Eufy SoloCam S340 T8170CW1

Eufy S340, a lot of bang for your buck, not perfect – In the 2023 Black Friday sales, I bought two Eufy S340 wifi connected solar powered cameras. I don't have a Eufy home base so these cams were going to be connected to and run by the Eufy Security app. It's been about two months and one cam has worked flawlessly, the other glitched out after 6 weeks, but with a full reset, is back to full functionality.

To cut to the chase, clarity and picture quality of both the wide angle and zoomed cameras are pretty good, and as a stand alone PTZ cam with some intelligent functionality, it is probably the biggest bang for your buck external wifi camera on the market.

The instructions aren't great, but between what is in the box and the prompts that pop up in the Eufy security app, installation isn't completely rocket science. For simplicity sake, charge up the cam and connect it to the app while you're sipping a cuppa at the your dining table, then worry about the physical install. Just be aware that while you might have wifi at your table, the wifi also needs to reach where your camera will be installed.

The simplest install is a plain wall with lots of sunlight. The cam and solar panel remain intact and its just a matter of drilling three holes per the template, attaching the mount and then installing the camera. Job done. The problem with that is that it directly exposes the camera to the elements - the baking summer sun and driving winter rains. I suspect that that kind of install will shorten the life of the camera. I opted for mounting the cams on the wall directly under the roof eaves - so somewhat protected. This does mean some messing about to remotely install the solar panel so that it catches the sun. This will take more than a minute. You can buy a solar panel mount from eBay, I didn't though, so I made up a bracket to mount the panel from the eave fascia.

These cameras have a lot of functionality, including auto(AI) PTZ, LED spot light, siren/alarm, preset positions, human detection, vehicle detection, pet detection, all movement detection, configurable motion detection zone, microphone, speaker (you can speak through the app). You can also set up different operating modes so that the cam will or won't notify you of detections, or trigger a local alarm for when you're away... this mode setting is not well explained, but relatively intuitive once you've spent some time with the app.

The app does measure the WIFI signal in the camera location area, but even though one of my locations had signal, it wasn't reliable/strong enough and the cam kept losing signal/connection. I ended up putting in a wifi extender and reconnecting the camera to it. It has had relatively reliable performance since. The other cam was well within the wifi zone and its connection has been rock solid.

After a couple of months of use, it is clear that the units are a little buggy. The cams store video onboard in their own 8gig memory. Playback can be jerky. Navigation when a video is playing is next to useless, dragging back on the video play bar rarely repositions the video and instead the video file will start from the start again. I suspect too that the onboard CPU is underpowered. If you try to do too many things too quickly, the cam seems to bog down and the app loses connection to the camera, or the video files stop downloading or even sometimes the cam will crash (a classic case is when you delete a file and then immediately try to play another or go to live feed - this seems to overload the CPU and you get the equivalent of the spinning buffering wheel of death). You can hit the retry button or restart the app - these sometimes work, or if it truly won't connect, click the "restart device" option to give the cam a good kick in the guts.

I've since learned to take one action at a time, allowing the cam to "breathe" in between actions - which is a definite con on a unit where you are attempting some real time surveillance. I wonder whether having a home base would offload the cam CPU and make the system more robust? Homebase promises additional storage and additional AI capability - something I'm yet to look into.

The biggest glitch I've had so far was when my home wifi was out for a half day. The cam that was connected via the wifi extender totally glitched out. It stopped charging from the panel, battery power consumption went up and battery charge dropped to under 50% in that one day. The cam kept detecting and recording events, but stopped sending notifications. Replays were very buggy. Restarting the camera didn't help. In the end, the equivalent of a full factory reset, removing the device from the app and fully setting it back up from scratch got it running fine again.

Eufy support have been pretty good with my questions and support requests. There is no ongoing subscription, but as I've been relatively happy, I am thinking of a 3rd S340 and an internal camera to monitor my pets, plus the app has the occasional pop ups requesting surveys or notifying of new features or devices, so I suspect their business model is based on repeat sales.

In terms of charging, during a typical day a camera might use 5% of it's battery capacity. The way I've installed the solar panels means that they see the morning sun and a good sunny morning will easily top that back up to 100%. I suspect I will need to move the panels to a sunnier location in winter.

The other thing is that due to how push notifications work on iPhones, the Eufy app does increase the phone's battery drain. This might be improved by having a home base?? Right, TL:DR - on balance, pretty decent and capable security monitoring camera, with a good fair quality wide angle and good quality zoomed camera, that comes with a decent range of functionality, and at a sub $300 Black Friday JB HiFi member price, definitely worth the money.