Foscam SD2 WI-FI PTZ CAMERA REVIEW

Pan/Tilt control

The the pan and tilt control of the camera was excellent and it did not exhibit any lagging.  When you release your touch it immediately stopped which made it easy to get the desired image.  I especially liked the way they handled the touch control. Once you touch and swiped you can keep the pan or tilt active for as long as you maintain touch.  It made for a smoother user interface and better control.  The pan/tilt was very smooth with almost no motor noise. 

Sound Detection

The sound detection worked well.  You can set the detection level to one of 5 levels (Lowest, Lower, Low, Medium, High).  It would send notifications to my phone when ever it heard adequate sound in its area.  It also save a short video of what it saw during the sound alarm in the SD Card area.  It was nice to see a list of alarms to choose from and view just by clicking on one. In a way,  I kind of like this method of play back over the standard sliding timeline.  

Motion Detection

Motion detection worked great. Here too you can set the sensitivity to one of 5 levels (Lowest, Lower, Low, Medium, High).    This wide range in sensitivity would come in very useful when dealing with false motion detection due to bugs, leaves, trees and other similar items.  I had to lower the setting to the Lowest setting to get my camera to stop sending false detection alarms. 

AI Human Detection 

You have the option of using standard Motion Detection (above) or AI Human Detection but you cant have both enabled at the same time.  The Human Detection we are testing here is done on the device as apposed to their more advanced online cloud services.  It is supposed to distinguish between human and non-human objects.  To test the AI Human detection I first setup the camera with standard Motion Detection and pointed the camera at a scene that had some plants that where moving due to a light breeze.  The motion alarm was constantly being activated as it picked up the plant moving (I had this set to highest sensitivity).   I then set the camera to AI Human detection with the same scene and monitored.  It was disappointing to see that it continued to generate motion alarms even without anyone entering the field of view.   I expected all detection alarms to stop as there wasn’t anything remotely resembling a human in the scene.  I found this strange so  I contacted their support team just to ensure that I hadn’t setup something wrong that caused this but I never received a reply. 

We also tested the AI Human Detection in a real life environment.  It was installed on a home looking at a large driveway.  When we walked into the view it seemed to work better and it identified us as human and sent a proper notification.  This would be a great feature to prevent false detections as would normally be endured with standard motion detection (bugs, leaves, trees etc.).

Cloud Storage

I normally do not test the online cloud services when I do reviews but in this case I thought I would subscribe and check out their AI Recognition Reminder.  Not sure why they called it a Reminder but in any case according to the documentation its supposed to identify the differences in packages, human bodies, pets and vehicles.  So I went ahead and signed up for the Free 30 day trial subscription.  The sign up was super easy which I did right from the App by selecting the MyPlan icon from the settings screen. 

The cloud video storage worked flawlessly.  If an alarm was tripped it stored the video in the cloud and I was able to easily view the events.  The playback interface was very responsive and didn’t exhibit any lagging or stuttering.  The provided sliding time line displayed all my alarm events and I was able to zero in on the exact video I was looking for.

I then proceeded to test the the Cloud AI Recognition features (Packages, Human, Pets and Vehicle) starting with Human Detection.  Please note that the AI detection features being tested here are those performed on the cloud service not locally on your camera.  How this works is that the camera sends the video to the cloud service which will then analyse the video to determine if its a package, vehicle, pet or human.  If detection is successful it will push a notification with the detected type to your phone.   

Note:  In the App they provided a list of cameras and countries that supported the Cloud AI Recognition features.  The SD2 camera was not listed and neither was Canada.  I sent a request to Foscam support to confirm if its officially supported and have not yet received a response.  I will update this review if/when I do get a response. However, despite not be listed as supported it still worked.  

I setup the camera with a full view of me walking towards the camera.  I walked at a normal pace towards the camera and I got varying results.  Sometimes it detected me and pushed a notification and other times it didn’t detect me at all.  In most cases it would detect me but would push a generic notification “Motion detection alarm”.  The distance from me and the camera was about 12′ or 365 cm.

Next I tried the Package detection feature.  I setup the camera to view a counter on which I would place a box (approx. 12″ x 12″) and walked away.  Again, it was not able to detect the package all the time and most of the time I got a notification saying “Motion detection alarm” without it specify that it was a package.

Next up was the vehicle detection.  I pointed the camera at a empty spot in a driveway.  We then had a vehicle park in the cameras FOV.   It did pick up the vehicle and sent a proper notification.

So I would have to say that the AI detection is probably about 90% reliable but I would also believe that different environments could provide different results.

Would I subscribe to this cloud service even without these features?  Well I would if I needed to store longer periods of video that couldn’t be handled by the on board SD Card.    

Play Back from SD Card

The camera has the ability to record video on a SD card that you insert into the back of the camera.  I had a 32GB SD card lying around so I installed it into the camera (SD cards are not included with camera).  I then proceeded to cause some motion and sound alarms.  With each alarm I received a notification on my phone and a new recording stored within the SD Card section of the App.  The way they organize the alarm recordings is by using a simple list with the type of alarm recording (Sound, Motion or Human Detection) along with the time of the alarm and a video clip.  This made it easy to find the event I was looking for.  When you open an alarm event it provided a playback view where can easily view the alarm video. You also have the ability to jump forward or backwards within the video clip. The video playback was excellent.   You can even download the videos for long term storage.   I was very happy with the SD card storage feature.

Sharing 

If you want to share your cameras you can do that too.  You just need to go to the Share Camera menu option and add the account you want to share with.  The person will need to have an account setup prior to using this feature.  The App wont send an invite to them which I think could be a great feature for the manufacturer to add.

IR Night Vision

As with any camera I find the IR illumination range mentioned in the specifications rarely line up with reality.  In my test I estimate the IR illumination for the SD2 would reach approx. 10m in my environment.