third party screen capture software. This is unacceptable! My camera obviously didn't record it off a motion even because I have it set up to not go off every single time a leaf twitches on my street. So, I took a screen capture of the video and provided it to my neighbor, but seeing as it didn't really provide suspect information, it is probably worthless. Even if it had, I question whether any such evidence would be suitable for the court as I have no way of exporting it and having the metadata show when it was actually captured. A screen capture obviously will only show the time of when my screen capture occurred. Overall, I'm incredibly disappointed because I've invested nearly $1k into all the equipment, accessories, and service just to find that it is nothing more than an overpriced system for someone far older than me who enjoys just being a nosy neighbor. If I could go back in time and avoid purchasing this I would have. Arlo doesn't seem to be in a rush to improve any of its products, so I'm not going to hold my breath for it to get better any time soon. Most of the answers to my questions I found have been asked and answered as far back as 2019, so obviously not a whole lot has improved over the years. I bought the system based on how it ranked on some of my favored technology review sites. I guess I should have dug deeper into the systems capabilities. This was my first time setting something like this up, so I really didn't know what I wanted until it was too late. Next time I'll buy a wired closed circuit system with a DVR and take the extra time fishing wire through the walls.

I have had this system for 5 years and it has worked perfectly time. After 5 years, the hub went out and strted malfunctioning. So I ordered this system to replace one camara and my hub. I have been using it for 4 months and it works great. The value for the money for such good quality and serviceability is worth it. Product detects and has good night vision. I am thankful to the seller for this affordable price for such a high quality camara system that really works and stands to the weather.

In the end these cameras worked well and had a good picture, but . . . , 1. They were very finicky to set up and it took way longer than it should have to get all the cameras to connect to the hub. 2. I could not find a clear definition of usable system features for a stand alone, no cloud subscription mode. Camera access appears to be very slow if you do not have the paid cloud subscription. You also do not have the ability to use any of the basic features of the cameras without a subscription. 3. They were way over priced (double that of other brands), plus the added monthly subscription cost. They did satisfy the need for fully battery powered cameras but I sure wasn't happy to be forced to buy a subscription to make the cameras work correctly. I would not buy again

I just received my new Ultra 2 cameras and added them to my app and current hub that they work with. All easy firmware update and install. Also ordered the solar panels; which is what I had before. All super easy and can I say just WOW! I love the super wide angle. My Pro2 would only catch the door. This camera picks up both sides extending out. Thinking of getting rid of my 2k flood light and replacing with one of these, but I’ll see how it goes for a week or so. Love this product!

Given the explosion of wireless cameras recently in the market, I wanted to purchase a premium product to test out. This had my hopes up pretty high until I tested it out the last 3 months in an outdoor setting with some nighttime traffic. Base station indoors. Two cameras outdoors (25ft and 50ft distance to station). A few positive things to note - - Easy set up - Clean user interface - Crisp daytime 4k video - Camera firmware and updates are automatic and managed seemlessly by Arlo - The AI categorization algorithm is pretty good - Probably the best wireless 4k stuff on the market today Real challenges that need to be addressed that introduce a lot of maintenance and friction: - Stock battery life is pretty terrible. I have to charge these up every 10 days, even though I only use them for nighttime purposes in a medium traffic parking area. And you can forget any type of real distance between the camera and the base station, it kills the battery. Arlo could have packed a bigger battery into the box for the price being paid, but really cheaped out here. Instead they want you to buy a bigger battery separately. That's bad product strategy. If you want to be the best WIRELESS camera, it starts with the battery life. It's already one of the most expensive cameras on the market... why would you cut costs here? - Charging is absurdly slow, and the battery indicator is terribly inaccurate and a guestimate at best. It takes 8 hours or more to bring a camera up to full charge by cable... again... I ask why for such a small battery? Cellphones with bigger batteries charge in two hours or less. Yes, you can buy a separate charging station, take down the camera, pull the battery out and charge the battery in a station... but again why? This is wireless device... battery life and power management are foundational to product success... how did you mess this up Arlo? The cellphone industry already figured this out for you. - These are IoT cameras that connect to Arlo's own servers through the smarthub that acts as a gateway. They cannot be directly connected to on your local intranet. Everything goes through Arlo's servers and cannot be operated without passing data over the internet. The only way to access any manage the cameras is over their website. And you MUST have a good internet connection. Even the local storage in the smarthub must be accessed through the internet, or the SD card pulled and put directly into your computer. Arlo claims this is for security reasons, but I'm not 100% sold on this approach. The smarthub is just a locked down wifi router... There should be better ways to do this without requiring data to go through Arlo servers. - Motion detection is good, but more problematic, the video often cuts short of activity actually occurring - If you are expecting to capture license plates with this... not happening unless it's pointed right at the car 10 ft away max. I believe this is because of the 180 degree ultra-wide lens on a 4k sensor. Effectively, expect the same clarity of video as a 2k 130 degree camera that just covers a lot more area. - The video CODEC used to record and store videos is proprietary, which is completely unnecessary given the widely available, open source, and free codecs that are well known and used throughout the industry. You must purchase the video coded separately for Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, and it doesn't even work with Mozilla Firefox. This also means you can't share videos with others unless they buy the codec as well. - The wireless connection is still WiFi protocol and susceptible to basic WiFi jamming and interference. It really needs a different secure wireless method. (To be fair, there are not a lot of alternative wireless methods in the industry yet. Just know it's ultimately a WiFi camera.) - Subscription is pretty much a requirement for functionality to be worth anything. Though, the price point is such that if you are forking out money for this camera, the subscription price shouldn't be your biggest concern. All that said, this tech is far better than what was on the market just 3 years ago. Given Arlo's apparent strategy, they are making it work and proving to be innovative. I hope Arlo rethinks it's product strategy and continues to improve it's products and innovate, otherwise it's going to get killed by emerging competition with better technology and friction-less features.

Unlike my experience with Arlo's wired doorbell and chime, the Ultra 2 cameras work fabulously. The batteries do not last the advertised length of time. Knowing that I ordered two extras and the charger. The main camera battery had to be exchanged every two days and the secondary camera in our carport every five days. I installed a third-party 3 watt solar panel designed for the Arlo for each camera. The solar panels keep both batteries charged at 100 percent. I think it will be a pain to review the recordings on the base station's mini SD card, so there is no question in my mind that customers purchasing the cameras will also need to purchase Arlo's cloud storage service once the free trial period is over. Customers need to have reasonable expectations. I have my camera's set at the best quality settings, but still, don't expect to be able to read license plate numbers, and the "color" in nighttime recordings is very marginal.

I was pretty enthusiastic about the recently introduced Arlo Ultra 2 Spotlight kit (2-cameras and a base). I thought this was finally going to be a security camera kit that I could comfortably use with my Apple TV 4K, iPhone, Mac and Windows computers. However, I returned the kit today after a disappointing 2-day experience with these security cameras, at least for the Apple HomeKit environment (which is why I bought them in the 1st place). Pros * 180-degree field-of-view is really marvelous (great color); fish eye correction is well done. * Night vision is really good (but resolution is a problem, see Cons) * Automated Spotlight for night vision motion triggers really helps - it triggers color to also be captured on recordings * Can be powered by battery for a while or with full-time wall power. My one camera went from 100% to 85% after two days of testing (my only data point there). * Can record locally to a SD-card * Relatively easy to mount / install * Web access to home cameras via Arlo login account is great (nearly real-time views, just a few seconds delay) * Camera and base setup can in theory be done from the Arlo website (once registered) * Snap on magnetic power connector is great (very secure and easy to attach to the bottom of the camera) Cons * Advertises as 4K pixel resolution, but I am nearly certain Arlo must be compressing the video so much that it looks *no better* than 1080P resolution (cannot clearly see faces or license plates that are 20' away from the camera) * Uncertain about how well the wireless works to the cameras; before I mounted my 1st camera, I found the video got unacceptably jerky on the recordings / Arlo website when I was only 25-30 feet away from the base unit (not anywhere close to the suggested 300 feet in their marketing materials). It seems to me in my limited experience, one might need a separate base unit for each camera (my application was one for front yard, and a second for the back yard) * Relatively weak documentation on how to setup the system (surprisingly). Some pictures were not as clear as they should have been (like where the "Sync" buttons are on the base and camera units) * Could not get one camera to pair *at all* with the Arlo base unit (after 5-visits to tech support, no luck). Tech support was not very helpful (perhaps 4+ hours spent on the phone with them). I suggested they send me a replacement camera, but they didn't want to do that (so their "boss" said) * After setting up zones to not trigger cars passing by the front of my house, or people walking by on the near-by sidewalk, I still got numerous warnings on my Apple Watch and iPhone (via Homekit). When I went to review the recorded videos, there were none! I suspect (?) Homekit alerts aren't being filtered by Arlo in their software as it was seemingly doing the right thing for not capturing video for people on the sidewalk or cars passing by, but my guess is that the zone marked motion alerts were still being passed on to Homekit (and thus to me). This happened many times during the 2-days I used the one camera that was working. Too many false-positives means no trust basically... * I seriously doubt the cameras running on battery would last the advertised "six months". I would guess no more than 10-20 days max based upon my limited experience. Make sure you get the 25' charging cable to charge your cameras; the included short power cable wouldn't have worked for me (and I suspect most people). * The kit I got included a magnetic base attachment unit for mounting the camera and a different unit for screwing the camera firmly into the mounting bracket (very stable). For mounting cameras outside, Arlo recommends the cameras be used with the mounting hardware that allows the camera to be firmly attached (screwed in) to the mounting base. The magnetic base is only usable IMO if the camera is over soft materials like a couch or carpeted areas as I almost dropped the camera off of the base (not very secure when holding on via magnets). I would have had to purchase another mounting bracket for outside *if* I had got the 2nd camera working (I never did). * I could not get any alerts on my Apple TV from the one camera that did work (I assumed alerts should have been displayed there). Never got far enough to get this resolved either. Maybe this is an Apple problem (not sure to be fair). * Unclear how secure the video streams at Arlo are (never got that far in my analysis). Arlo does not advertise if the video is encrypted or not (I assume it is not and would therefore not be considered private IMO) * Pay for recordings I recall was $9.99 per camera (not a very good price IMO after spending nearly $650 for the kit) * A post online reviewing the Arlo Ultra cameras suggested that if you disabled the pay for storage subscription on the Arlo website and opted to use local video storage to SD-card in the base, you wouldn't get any Apple Homekit alerts. If true, that would also be a deal breaker for me (what kind of security would that be without any motion alerts)? So, maybe for those that don't care about HomeKit, this might be a pretty good solution for home security, but for me, the negatives far outweighed the positives!

system works great ,Great picture quality and very sensitive, they dont like the cold ,cold weather but when it warms up they come back on,,,GREAT

What is the point of having a wireless "Outdoor" camera that overheat and shuts off by itself?! another thing apart from Overheating, it drains the battery fast it might stay up to 5-7 days max if it is placed in tward the street even if I used Activity zones. and nice about Surveillance cameras is with a fee in Arlo Cameras....

CVR not available on local SD card, only in the cloud, through a subscription. This is critical in a monitoring system, so two stars less. The battery in my case has lasted about 1 month, this varies according to the amount of movements detected and the desired image quality, it is not a critical point in my opinion. The motion detector is also not good. There is considerable delay between motion detection and the start of recording. Often it is not possible to see the movement that activated the recording. Update: After testing the product for 1 year... Batteries last 1 to 2 weeks. Motion recording always delayed. Sometimes the recording event has already ended and it is not possible to see what activated the recording. Another important point, it is not possible to access the SD card recordings in a web browser, only through the manufacturer's app. I do not recommend this product.

So far so good. Only installed a week ago. Install was easy. Waiting to see if battery life is as advertised.

NOT water resistant.. do not use the North West. This camera can not be rained on .. Water get in housing and the electronics die. Of 4 alro 2 cameras 2 died in 6 months, they were warrantied. Thanks Arlo gonna have to put a substantial roof over each one.