Customer Ratings & Reviews

difficulties syncing the camera with existing camera

Picture quality is great I mounted it in my garage to let me know if the door is up. When dark the light in the camera enhances what is being videoed. Great camera.

I’ve tried and tried to like this camera, but I just find it to be half-baked. The price of entry is very enticing, and perhaps that is the entire point. Coming in at under a hundred bucks (at the time of this writing), it’s one of those tech toys that if you were ever curious about it won’t break the bank to try. And that is what I did, and I found myself wanting more… Not features, but just reliability, dependability, and ease of continued use. I’ve lived with the Arlo Essential Camera now for nearly a month and in doing so I have concluded two things. One, I like having security cameras, and two - this particular Arlo is not the one. But why? On paper this seems like a screaming deal, it is feature rich and comes from a respected manufacturer. The unit has a real quality feel to it. It’s solid, doesn’t rattle, the shell is glossy white and reminds me of an Apple product. But the similarity to Apple ends there. The primary feature that drew me to this product wasn’t just price, it was the fully wireless capability. It uses WiFi to connect to your home network. So no wires… But what about power? Ahhh… This was what really snagged me - it runs off a built-in (non-removable) LiON battery. I’m renting an apartment and I really didn’t want to run wires, so this device was perfect for my needs. My findings are that the device has all the features built-in as advertised, but I found none of the features to be anything more than average (and many were below expectation). I would not purchase this particular model again, but I would look at more expensive higher end models that they build. As I mentioned I felt the build quality was very good, and that I felt this model was to get people interested. My gripes: Battery life wasn’t great. This depends on a lot of factors of course, because the camera goes into a lower power mode when there isn’t activity detected. The more often it activates, the more power it consumes. Use the spotlight feature and the battery will drain even faster. Because the battery needs to be recharged you need to either get used to pulling it down to recharge (which can be a pita), attach a solar panel to it to keep it charged, or keep a USB cable plugged into it and charge it as needed or just leave it plugged in. The battery isn’t removable, which isn’t unexpected since most products these days are completely sealed. Still, I’d like to have that option. Video quality. I haven’t been super impressed with clarity. Certainly the specs read better than what in reality you get. I found faces and other details to get fuzzy. Audio quality. Not that good at picking up sounds. Audio is muffled and low. Lag - I am not a fan at all of the video lag from this camera. It’s not good… There is a nearly 1 second lag between reality and what’s shown on the app. Night vision quality with IR and spotlight still stinks. Forget any details beyond 10 feet. Motion sensor is finicky, I found it not to be sensitive enough. The app - multiple issues with notifications, hanging on my Apple iPhone. Lost connections, etc. While away on vacation after 5 days I couldn’t access the camera. When I got home I found the camera to be completely drained and dead. I recharged it fully and found that the app no longer recognized the camera. It would not even connect. I had to look up how to do a hard reset, back to factory defaults to revive the camera. Ultimately that worked but I lost all my footage and settings. I’ll leave it there, 10 reasons to not buy this camera. I have other things that annoyed me - but you get the point. If I could get my money back on this Arlo camera I definitely would. But I can’t… Having said that I wouldn’t have a problem trading it in and applying a credit towards another Arlo camera because I was impressed with the build and material quality. I do have one gripe about the material quality actually, there is a small black plastic cover under where the lens is. That has scratched very easily and is noticeable. One last bonus gripe… Arlo provides a free 3 month subscription for the camera. You don’t have to continue it, but if you don’t you lose many of the features. Signing up for a subscription opens up other features that you won’t get stand alone. And keep that in mind because there is not an SD card slot. So memory storage will be an issue if you don’t subscribe. That’s probably the real reason for the low price, kind of like buying a cell phone. Initial cost is low, but you’ll be paying monthly to make it useful. And finally… USB-B? Why? Why not USB-C and charging would be so much faster… Thumbs down for me. If your needs and expectations are light and minimal, then give it a whirl. For me I’d recommend saving your nickels to get a better camera. For instance the Arlo 3 or 4? Hmmm… Arlo I still like you, but I am unfortunately not a fan of this model. Just my honest personal opinion, for what it’s worth.

Arlo Essential Spotlight is an incredible camera, excellent image, its detection of people and animals works very well, easy to install and use, it has definitely been the best purchase I have made ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

These were purchases to replace older Arlo cameras. So far these are working well. They are compatible with my Arlo hub which allows me to record videos locally. They were easy to set up and have good video and audio. I’m pleased with my purchase.

Which there is no perfect lighting in this respect. Where it had to be placed for security protection for my elderly mother and here place does not have easy setup material to the outside of her house, and since she keeps her garage door open almost all day, it had to be placed in the wall of the garage to look out to the driveway. During the day, I cannot see her face or things held in her hands, and the driveway has a horrible glare, so other than motion and glimpses of vehicles going by, it is hard to tell what may go on, on her driveway. I am still trying to tweak the lighting and settings on the camera, but between the lighting issues and the clips being too short and cutting off when someone is still walking in line of the camera view, I'm not sure I did the right thing switching over, but we shall see.

I have multiple arlo cameras only one essential camera. I like the price compared to the others, picture quality is good the spotlight is a very nice feature. Only downside for me is the non removable non replaceable battery. I would buy another essential camera if on a budget otherwise the removable battery models are the best fit for me.

When I got the Arlo essential spotlight camera's it was easy to setup. They work well with capturing what I have it set to and has every good capture on the noise to whatever is around.

We've been using the Arlo Essential Spotlight Camera for our home for the last 1-2 weeks. For background, we've previously purchased the Arlo Baby camera several months ago, but have never utilized the Arlo Smart subscription; we have only ever used the free tier. The Arlo Wire-free Spotlight Camera comes with a free 3-month trial of ArloSmart, which includes 30 days of cloud storage, e911 calls, and specific (and even location-based) alerts for detections of people, animals, packages, and CO monitoring. These features all work well and are excellent, but I don't think you need the Smart plan to get almost everything valuable out of this camera. At the free tier, you get a small, easy to mount camera with great resolution, and 7 days of event recording. The camera also comes with a great "spotlight" (duh) function, which is helpful for outdoors detectionj/warning of trespassers. Load times with a good internet connection on your phone is relatively short - it takes about 1-2 seconds on a 100 Mbps WiFi connection to pull up the simultaneous live feeds from our two Arlo products. I appreciate this behavior specifically over some of the other popular home security apps, which may require you to click into an individual camera to load the feed, wasting precious time. Battery life appears to run down about 10% per week on the Optimized performance mode, which means that you'll probably have to charge this every 2 months. There's a solar panel option that Arlo sells to keep it continually charged for outdoor use, but it's not so big a hassle for us to remove it from its perch periodically to charge. Overall, we're really happy with this camera. It's a welcome addition to our home, and honestly, the way the products synergistically work together in a centralized home security solution is *very* helpful to us. We probably won't be extending our Smart subscription beyond the trial period, but that should actually stand as a compliment to how good the camera is on its free tier. Definite recommend.

Arlo has amazing picture and sound quality set up is easy and hands down the best system ever I absolutely love it

I am all for simplicity and ease of products, and this product pretty much achieves that, however, there were some issues along the way with this camera. SETUP: The initial set up was... not that great for me. The camera had issues connecting to the app after it was connected to my Wi-Fi and recognized as a camera. I would press on the camera, and it would spin forever and then after 2 minutes finally load it for a live feed. Also had issues setting up motion zones too. I got fed up and reset the camera and then everything worked fine. Probably a one off issue, but still annoying to go through. After setup, everything was working well. USE: Ok, so that 6 months of battery life is a lie if you are placing this in an area with high activity. After 1.5 weeks this thing died on me, now granted it was in a high traffic zone, maybe I needed to tweak it more for battery life saving, but I was shocked that it died so fast. Also, how is there no easily accessible SD card access slot!? This is my biggest gripe, I do not want all recordings in the cloud, I want them saved locally to the camera where I can pull an SD card out, I have another camera that does this, so I don't get why Arlo said NO. Either I am blind, or this is just not a feature on this camera. It kind of forces you to buy into their cloud eco-system which I am not for. If you are fine with cloud based storage only, then maybe this camera is for you, otherwise, probably not.

Great picture, great range of picture, easy to install and connect to Arlo Hub. Very accurate and you can zoom in on the pictures and its very clear

Easy to install and set up. Can see when packages are delivered. Able to keep an eye on our entire property

For $69.00 each, I’m very satisfied with the performance of these cameras. They do all that I need them to do, which is reliably record motion - without the pixelation, stop-motion, and all the other issues I’ve endured with the Pro and Pro2 cameras I’ve had for some years.

I had the original arlo system and was looking to upgrade the camera quality, battery life, and experience. These cameras did just that, you have 2 way talk on each camera, spotlight, and they campture way more than my original ever did. I kept my base station but if you don't have one it is not necessary. The cameras came with 50% charge so charging them up did not take long. As for the battery life, depending on how busy the area that you install them is how much they will last. Your looking at a 4-6 month max. All in all I would definitely recommend these for a starter system or if your looking to expand your existing system.

When it came time for my husband and I to decide what type of home security cameras we wanted we knew there were so many different options. We did our research and we also discussed. It was some very close friends who had recently moved and purchased Arlo cameras. They told us hands-down that the app was easy to use and the cameras were amazing quality let’s just say they were RIGHT!! I am an absolute love with these cameras because I can see my house and doorbell all under the same app at any time and the picture quality is amazing. I also love being able to talk through my cameras if someone shows up why were away.

The set up of the Arlo camera was so easy. The best part is the ease of use and great picture quality. It’s just what you want in a security camera and so affordable

Pleased with the new installation of the camera. The Arlo's does an excellent job with alerts distinguishing cars, people, and animals as they come cross and/or approach the camera's target areas. The quality of the video is at a 1080P, in my opinion is excellent quality given there are higher visual qualities offered by Arlo as well as the market. Overall, It gets the job done.

So far so good. Easy install, easy to use, easy set up, has a good picture, so far I like this system, app is easy to download and use too. Thanks

I like my Essential Spotlight Camera but the software app leaves things to be desired like ease of use to delete all Feeds from/to a date range, etc. Climbing a ladder to recharge the camera is not fun and when I put it back, the angle always changes. Other than that, I love it!