Customer Ratings & Reviews

Easy setup and installation, because it is solar you do not need to do the electrical wiring. Camera has a wide angle too.

Sure it can charge without directly facing the sun, so long as there is enough light. However, its sensors are slow and patchy. If you have a long driveway it will pick up motion far down the street, but not up near the entrance of the driveway. It will pick up random passing by vehicles, but not anything in your driveway, unless its 2 feet in-front of the camera. It may or may not ever pick anything up. The construction of this thing worries me, there are too may distinct pieces. I've seen videos of people try to rip off door-cams. These can probably be removed in 4 different ways, its so dumb. Its heavy, you would think it had more than a motion sensor for its size. not counting the infrared, This should have something heat sensing for greater detection accuracy. These are supposed to be out doors, couldn't it have had an outside temp. gauge? I hate to say it but I probably could have found something just as good or better for cheaper on amazon...

This is the best outdoor camera I have seen. It works flawlessly and is easy to set up. I use it on my PC, iPhone, iPad, etc.

Good quality of product and easy to use , the technology is good

Product works great. Installation was good and they explained everything to me.

Call them on Cell. Very good bargain very easy to use and connect your phone.

Place and forget self charges with panels straight to cell pictures. nv is ok always shop deal

Great camers advise to charge up cameras before installation out side solar panel only does the minimum.

Easy to setup and configure, Solar panels do a great job charging the batteries, will see this Winter if they won't need manual charging.

Easy to install, setup, and use. Only wish they came wirh better mounting screws

I like these cameras a lot. This was the second set of three Tapo Outdoor battery-powered wireless security cameras with solar panels that I have bought from Best Buy. Not only are these cameras highly rated by Consumer Reports I got them at a very good price. I highly recommend them.

TSpectacular product that has integrated well with my doorbell from TP link. Highly recommend !

Great picture day or night. Solar portion keeps battery power charged at 100%

I highly recommend to everyone buy it.Very good quality video and fast sensor

Cameras are great, don’t have to climb up on anything to charge them, the sun does it all, love that,

These cameras are mediocre. They worked well for a couple of weeks. Now, they don't always send notifications, or they will send notifications to one phone. I have to reboot them regularly to have them work somewhat like they should. Nighttime use is very limited. An object has to be a lot closer to the camera to get the to pick up movement. It does not always pick things up at night. For the price, you get what you pay for. But only if you buy them on sale. If you pay full price, you will regret it.

The camera quality and build is very good. Setup was easy. Only issue is that the motion detection is fairly poor in the night. This defeats the purpose of having a security camera that gives lack of notification of any events in the dark.

Love these cameras clear quality & free app to see happening 24/7

Camaras work great good quality! Will recommend to buy.

Overall Simple, well-built, versatile, and a great picture. I've been on the market for "starlight" security cameras for a short while. When I noticed these, I knew I had to take them for a spin. While I have no real hands-on experience with any, I've evaluated many options out there in the market through images, videos, documentation, and reviews. My initial impression of the Tapo cams in-action was slightly negative, but after fiddling with them for several days, my opinion of them has changed to make this a positive experience. There is still a slight nag occasionally, but this might be more to the nature of WiFi/cloud based cameras than issues with the product. More on these points below. Design This was one key area in which I was most impressed. The cameras themselves (TC85) have a sturdy shell. While this doesn't appear to be any type of metal, the camera has a good weight to it, mostly from the components it houses and the rechargeable battery. The base of the camera has what appears to be a 1/4" thread to seat onto its included mount. The mount adds a locking nut to tighten and secure the camera when in position. An area of interest here, the base has a slight magnetic pull to it. This led me to believe the same model is boxed with other product lines. The mount gives the camera a 180° vertical orientation and a 360° horizontal angle of adjustment. The mount comes pre-assembeled with the mount for the entire solar/camera mount but can be separated to mount both units individually.  The solar panel mount has the same adjustability but is fixed to the larger mount. It seats by sliding into a groove and locking in place. The solar panel has a noticeably more flimsy design/build compared to the camera. How these two units connect to each other is... a bit odd, to say the least. The solar panel has a type C USB cable of about 6" coming out of its back. While the camera has a covered micro USB port protected by a silicon flap, it requires an adaptor between both units. The USB type C cable ends in a 90° plug, this would be perfect if the camera could just hook up directly. The adaptor uses a straight connector, this makes your installation slightly more troublesome if it leaves your camera very close to a surface. This reinforces the idea that both of these units may be sold with other oroduct lines, and it is cheaper to include an adaptor than a new mold or chassis alteration to use the same conector type. The face of the camera houses all your visual sensory components, from a wide angle lens, motion sensor, a pair of LEDs each housing an IR and light LED. There's an additional, smaller LED, for operation status and a mic along the front. On the underside, a pair of silicon flaps for power input, microSD, power button, and a speaker grill. Setup These cameras are some of the simplest devices to setup, in my case, everything was practically automatic. After grabbing the Tapo app and logging in, tap  the "+" sign in the upper corner and select "outdoor camera" followed by your model. Tapo prompts that you should change to a "Tapo##_####" wifi name, but in my case, the phone switched automatically. If you haven't used the app before, you'll get a window asking for your WiFi information. My only hangup during setup was unrelated to Tapo. If you have any type of VPN active during setup, turn it off before beginning. In my case, establishing a connection initially failed with an error, going through the ritual a second time, and after disabling the VPN, the camera paired in minutes and was streaming to my phone. Performance The cameras look very clear during the day, every detail is easily distinguishable. The wide angle lens lets you see a vast area of your property. I'd like to say the auto settings that they come configured in should work in almost any environment, but the app does give some customization options. Night time view is clear, but any minor reflective object such as a windshield or taillights of a car, causes enough glare when the IR light is on. There's no orientation setting, however, the instructions clearly call for not installing it in a different orientation, as the motion sensor may not work correctly. The detection modes let you choose the type of objects and if you want notifications for them. From human, vehicle, pet, and generalized motion detection. They include a deterrent function, which the app simply calls "alarm". It allows for an audible noise to play when an object comes into view, a strobe light like effect, or a combination of the two. Zones where you want each notification to trigger can also be customized for every tag. Viewing the live feed adds a setting to identify every object on screen with a visible square box around anything it could potentially detect. Using IR mode adds a depth of view setting. It allows selecting a nearby or distant field of view. This setting seems to adjust the strength of the IR lights and enhancing your camera's depth of view in larger environments. While I cannot speak for a situation for moving out of its wifi environment, if it becomes disconnected from the internet, the cameras will still record detections and write them to memory locally. Obviously, this wouldn't upload anything to the cloud if you choose a hybrid recording scheme. Cons There is a color mode and IR mode that can be triggered at will from within settings. Color mode is impressive and makes things look very bright in dark areas but it permanently enables the lights. IR mode is exactly the same and neither allow disabling of the lights like typical cameras do. Motion detection has often mislabeled notification types. The instructions call for placing cameras at about a 15⁰ angle and not facing the direction of travel. If your camera were looking at your lawn with street objects visible. A parked car on the street might trigger a vehicle motion notification even when the trigger was human or generalized motion. In the event of a network outage, your ISP dropped the ball or any other reason you have no internet but have a wifi signal, your camera will record events, but there will be zero communication with the camera. There is no network based streaming protocol, and everything happening on the camera relays across a Tapo server and back to your phone. Conclusion While this looks great, feels fairly well-built, and offers powerful features, there are still a few minor quirks to hopefully get ironed out. The night vision is fairly good for its price, with an impressive daytime image quality. In typical scenarios, motion detection will also be great to precise. This is worth 4-stars.