Arlo Ultra 3 4K Outdoor Security Camera review: A high-end but expensive security camera

There’s now no shortage of choice when it comes to security cameras. You can spend under £50 or, as this two-camera kit from Arlo demonstrates, over £500.

What does all that extra cash get you? There’s 4K video for a start, plus HDR and what Arlo claims to be advanced AI designed to detect known people and vehicles to prevent false alarms. There’s also package detection for when deliveries are left on the doorstep, fire recognition and smoke alarm detection, and a hub that can be connected to up to 20 compatible cameras at once.

The hub has a microSD card for free local storage, but limitations apply, and full functionality (with cloud storage) is only unlocked when paying for an Arlo Secure subscription.

Can the Arlo Ultra 3’s video quality and AI smarts justify the high price? Read on to find out.

Arlo Ultra 3 review: Price and availability

The third-generation Arlo Ultra is available as a two-, three- or four-camera kit. Each of these comes with a hub, and you can buy additional cameras to expand your system. An individual camera does not work on its own without the hub, so you’ll need to buy a kit before picking up extra cameras if you need a larger system.

Prices start at £529.99 for the two-camera kit reviewed here, rising to £629.99 for three cameras and £799.99 for four. Additional cameras cost £259.99 each.

This all makes the Arlo Ultra 3 sound rather expensive. These prices are much higher than rival cameras, like the latest-generation Ring Outdoor Camera Plus, which costs £90 and is sometimes reduced to just £54.99. That records in 2K instead of 4K, but to many buyers it’ll seem like much better value.

Arlo goes some way towards justifying that price gulf by equipping the Ultra with true 4K instead of any upscaling, HDR, and an unusually wide 180-degree field-of-view, plus 12x digital zoom with automatic subject tracking, colour night vision, an integrated spotlight and siren.

On top of all that is Arlo’s artificial intelligence, which I’ll address in more detail later.

Arlo Ultra 3 review: Design

Even before you power up these cameras, their design goes some way towards justifying the high price. When many outdoor security cameras can look utilitarian, these look sleek, clean, modern and perhaps even Apple-like with their glossy white enclosures. They’re quite compact, which is welcome given how much performance they pack into a relatively small body.

They lack solar charging though, which isn’t a surprise given the shape doesn’t have a large top surface area like, say, the Eufy S3 Pro. But it’s a premium design, and one that mounts to a wall or fence with a couple of included screws and wall plugs. The mount then fixes to the camera with a ball-and-socket joint that offers lots of adjustability and screws tight.

Battery-powered, the cameras charge via USB-C cable and you can buy an additional battery to quickly swap out while the other is charging. Be careful with those batteries though. It’s all too easy to slot it into the camera upside-down, causing it to get completely stuck. Like, really stuck. I managed to free it by putting it in the fridge and letting the plastic contract slightly. User error, but I can’t be the only one.

The cameras are joined in this particular kit by a base hub. This plugs into a wall socket and connects to your router by Wi-Fi or Ethernet, then gives the cameras their wireless internet connection. There’s no integrated storage, but it accepts microSD cards up to 2TB in capacity – that’s good, but well short of the 16TB you could slot into a rival hub like the Eufy HomeBase 3 (which, incidentally, has 16GB of internal storage out of the box).

Arlo Ultra 3 review: Performance

Setting up the Arlo Ultra 3 is much like any other home security camera. Plug the hub into a wall socket and connect to your router – in my case via an Ethernet cable – then download the Arlo smartphone app and follow the setup instructions.

Camera installation is equally simple, with just a drill and/or screwdriver required to mount them to a flat surface like a wall or fence. Be sure to check signal strength and video streaming reliability before reaching for the power tools, since walls and distance will affect performance.

The app opens relatively quickly when away from home, and in my testing I found a live video feed would start in around five seconds, but this will vary by local signal strength and network coverage. From here you can view and download recordings saved in the cloud, control the camera’s LED spotlight, and arm or disarm the alarm.

Video quality is excellent, and certainly among the best I’ve ever seen from a home security system. The full 4K resolution helps, of course, but so does the wide, 180-degree lens and the inclusion of HDR to help retain detail in highlights and boost it in shadows. All those pixels also help with zooming too, and while at the full 12x things get quite pixelated, footage stays nice and sharp when zooming in by 2x or 4x – something a Full HD camera just can’t do.

Night vision is similarly impressive, with an integrated spotlight also on hand to help enable full-colour video after dark.

Motion alerts can distinguish between people, vehicles, animals and packages – and, going a step further than some rivals, Arlo’s AI tech can recognise familiar people and vehicles to help prevent buzzing your phone with alerts about your partner putting the bin out. There’s also fire detection which actually uses the camera and AI to identify flames, rather than just responding to the sound of a smoke alarm – although it can also do that too.

The catch is that many of these features require an Arlo Secure subscription, so even with its high price tag, the Ultra 3’s full capabilities aren’t unlocked unless you stump up for the monthly fee too. This feels particularly stingy when some alternatives, like Eufy’s HomeBase S380, also have person detection with facial recognition but include it for free when paired with a compatible camera.

Those costs can be avoided if you opt for local storage and slot your own microSD card into the hub. But then you’re still missing out on the AI extras that help this camera stand apart from lesser rivals.

A small issue I had is how Arlo uses Apple Maps. This will be fine for most users, but I live on a new-build estate that wasn’t finished when Apple last updated its maps and satellite images (unlike Google Maps, which is fine). So my house – indeed, much of my road – simply isn’t on the Arlo’s map view or satellite imagery, which appears on the Emergency page of the Arlo Secure app.

Arlo Ultra 3 review: Verdict

This is a very good home security camera kit, with excellent video quality and impressive AI-powered technology. I like the hardware design, the app and of course the video quality, along with the excellent night vision capabilities, integrated spotlight and wide field-of-view. But it also comes at a high price, and is even expensive compared to other Arlo cameras.

There is a way to bring that price down, though. Sign up to Arlo’s Secure Plus Annual subscription, at £199.90 a year, and along with all of the regular subscription’s AI cleverness (plus replacement cameras if stolen and cloud video storage) new customers save 50 percent on new cameras. This cuts the price of the two-camera kit reviewed here from £530 to a far more palatable £265.

That £199.90 a year subscription sounds expensive, but it works out at about £17 a month and works with up to 20 cameras.

If budget isn’t a consideration for you, then go ahead and buy the Arlo Ultra 3; you’ll get superb 4K video and, with an Arlo Secure subscription, one of the smartest home surveillance systems around. But if you aren’t in that fortunate position, there are plenty of other options, with similar performance, lower prices, and even no ongoing subscription fee, too.