Carrefour hypermarkets have been offering a low-cost surveillance camera for a few days, the Smart from the Dutch brand Calex.
Sold for 39.99 euros, the device allows you to monitor your interior from a smartphone, gives the alert in case of detection of movement or sound, and is simple to install.
But it suffers from certain shortcomings which make it lose part of its credibility.
A newcomer to the surveillance camera market is the Calex Smart.
Sold by Carrefour at only 39.99 euros, it promises us more secure homes.
On paper, it is the ideal product as a summer approaches during which many hope to flee their homes, synonymous with months of successive confinements.
Until the holidays, what is this Smart camera worth, sold almost four to five times cheaper than the indoor cameras from Nest or Netatmo which are benchmarks?
A discreet camera with local storage
Calex Holland. We are first of all intrigued by this brand unknown to the battalion. Based in Rotterdam, Calex has been selling light bulbs since 1970. Connected or not, some, decorative, are the most beautiful effect. On the firm's website, there is no mention of devices dedicated to security. It is a press release from the distribution giant Carrefour which alerted us to the existence of the Smart camera on its shelves and the low price of the device which encouraged us to test it. This one is "Made in PRC", a diminutive for People's Republic of China.
Cute, the camera is only 11 cm high, 5.3 wide and 3.2 cm thick.
It is therefore very discreet.
Its foot is flexible and can be slightly bent to orient the shot.
3M double-sided tape can be placed under the foot to fix the camera to a wall, for example.
There is a microphone at the back, a speaker grille, as well as a micro-SD card slot (up to 128 GB, not included).
The camera is supplied with a USB cable (and its mains plug) of one meter, which is short if you want to install the camera at a height.
Easy to get started
The installation, precisely.
It takes little more than three minutes for the camera to be operational.
The Calex Smart application is fairly well packaged and you just have to follow the proposed step by step obediently so as not to make a mistake.
Pairing with a smartphone is achieved by photographing a QR Code.
No easier.
The small blue LED on the front of the camera shows that all is well.
There are still some settings to be made in the application, such as adjusting the sensitivity of motion detection (Low, Medium, High), activate sound detection, etc. Good point: you can add the application to the home screen of our smartphone.
A beautifully crafted Full HD image
With the Calex application open, it is possible to view at any time what the camera sees.
In Full HD, it offers a fairly comfortable and detailed view.
It is also possible to activate a SD vision if the quality of the network is not there.
By switching the smartphone screen to landscape mode, the view is even better and you can zoom in the image to check a detail.
Note a night vision of rather good quality, and appreciable to remove doubts.
If necessary, the application offers to take a screenshot or record a live video.
Not bad, when we get home from work, to confuse the dog who spent his day sprawled on the sofa when he is prohibited from doing so ...
It is also possible to address someone via the microphone of their smartphone.
A two-way exchange that can be practical (although difficult to test), at best to reassure a child left alone, at worst to gently ask an intruder to close the door when leaving the premises ... For the anecdote, the camera triggers a sound detection alert when speaking into the microphone.
Rather reassuring ...
Weak point: the lack of cloud service
If the self-recorded videos are stored directly in the smartphone's memory, those automatically produced when motion is detected are recorded on the SD card housed in the camera.
This is a fundamental difference with more advanced and more expensive cameras that have cloud storage (with or without subscription).
In addition, the probability that a thief embeds the camera and SD card is not negligible, thus leaving no trace behind his passage.
It remains that each detection of movement, the camera instantly sends a notification to its owner.
The experiment, tried dozens of times, worked each time.
But what a notification!
A little unicorn in ambush
The message received in case of motion detection reads as follows: "Voice control failed Check the status of little unicorn".
It looks like a coded message!
Translation problem, no doubt?
The firmware is however up to date.
Frankly, that doesn't sound serious.
All the more so as this camera, of which Carrefour praises the merits, must have arrived by entire pallets to the distributor.
We imagine the customer persuaded to have made a good deal to call the after-sales service of his store to ask him for explanations.
Or worse: a first experience that was not entirely conclusive with a connected object dedicated to security.
Note that the Calex Smart Home camera is also sold on Amazon or (hey, it's strange!) On light bulb sales sites.
Hopefully this little
bug
of youth is quickly corrected.
As it stands, it takes a lot of its credibility away from a product that ultimately isn't that bad.
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