Ezviz H8x
- Best: Motorised outdoor camera
- Power source: Wall outlet
- DIY installation: Yes
- Video resolution: 2K (2560 x 1440)
- Field of view: 108 degrees (340 with movement)
- HDR: No
- Night vision: Yes, colour
- Two-way audio: Yes
- Removable battery: N/A
- Local storage: Yes, cloud storage optional
- Indoor or outdoor: Outdoor
- Why we love it
- Great value
- Motorised movement
- Good video quality
- Take note
- App isn't great
- Setup involves some trial-and-error
- No microSD card included
Since this is a wired outdoor camera, the installation is more involved than battery-powered cameras designed for use indoors. Location is key, since the camera needs to have a solid wifi connection and be within reach of a plug socket. The included power cable is longer than most I’ve used before, so that’s helpful, and it’s also thin enough to have a window closed on it. This means you don’t need to drill a hole through a wall, or worry about how you’ll feed the power cable out of your home.
The H8x is designed to be wall mounted with four included screws and wall plugs. But since I’m constantly installing and removing cameras for testing, I’ve mounted the H8x to a planter on a first-floor windowsill. It’s not the perfect solution, but saves me from drilling another set of holes into the wall. The camera comes with a template sticker to help you drill in exactly the right place. Remember to ensure the camera has space to fully rotate and tilt.
The power cable has an integrated Ethernet socket for giving the camera a wired internet connection. This is a great option if your wifi network coverage can be patchy, but can be ignored otherwise. Naturally, installing an Ethernet cable will add more complexity to the setup process.
Once secured with the four screws, the camera is ready to be plugged in and set up using the Ezviz smartphone app. And don’t forget – if you plan to use local storage instead of Ezviz’s cloud subscription, you’ll need a small screwdriver to access the microSD card slot. The camera accepts cards up to 512 GB, but there isn’t one included in the box.
Camera
The H8x has a 1/1.8” CMOS imaging sensor with a 2K (2560 x 1440) resolution and a wide lens aperture of F1.0. The lens itself has a 108-degree diagonal field-of-view, but this is enhanced significantly by the camera’s ability to pan 340 degrees and tilt 70 degrees. There’s also support for WDR, which stands for ‘wide dynamic range’. This doesn’t quite give your videos the full HDR (high dynamic range) treatment, but it’s a useful addition nonetheless.
I was reasonably impressed by the H8x’s video quality. Its 2K resolution is a welcome upgrade over the 1080p offerings of many rivals – especially battery-powered cameras where a higher resolution isn’t worth the drop in energy efficiency. But, as with the Ring Outdoor Camera Plus, which was recently upgraded from 1080p to 2K, the difference isn’t night-and-day. Footage recorded by the Ezviz is bright and clear, with exposure automatically cranked up a little to lift the shadows. It might not win an Oscar but it’s plenty sharp enough for a security camera.
There’s an option to lower the resolution to Full HD, which I found helped to iron out choppy footage caused by a poor wifi onnection, as my router was two rooms away.
Features and connectivity
The biggest feature of the H8x is of course motorised movement. You can move the camera manually using the app, but the best option is for it to follow movement whenever it’s spotted. That way, it’ll lock onto a person when they enter the frame, zooming in for a closer look and panning or tilting to follow them.
It’s a system that works well, but can also be a little frustrating. There’s an option in the settings menu for creating a detection zone, where the camera will only alert you, record video and move to follow a subject when movement is spotted in that portion of its view. Creating the zone is more fiddly than it ought to be, and I found the camera would ignore it and alert me to movement from outside the detection zone. This can be annoying if you’re trying to stop the camera from recording every time someone walks along the pavement. As is often the case with security cameras, a bit of trial-and-error is required until everything is working correctly.
The camera uses 2.4 GHz wifi, missing out on 5 GHz. This isn’t a deal breaker though, especially at the sub-£100 price point, and I had no problems connecting to the camera and streaming video to my phone. That said, the app could do with some improvement. It’s stable enough, but can sometimes be a little slow to connect to the camera, and is littered with poorly translated English, making the descriptions of some features difficult to understand.
Storage and subscription
A microSD card slot means this camera has local storage. There’s no card included in the box, which is a shame, but it’s nice to see the camera can support a capacity of up to 512 GB, giving you plenty of space for hours of recordings. The card slot is concealed beneath a panel that’s secured with two screws – so, while a thief or burglar could potentially remove the card without any force or specialist equipment, they’d be doing so right in the camera’s view.
Cloud storage is also an option with the H8x. There are three levels to pick from: silver, gold and crystal. These include 1GB, 5GB and 10GB of cloud storage respectively, and recordings can be accessed for seven days with a silver subscription, or 30 days with both gold and crystal. The three tiers are priced at £5.99, £10.99 and £19.99 per month, with discounts available if you pay for a year upfront.
Cloud storage can be helpful, but I prefer to use a camera’s integrated storage and avoid a monthly fee where possible. I like how, unlike Ring, Ezviz doesn’t lock extra features (like improved intelligence) behind a monthly fee. If you go down the internal-storage route, the camera retains all of its functionality.