Review: EufyCam S4 2-Cam Kit

The recently tested Imou Cruiser Dual Aurora is equipped with two lenses, one fixed and one pan and tilt (P&T) to follow people being detected. EufyCam S4 also has an additional lens mounted on the P&T module with a field of view of 46° instead of the 130° of the fixed – and most moving – lenses. This provides a fixed 3x optical zoom.

Eufy states that the P&T camera has 8x hybrid zoom. In practice, how it works is that after one of the cameras detects a moving object, such as a person, the P&T camera pans and tilts towards the object, follows it and zooms in. First utilising the fixed 3x optical zoom, the second lens seamlessly takes over and continues with digital zoom to get even closer.

Two cameras means you can cover a large field of view by setting the start position of the P&T camera just to the right or left of the fixed camera. This gives you a full 260° field of view horizontally. Alternatively, you can point and zoom in with the P&T camera towards a specific area you want to keep an eye on.

 

Installation

Mounting the two cameras, downloading the Eufy Security app and installing the cameras and the Eufy HomeBase S380 base station was quick and easy. During installation, you need to connect the base station to your router with a cable, and since my router – located in the shed under the stairs – had no available network ports, the base station ended up in my home office, where it was connected with a cable to the Netgear Orbi satellite there. If you wish, after installation you can remove the cable and let the base station communicate via 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi instead.

The camera mount can be wall or ceiling mounted, but in the latter case you cannot mount the included solar panel on top of the mount. Instead, you need to find a suitable location that is no more than three metres from the camera as the extension cable is three metres long.

The included solar panels are said to be 220 per cent more efficient than previous models and charge at 5.5 W, so an hour of direct sunlight per day should be enough to keep the camera running. We don’t doubt this as the battery in the camera, which was placed in a favourable sunny spot at the back of the house, was still at around 80 percent after two weeks of constant use. The battery in the camera placed at the front, where there is almost no direct sunlight, went from 100 per cent to 0 per cent in 12 days. All we had to do was loosen the screw, remove the battery and fully charge it – which takes about six hours – and put it back again.

This placement of the camera would therefore not be sustainable in the long term, but there is an option to connect a power adapter (not included) which also enables 24/7 monitoring – which for obvious reasons does not work with battery power.

Operation

As with all surveillance cameras, you receive a notification on your mobile phone when a camera detects something and you can see what’s happening in the app. You can talk to any visitors via the camera’s built-in microphone and speaker. You can also choose to switch on a spotlight when something is detected or switch on a flashing red and blue light as a warning. And you have the option to activate the alarm sound when something is detected if you wish.

There are a number of settings in the app and you can customise most aspects of how the cameras should react to different things, at different times, whether you are at home or not.

You can choose whether the camera should record and/or send a message if it detects vehicles, animals, people and what the app calls ‘Human Recognition’, which means that the camera (via HomeBase S380) is equipped with facial recognition and the feature uses something Eufy calls BionicMind AI Recognition. It’s a neat feature to be able to set so that no video is recorded (and no notification is sent) if it’s a family member who triggers the camera. It’s not entirely reliable and was wrong a few times, but it’s likely to work better and be more accurate the more it’s used.

The HomeBase S380 base station comes with 16 gigabytes of built-in storage capacity, which can easily be expanded up to 16 terabytes either by installing a SATA SSD or by connecting a USB storage device. It’s also possible to store your videos on a NAS via RTSP – and for those who want to, there’s the option to subscribe to cloud storage.

According to Eufy, the base station uses Multi-Bridge technology, which ensures that the system always uses the most optimal configuration. This likely means that each camera communicates with the device that has the best signal strength, either the base station or the router. During the test, the rear camera used Wi-Fi, while the front camera communicated directly with the base station.

Recordings

EufyCam S4 has very good image quality, both for the fixed camera and the panning camera – both during the day and at night (where you can choose to turn the lights on and record in colour or leave them off and record in black and white). Unlike most P&T cameras we’ve tested in the past, you won’t easily notice the camera panning and tilting in the footage – you can hear it, but very faintly.

EufyCam S4 doesn’t save the video clips separately, but together on top of each other. The video from the fixed lens appears at the top and the video from the P&T camera appears at the bottom. The video resolution is 2,688 x 3,040 pixels, which means that each video has a resolution of 2,688 x 1,520 pixels and the frame rate is 15 fps. It’s a bit of a shame that the video from the fixed lens isn’t saved in 4K resolution since that camera has such a high resolution, but then Eufy’s chosen concept of combining the video files into a single video wouldn’t work as well since the P&T camera has 2K resolution.

There is also a cross-camera tracking feature, which means that if an event is detected by both cameras within a certain amount of time (2-30 minutes), you can choose to have two or more video clips automatically edited into one single clip. If you use this feature, the resolution of each video drops to 2,150 x 1,216 pixels, but the files become larger (ten seconds of video becomes 12 megabytes instead of 4 megabytes).

However, as with many things, focusing solely on the numbers doesn’t give you the full picture. For example, if you compare the EufyCam S4 with the Imou Cruiser Dual Aurora mentioned above, the latter records video clips at 2,560 x 1,440 pixels and 20 fps (i.e. slightly lower resolution but higher frame rate), but the image quality of the EufyCam S4 is clearly better – and it should be, as the price per camera is around double.

What is surprising is that accessing live video from the cameras via the app is not lightning fast, which you would expect from a flagship model like the EufyCam S4. It takes about five seconds from when the camera detects something until the notification pops up on your mobile, which is fine and on par with other cameras we’ve tested. But the fact that it usually takes five seconds, sometimes ten and sometimes close to 20 before you can see what the cameras see in the app (which itself starts at just over a second) is rather disappointing.

The video above shows daytime footage. The cross-camera tracking feature has been used to merge three clips into one.

Conclusion

The EufyCam S4 2-Cam Kit is a high-quality surveillance system with two cameras and a base station, offering great flexibility with a fixed lens and a P&T module (with two lenses and hybrid zoom) in each camera. You can get a very wide field of view or focus – and zoom in – on a specific area with the P&T module.

The image quality is very good, and you don’t need a subscription to store the recorded videos on the base station. The included solar panels are effective, and if you choose a location with too little sunlight, you can connect a power adapter.

The fly in the ointment is that when you want to access live video from the cameras and adjust any of the settings via the app, you have to wait a little while, which is an annoyance. Another minor drawback is that the videos you record are not in the high resolution that is actually available in the camera, as the videos from the fixed camera and the P&T camera are combined into one clip, which in itself provides a nice overview.