Wyze Cam Floodlight Review

When it comes to outdoor security, floodlight cameras are excellent lines of defense, but they're also among the most expensive. Wyze, known for its value-packed smart home devices, is shaking things up with the release of the Wyze Cam Floodlight . The device offers powerful performance, bright lighting, and a wide camera view, all for a fraction of what you'll pay for rival models from Ring, Google Nest, and Eufy. Wyze's option may not be as feature-filled or as solidly built as the competition, but it’s the best deal we've seen on a floodlight camera yet.

About the Wyze Cam Floodlight

• Price: $84.99
• Colors: White
• Connectivity: 802.11 b/g/n @2.4GHz
• Power source: Hardwired (110-120V)
• Resolution: 1080p HD
• Field of view: 130 degrees horizontal, 270-degree PIR motion sensor
• Audio: Built-in microphone with 90-decibel speaker
• Brightness: Up to 2600 lumens
• Smart assistant support: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant
• Operational temperatures: 32 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit
• Weight: 2.76 pounds

Installing the Wyze Cam Floodlight was a simple, 30-minute process, aided by the Wyze app’s instructions and GIFs. It does depend, of course, on any snags you run into with your home’s wiring, since the floodlight requires a hardwired power source. But if you’ve got the wiring to work with, it should be a straightforward setup.

You will need to provide some of your own tools, like an unusually long Phillips head screwdriver to tighten the final screw when securing the floodlight to its bracket. The device comes with other hardware like a variety of screws, a rubber stopper, a mounting bracket, and two wire nuts.

After first powering on your floodlight, be ready to finish the installation process via the app as quickly as possible. After initializing the setup, the camera’s microphone will begin loudly repeating “ready to connect” until you’ve made said connection. There’s no option to turn down the volume until setup is complete, and as others have pointed out, it's a jarring sound to blast out in a quiet neighborhood.

What we like

An unquestionably great value

The Wyze Cam Floodlight delivers good performance for a lot less money than competitors like the Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 Pro, Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, and Google Nest Cam with Floodlight.

While each of the aforementioned floodlights has higher video resolution, the Wyze Cam Floodlight isn’t far behind with 1080p. At night, the device puts out up to 2600 lumens of adjustable brightness, which is eclipsed only by the Eufy Floodlight Cam 2 Pro. The Wyze floodlight’s standard field of view is worse than a few of its competitors, but it gains an instant advantage with the ability to significantly boost that view for the cost of a separate camera. A second Wyze Cam V3 can be connected using the floodlight’s USB port to maximize your monitoring capabilities.

Outside of the specs sheet, the Wyze Cam Floodlight lives up to its stats. The camera is accurate and responsive, video quality is more than reasonable for a sub-$100 outdoor camera, and the device particularly shines (pun intended) at night. The extra lumens really make their presence known in the evening, completely illuminating my driveway to help with monitoring our parked vehicles. Even without the lights, Wyze’s color night vision displays a clear view of your home’s surroundings.

The Wyze Cam Floodlight has a built-in microphone for two-way audio but doesn’t feature active noise cancellation like its Ring counterpart. Still, the audio that’s relayed from the floodlight is relatively clear and free of any noticeable delays. The device can also operate in extreme weather conditions and has an IP65 weather-resistance rating to keep dust and moisture at bay.

Simple, streamlined app that's easy to use

The Wyze app (available for iOS and Android) offers an interface that's about as simple as it gets. The home screen displays all of your available Wyze cameras, as well as other connected devices, with buttons to tap each of them on/off. Tapping on an individual camera pulls up its live feed, with four available options sitting neatly underneath: Sound, Record, Speak, and Take Photos.

A “More” option sits on the far right, and tapping it brings up a few additional options. Turning on Motion Tagging emits a green box around the motion the camera captures in all recorded videos, while Timelapse will enable continuous recording, but only for those who have added a microSD card. There’s also the option to enable Wyze’s 90dB siren, which is unpleasantly loud and effective to say the least, and an album icon that gives way to your library of recordings.

A good variety of customizable security features

The Wyze Cam Floodlight offers a welcome spread of features, especially for what you pay. One great option is the “Rules” feature, which offers the ability to do things like set schedules and create location triggers that will automatically employ an action by one of your other Wyze smart devices when you arrive home. For example, you could set your Wyze Thermostat to turn the AC on when you get home.

In addition to general features like Away mode and Dusk to Dawn automation (which automatically enables and disables the lights depending on the time of day), the Rules tab also allows you to choose when the floodlight’s motion detection is enabled, or when it sends you notifications. You can also choose from several predetermined motion zones in the app for light control with the floodlight’s sensors, in addition to the option to adjust the floodlight’s light sensitivity and brightness.

As a caveat, some of the pricier floodlight cameras on the market have more advanced features. Ring’s app, for example, provides full control over things like motion sensitivity and what kinds of motion alerts you want to trigger notifications. Eufy’s app incorporates the ability to adjust the floodlight’s default color temperature and brightness, as well as the option to choose between five distinct security modes. That said, the Wyze Floodlight Camera offers a subtly impressive assortment of options considering its bargain-bin price tag.

What we don’t like

The full experience comes at a price

Nobody wants to pay additional fees after buying a new device, but that's often the case with home security gadgets like the Wyze Cam Floodlight. Unlocking features like unlimited event video length, back-to-back recordings, and advanced detection features (person, package, vehicle, pet) require a Wyze Cam Plus plan ($1.99/month per camera).

There's also Wyze's Cam Plus Pro plan ($3.99/month per camera), which provides access to all of the Cam Plus plan features, and adds 24/7 professional monitoring, visual alert notifications, and the ability to arm or disarm your camera. The floodlight does come with 14 days worth of cloud storage for video event recordings right out of the box. If you don’t want to upload videos to the cloud, there’s a micro SD card slot on the back for local storage (the card is not included with the floodlight).

By comparison, Eufy has 8GB of internal storage from the factory but no option for cloud storage. Google offers three hours of event video history and intelligent alerts at no cost, with additional features locked behind a paid Nest Aware plan (starting at $6/month). Ring won’t let you record at all until you’ve invested in a Ring Protect Plan, which offers similar features to Google (starting at $3/month). Just keep in mind that, unlike Ring and Google's paid plans, Wyze's are priced per camera, which could get costly quickly if you have multiple devices.

The build quality is just OK

For everything Wyze has managed to accomplish with its products, build quality isn’t among the brand’s strongest suits. It was a notable point of concern with the Wyze Video Doorbell, and it stands out once again with the company’s new floodlight.

Wyze's model is suspiciously light (about half the weight of both the Ring and Eufy floodlights touched on above) and its plastic body feels flimsy and susceptible to serious damage if you accidentally dropped it during installation. Ring and Eufy’s products, by comparison, feel like they could take a punch if need be.

Limited support for smart assistants

Though Wyze can integrate Alexa and Google Home ecosystems, including the ability to view your camera feed on a Nest smart display like a Google Nest Hub Max or Alexa-powered Echo Show smart displays like the Echo Show 8, but you will not have access to your Wyze camera feed within the Google Home or Alexa apps.

Maybe this isn’t much of an issue for you. But if you’re someone like me who has multiple brands of smart cameras around the home, being able to access them all from a central location is incredibly helpful.

Wyze doesn't work with Apple HomeKit, and there’s no concrete indication that it’s coming anytime soon. For what it’s worth, Wyze did join the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which means there is potential for it to support Matter at some point in the future.

Privacy

Wyze claims to use symmetric and asymmetric encryption to protect user information. The Wyze app also offers two-factor authentication through either text message or the authenticator app to help keep your smart home safe and secure. In the Wyze app, you can also turn off audio and video recording for the floodlight. When the camera is recording or the live stream is being viewed, a red status light illuminates on the front of the camera.

Should you buy it?

Yes, this floodlight camera is a value-packed device for outdoor home security.

Wyze’s floodlight offers very good performance for a price that no other legitimate smart home brand can even begin to approach. In exchange for those savings, your only real compromises are cheap build quality and a lack of abundance in extra features.

Wyze’s best competition is significantly more expensive. The Eufy Cam 2 Pro is the best smart floodlight I’ve tested to date, both because of its unparalleled performance and excellent onboard storage options. Ring’s Floodlight Cam Wired Pro puts you in the driver’s seat of your floodlight’s functionality, and Google’s Nest Cam with Floodlight is a solid option for those entrenched in the Google smart home ecosystem.

The average person interested in a smart floodlight wants to be able to see what’s happening outside their home and record important motion events as they happen. By that definition, there’s no better value on the market today than the Wyze Cam Floodlight.