The best security cameras have a new rival: the WiZ Indoor Camera. The first smart home security camera from the smart lighting brand has all the features you'd expect from a smart home camera, and a few you might not.
The WiZ Indoor Camera, which launches in mid-May 2023 with a price tag of $69.99 / £79.99 / €89.99, comes with a 120-degree field of view, full HD streaming and recording, two-way audio motion detection and infra-red night vision. You don't need a subscription to store video – there's an SD card slot in the camera – but you can subscribe to benefit from cloud storage and more advanced features such as defining motion activity and privacy zones.
It also does some clever things with WiZ lights.
What does the WiZ Indoor Camera do that rival cameras don't?
For me, the best feature here is what WiZ calls SpaceSense. It's motion detection, but it's detection with a difference because it uses your lights to detect movement. Compatible WiZ lights will be able to detect motion in rooms far from your camera, effectively turning your whole home into an intruder detector.
That's very useful, I think. I've got a motion detector on my Hue network and in addition to the obvious security uses (triggering alerts or flashing lights to alert the neighbours) it's also really handy for everyday stuff such as illuminating my hilariously dark hallway when anyone's there.
If you have WiZ lights you can benefit from another security feature: presence simulation. This is a holiday mode that you can set to enable and adjust your smart lights to give the impression that you're home when you're not.
I like the look of this, not least because WiZ offers Hue levels of quality for a much lower price tag – so if you're new to smart home tech it's a lot cheaper to get up and running with WiZ than it is with their sibling brand. And while there's only one camera for now, I'm sure we'll see more models coming out including outdoor cameras to better help WiZ compete with the likes of Blink, Arlo and Ring.
