Tech

Review: Netatmo’s Welcome home security camera gets facial recognition right

It doesn’t require a subscription, but lag and image quality can be problems.

Valentina Palladino – Nov 3, 2015 4:30 pm | 7

Credit: Valentina Palladino

Most Wi-Fi security cameras follow a simple formula: sleek pieces of hardware, motion and sound detection features, a mobile app where a live stream can be watched, and a subscription platform that lets you choose the footage you want to keep. Netatmo, a company that launched in 2011 with a connected “weather station,” follows a slightly different formula with its Welcome camera. Its two main features are facial recognition—which is eerily sensitive, to say the least—and lack of subscription tiers, making all of your home’s footage free for you to access at any time. Those features come with some caveats, but the Welcome cam is a home security device that isn’t a cookie-cutter copy of the competition.

A device worthy of a spot on your mantel

Netatmo’s Welcome resembles a slimmer, golden Canary cam. It’s a half-foot tall cylinder made of brushed aluminum with a base made of white plastic, a strip of black in the middle, and the camera lens at the top. On the back of Welcome are ports for Ethernet, microUSB for power, and an SD card for storage. It’s a beautiful device that’s not meant to hide amidst cluttered bookshelves, and it’s slightly more unassuming than the Canary camera thanks to its smaller size. Not to mention, it looks nearly identical to Netatmo’s in-home-or-office Weather Station, so clearly the company didn’t want to mess with an already decent design.

SPECS AT A GLANCE: NETATMO WELCOME
CAMERA RESOLUTION	Up to 1080p
FIELD OF VIEW	130 degrees
INTERNET	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (2.4GHz), connected Ethernet
LIVE STREAMING	Yes
NIGHT VISION	Yes
MOTION/SOUND DETECTION	Motion detection only
MOBILE APP	Android and iOS
SUBSCRIPTION	none—storage up to 32GB using microSD card (8GB card included)
PRICE	$199

Setting up the Welcome wasn’t too difficult, but I did experience a minor hiccup. After plugging the camera into power using the microUSB cable and power adapter provided, you download the Netatmo Welcome app for Android or iOS and create an account. Then you’ll be prompted to turn the device upside down and wait for a blue light to glow near the camera lens. I was confused but followed the instructions—sure enough, in a minute or two a blue light appeared.

Next, the Welcome will sync with your device and attempt to connect to the Wi-Fi network your device is currently using. Once that’s all done, you can name and choose the location of the Welcome. Since the camera’s primary feature is recognizing faces, the app suggests you place the Welcome facing a doorway and not directly in front of an open window or area that gets a lot of sunlight since too much backlight can interfere with the facial recognition. Finally, it brings you to the homepage of the app where a live stream of your Welcome will appear with timestamps of activity listed below.

As I attempted to play around with the app, the Welcome mysteriously disconnected. The live stream disappeared, and even unplugging and reconnecting the device’s power didn’t work. To resolve this, I went into Settings in the app (the gear icon at the top left corner) and found my Welcome under its location in “My Homes.” At the bottom of this information page are buttons to remove the camera from this home or reset it. I reset the Welcome and started the process from the beginning, and I had no issues the second time.

Image quality: night and day

The Welcome can shoot video at up to 1080p resolution, but the way it does so is slightly different from the competition. You cannot choose the video’s resolution, rather the camera adjusts to record with the highest quality possible depending on the speed of your internet connection. Netatmo advises that the video quality will be best when both the Welcome and the device you link it with (smartphone, tablet, laptop, etc) are connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

The Welcome shot crisp video when I was in my apartment with my iPhone 6, the device I linked to it. Depending on the lighting, the colors of my furniture were skewed to the blue side—my black futon and light gray curtains appeared dark purple during the daytime—but I could see details in pillows and photos hanging on the wall across from the Welcome.

But it was a totally different story when I left my apartment with my smartphone. Depending on where I was and the strength of my LTE connection, Welcome’s live stream was either incredibly blurry and choppy or semi-sharp and not too terrible. At its worst, my living room was essentially reduced to a menagerie of blotchy, grayish figures, with large objects recognizable, but details virtually nonexistent.

Video produced by Jennifer Hahn.

Faces, faces, and more faces

While Welcome does alert you to unidentified movement in your home, its main feature is facial recognition. As soon as you set up the device, the camera begins collecting images of faces it detects. By doing this continuously (and with a little help from you), Welcome can learn the faces of every member of your household over time.

Once it has a general idea of whom to expect in your home regularly, you can set specific alerts for certain family members. If you have kids, you can be notified when Welcome detects them coming home from school, removing some of the guesswork and worrying that comes with being a busy parent at work most of the day.

When someone enters the room, Welcome detects faces and movement but not sound. It’s a bummer, considering the Nest Cam and Canary have sound detection, which is really meant to help prevent potentially dangerous situations from getting worse (think if a burglar smashes your window open with a loud crash). However, motion detection will capture almost any kind of physical breach of your home, expected or unexpected, so it’s not totally necessary. Welcome does record sound, though, so when you check a live stream of your home you’ll be able to see and hear everything—it just doesn’t act on what it hears.

A forthcoming feature of the Welcome is integration with Netatmo’s tags. These are rectangular sensors for your doors and windows that sense movement, communicating that activity to the Welcome camera. If someone opens a door or a window, the tag can trigger Welcome to record the activity. These tags have a range of 100 meters, so they can be placed all around your home (and outside, with waterproof tags) and still communicate with the Welcome. Netatmo claims these tags also sense vibrations, so they could potentially alert the camera to intruders before they even enter your home.

Welcome’s mobile and online portal

The homepage of the Welcome’s mobile app is divided into two parts: the real-time video player and a timeline of events. The player isn’t on by default, so you can tap it to see live video of the Welcome’s monitoring area. The playback delay is the longest I’ve experienced—between 10 to 15 seconds every time—which is terrible compared to Nest Cam’s one-second delay and Canary’s seven-second lapse. The timeline gives names, icons, and timestamps of when certain family members were seen by the camera. If new faces have been detected since the last time you opened the app, it will alert you of them immediately and ask you to identify them.

In testing, the Welcome is almost too good at recognizing faces. Every time I went into the app during the first few days, new images of my mug from all sorts of unflattering angles were there for me to validate and identify. The more you associate these photos with specific people, the better Welcome gets at identifying them, and soon you won’t have to validate the images anymore. Within a day of me identifying myself in the app, my individual profile gained a lot of strength and there were fewer photos of me to identify the next day. By the fourth day, there were no pictures of me to identify because the camera had learned who I was.

However, Welcome is so sensitive that I got a lot of false positives. Since I positioned the camera in the corner of my living room in full view of my TV, I had the casts of George of the Jungle and Good Morning America in the app waiting to be validated as part of my household. As much as I love Brendan Fraser and Robin Roberts, they won’t be visiting me any time soon. To get rid of these incorrect faces, I had to long-press on each and “forget” them one by one, which is tedious. There’s also the “not a face” option that you can use if Welcome wrongly identifies a pillow or a poster as a person, but my Welcome never identified any objects as faces.

Tapping on any of the timeline instances will put the video clip of that recorded activity into the video player so you can watch it back. In my experience, these saved clips could be as short as 50 seconds or as long as four minutes. When viewing a clip, you can tap the player and a small download icon will appear at the top left corner of the video. The Welcome doesn’t have a subscription tier, as its cloud storage is minimal at best—it only saves a screenshot of each event to the cloud, so you don’t have to pay for that storage at all.

All of the video clips are saved to a microSD card; you can download any of these clips to your photos on your mobile device at any time. Welcome will record over the earliest footage when its included 8GB microSD card runs out of room, so you will want to invest in a larger card if you want more footage saved at once. Luckily, Welcome supports up to a 32GB microSD card.

At the top right corner of the app’s homepage is an icon that leads to quick settings. You can manually turn on and off the Welcome here, as well as let the camera know when everyone is out of the house. Doing this right after everyone leaves for the day will make sure the Welcome is hyper-alert if and when it detects movement or another face.

You can access more advanced settings under “Adjust Welcome to your needs.” One of the features I liked best was the away timer, which sets the amount of inactive time that must pass before your Welcome considers everyone away. You can adjust this timer from one to 12 hours in increments of 15 minutes; I set mine so that after two hours of no movement or facial recognition, the camera knew everyone was away and most likely out of my apartment. When you eventually return, Welcome pings you with a “welcome home!’ message, which is a cute touch but also shows that it recognizes your face enough to know that you are not an intruder.

Other things you can set are how often you want to be alerted to unknown faces, when the camera should record detected motion, and how often you want to be notified of that motion. You can turn on or off “smart notifications” as well, which basically just groups multiple alerts into one by saying things such as “Tom and unknown face seen.” All of these features are available in the Web version of the app, including real-time video streaming, so you don’t always have to rely on your mobile device if you have your laptop handy.

For all of the faces in your life

Netatmo succeeded with the Welcome camera in the sense that it makes knowing who is in your home at any given time much easier. Its facial recognition is accurate and doesn’t take a long time to familiarize itself with members of your household. If an unknown person drops by when you’re not at home, Welcome will see it and alert you promptly. Despite the fact that the live video stream has a crazy lag time, you’ll at least be able to see what this unidentified person is up to before you possibly have to call the authorities.

That’s where the security features stop, though. Unlike Canary, the Welcome cam doesn’t have an alarm to scare off intruders nor does it store local police information to make it easier and faster for you to contact them. It also doesn’t have sound detection, and the quality of its night vision is a tossup depending on how strong your Wi-Fi connectivity is. I would love to see the best features of Canary—sound detection, great night vision, and a super-loud alarm—incorporated into the Welcome to make it an even stronger security device.

But if you’re looking for a surveillance camera that will only cost you its sticker price of $199, the Welcome is a solid choice. Its system of recording video to a microSD card rather than making you pay a monthly fee for basic services is really convenient. It was refreshing to use a security camera that didn’t threaten to take away some of its key features after my free trial expired, and Netatmo definitely hopes that will entice customers to welcome the Welcome into their homes.

The Good

You’ll be happy to display the Welcome anywhere in your home thanks to its sleek, understated design.
Welcome detects faces like a champ and learns the ones you identify pretty quickly.
No subscription fees; having all your video clips saved locally to a microSD card and available at any time is really convenient.

The Bad

Image quality is significantly reduced when your mobile device and the Welcome are not connected to the same network at the same time.
Removing false or unwanted faces from the detected pool is a time-consuming process.
Lag time in live video stream is the longest between it, the Nest Cam, and the Canary.

The Ugly

You will look ugly in 90 percent of the Welcome’s facial recognition captures. There’s no way around this.

Listing image: Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino Associate Reviewer Emeritus

Valentina reviews consumer electronics for Ars Technica, testing all kinds of gadgets with a focus on mobile devices and wearables. She has a soft spot for Chromebooks.

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