What is the BT Smart Home Cam?
While other manufacturers may be going smarter and more expensive with their cameras, the BT Smart Home Cam is something of a throwback to a different age. It has a lower resolution (720p) than most modern cameras, has a PIR sensor for motion detection and no cloud storage.
As a result, it’s a fair bit cheaper than many other cameras. An outdated app make and lack of features make this camera hard to recommend, though.
BT Smart Home Cam – Design and build
The tear-shaped design with the camera lens mounted in the middle is basic and simple, and the BT Smart Home Cam’s gloss plastic looks alright from a distance. Pick the camera up and you feel just how light it is, with very little inside the plastic housing.
The basic stand does a good enough job. You can place it on a desk and it’s sturdy enough that the power cable plugged into the rear doesn’t move the camera around. It’s a little annoying that you can’t tilt the camera down (only up), as this prevents you from putting the BT Smart Home Cam too high up as you’ll miss the action.
Alternatively, you can screw the stand to a wall or ceiling if you’d rather mount it. When you do this, the ability to tilt up makes more sense, giving you more control over the view.
At the rear, there’s a microSD card slot, plus a physical switch to turn the camera on and off for when you want privacy.
BT Smart Home Cam – Features
Basic is the best way to describe the BT Smart Home Cam. There’s no cloud storage and no microSD card supplied in the box. If you want to record any footage, then you need to provide your own card. Just inserting an SD card won’t do the job, and you also have to remember to toggle on the SD Card option in the app.
There are two options for motion detection: using the PIR sensor on the front or standard monitoring letting the camera monitor the video stream. Using the PIR sensor is the default option and makes more sense, as this option is less susceptible to false positives on cheaper cameras, such as the sun casting moving shadows.
If you do go for standard motion detection, you can adjust the sensitivity; with the PIR option, there are no settings. It’s a shame that you can’t set activity zones with standard motion detection, focussing on an area that you’re specifically interested in. In this mode, I found that the camera triggered more alerts than in PIR mode. The competition, such as the Ring Stick Up Cam or the Nest Cam IQ.
The camera can also monitor for background sound, with the option to adjust the sensitivity. This can be useful if you want your camera to listen out for anything suspicious going on in your home.
You can schedule when you want the camera to send notifications. The controls are a little clunky, but easy enough to get your head around. It’s a shame that there’s no geofencing option. Nor can you toggle the camera on or off from the app; if you want privacy, you have to physically turn the camera off using the switch on the side. Be careful: if you go out with the camera off, you can’t turn it back on remotely.
You can view the live stream from the app, and save a photo or video directly to your device. There’s a two-way talk option, so that you have a conversation with anyone inside your home. It works well enough, although the BT Smart Home Cam’s speaker is a little quiet and there’s a fair amount of delay through the app.
There’s a section for playing music through the BT Smart Home Cam. There are five melodies to choose from, all of which have a naff child’s toy feel to them. These are the same melodies as used in BT’s baby monitor products, giving a clue as to how this product was developed.
These melodies are part of the BT Smart Home Cam’s attempt to also be a baby monitor, letting you play ‘soothing’ tunes remotely. More useful is the background monitoring option, which lets you hear the audio stream of a camera when your phone’s on the home screen or locked.
Notifications are sent to your smartphone and appear in the app’s Notifications section, complete with a thumbnail view caught at the same time. Tapping a notification should take you to the camera to view the live stream or, if available, recorded clip. In my experience, the system was very flaky and these options often timed out.
Alternatively, you can view footage directly from the camera’s live feed, Event History view. You can filter footage by day, but not time, making finding a specific clip tricky at times.
BT Smart Home Cam – Performance
My biggest problem with the BT Smart Home Cam is how unreliable it proved when trying to connect to it. I had numerous times where the connection timed out and I had to reboot the camera. Even when it does work, the connection to the camera is very slow and the footage quite a long way behind real time.
Streaming clips from the camera is just as flaky: sometimes the clip would play; other times not. You can try and download clips to your smartphone, but this didn’t always work either. I lost count of the time that I got a ‘success’ message in the app, which really seemed to mean that I’d been sent back to the home screen.
Motion detection was pretty good using the PIR sensor, with few false positives. As a result, the video stream was clean. However, not being able to turn the camera off through the app is frustrating: as soon as you get in front of the BT Smart Home Cam, you get a flood of notifications about movement.
Sound detection has the same problems as on other cameras: you tend to get notifications for everything, even comparatively quiet sounds. In the end, I turned this option off.
BT Smart Home Cam – Video quality
Having only a 720p sensor shouldn’t be too much of a problem, and should still provide enough detail. Unfortunately, the BT Smart Home Cam fails to deliver. Pixelated and soft images, suffering from high levels of compression make the image very poor. You can tell the difference between people, but it’s hard to make out any distinguising marks in daylight.
At night, the problems are similar. The BT Smart Home Cam turns on its IR lights but the image is very soft and pixelated. Again, finer detail is hard to work out, although you can tell the difference between different people.
BT Smart Home Cam – IFTTT, Alexa, Google Assistant
There’s the BT Smart Controls Skill for Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant, which gives some basic control over the camera. There’s no option to view the video stream on a screen-enabled smart assistant, such as the Google Home or Amazon Echo Show.
Instead, you can start and stop a random lullaby on the camera. I also couldn’t get the system to turn on motion recording, with Alexa telling me that the option wasn’t supported.
There’s also no IFTTT channel for toggling the BT Smart Home Cam on or off, or triggering other devices when motion is detected.
Why buy the BT Smart Home Cam?
With its comparatively low price, the BT Smart Home Cam is one of the cheaper smart security cameras that I’ve tested. For some, the optional background monitoring that turns the camera into a rudimentary baby monitor could be a useful trick if you want a temporary security camera and monitoring system
However, the flaky app and lack of features really detract. My best security camera guide has lots of better choices, but you may also want to look at the Neos Smart Cam, which is cheaper and has free cloud storage.
Ultimately, the BT Smart Home Cam feels like a relic from a few years ago and isn’t up to the standard of modern cameras.
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