It is brilliant. As soon as I come home it reverts to private. And when I leave it activates. Fantastic picture quality and wide angle lens giving full coverage of a 8 x4 meter lounge. Main entry for possible breake in us at the end of the room which terminates in the garden by French doors.
Automatic message if something happens. We have auto light switch and I get alarm on phone as soon as the lights activate. I recommend this devise to anyone. Only drawback which is minor, is the delay as I believe the signal goes via the US. But it is only a matter of 6 to 8 seconds and I can't think of an instance where this is likely to create s problem. Like the idea of the records kept on iCloud adding safety to the recordings. Not had to use the download facility so can't comment on its benefit.
Automatic message if something happens. We have auto light switch and I get alarm on phone as soon as the lights activate. I recommend this devise to anyone. Only drawback which is minor, is the delay as I believe the signal goes via the US. But it is only a matter of 6 to 8 seconds and I can't think of an instance where this is likely to create s problem. Like the idea of the records kept on iCloud adding safety to the recordings. Not had to use the download facility so can't comment on its benefit.
I've had two Canary's for around 2 months now (writing this review in February 2016) and I absolutely love them!!! When I first set them up I had a few problems with the auto-arm/auto-disarm function and receiving notifications but they have actually learnt over time. The canary team are outstanding when you need help and they also have a blog so you can keep updated with new updates (canary updates silently so it's nice knowing what this little thing is thinking) after 7 days you drop to a free plan which holds the last 12 hours of activity and 24 hours of homehealth, you can upgrade this to a number of premium packages but I have found that this is not necessarily for my needs. I also have a pet which decides to get on the sofa when everybody is out so getting a notification for that is handy. The canary also has a ear piercing alarm you can set off ( I tested this when I first set it off and believe me this will attract attention!) The night vision is excellent and I have very few false alarms. I find HomeHealth very handy when myself and my partner are away on holiday to keep an eye on the temperature and humidity.
The Canary itself is beautifully designed, not a signal visiter have pointed it out and asked what it is (even a police woman failed to notice it). To me and my partner it just looks like one of them automatic air fresheners, this is a good thing but paramount in the event of a burglary, even though canary uploads live to the cloud the more recordings you catch of faces/damage the better for police/insurance purposes.
The setup process is so simple and since buying the canary an update which included changing the wifi over Bluetooth was rolled out making any changes to the settings a simple process.
Canary also has a number of modes...
Armed, in which all events are recorded and notifications sent to your phone.
Disarmed, in which events can optionally be recorded.
Privacy, in which camera and microphone are completely disabled.
Within the app you can tell the canary to switch into privacy mode when someone is home or keep recording movements.
Canary Learning...
This makes canary "smart" I can't go into this too much as the canary doesn't give away what it's learning and what it's not, I can say false alarms are getting rarer but it hasn't picked up my dog and understood it not to be someone entering my house and stealing my possessions but I found this statement from the canary team which may help you make sense to you canary learns...
"Canary learns two ways—users tagging content in events [supervised learning] and a combination of computer vision and machine learning that aggregates and interprets data independently [unsupervised learning]. Over the next few weeks, we expect to leverage the unsupervised learning to correct for alerts caused by lighting changes and the switch to night vision. More sophisticated learning, like identifying pets, will take a combination of both aspects, and a longer period of time. Canary users will see this aspect of the product mature the longer the have it."
Time will basically tell!!
Before I bought the two canarys to essentially protect £10000+ worth of belongings I was sceptical on how secure they were. The Canary site has some VT's from people who have had a success story with the system and I can't find a single statement to say someone got a away with a crime because Canary failed. When I thought about someone just walking into my house and unplugging the canary or even if the police would take it seriously I did some research... This is a statement (again from canary) of some interesting information...
We designed Canary to operate differently from traditional security systems, so it’s important to remember if someone were to get close enough to pull the plug on the device, you’re going to have HD footage (close-up) of the suspect as they do. Interestingly, in the burglary cases that Canary has recorded so far, not one of the intruders pulled the plug on Canary—though a few even got right up close and looked at it, with one burglar actually picking up the device and looking straight into the camera. Though traditional security systems may seem less easily defeated, they are often their own worst enemy, with 95% false alarm rates causing many homeowners to not even turn them on consistently (a recent study from ADT revealed that less that 30% of Americans with security systems actually turn them on). One other important thing to note is that if an individual calls the police to report a home invasion, and they can confirm that they see live footage of the intruder in the home, the police will respond right away. (This has already been the case with Canary users.) This is in contrast to when police receive calls from traditional security call centers—responses to these calls are nearly always de-prioritized.
I would highly recommend a Canary to anyone who has no patience with a complicated alarm system. Yes they are a little on the dear side for a "camera" but once you have this installed you will understand how intelligent this device really is!!
see price on amazon
I purchased Canary just over a month ago and have been holding off on writing this review until I had a decent chance to get to know it. I was a bit concerned about a lot of other reviews saying that they had problems connecting, problems with sensitivity, etc. Thankfully, my Canary experience has been extremely positive.
Connecting - Syncing the Canary with the app on my iPhone 5S was seamless and it also connected fine to my Sky broadband router - I have a download speed of around 13MBps and an upload speed of around 1MBps and it has coped fine.
Auto-arming - One of the huge reasons I went for Canary rather than one of the other cameras out there was the auto-arm function. Both my wife and I have the app on our phones and Canary has no problem auto-arming when we have both left the house and disarming once one of us is home. The only slightly irritating thing is that the radius is quite large, so that it only auto-arms once we are 200m away and disarms at around the same distance. I have also downloaded the Wink app which allows you to set a timer schedule for auto-arming, so we've got the Canary set up to arm at midnight and disarm at 7am. Perfect.
Sensitivity - When we first got the Canary, it was sending notifications a lot more than it should - we have lights switching on with timers and it would always notify us. However, after a bit of tagging and reducing the sensitivity setting, we no longer get notifications for this or things like car headlights or sunlight, although the Canary does still record them (it just doesn't tell us about them). So a month in, we've now got it set to a good level where we get notifications for people-sized movement but not for anything else.
Subscription - This was a bit annoying. I've had to pay around £40 for a 1 year plan that allows me to see 2 days worth of activity and have unlimited downloads. If I didn't sign up, I would only see 12 hours worth of activity and get 3 downloads in total - that simply wouldn't be good enough if I was away and didn't have time to check in with Canary every 12 hours. I'm happy to pay for quality service, but as others have said, it almost feels like I'm paying for something which should come as standard.
Issues - The only issue I've noticed is that sometimes Canary doesn't detect us coming home and fails to disarm automatically - once this happened when my wife was on the phone, so I'm assuming it's because iPhones can't use 4G and call at the same time. But it happens at other times every now and then. Not a huge issue, but hopefully something they will fix in time.
Overall - All in all, I would highly recommend Canary. Now that we've got it auto-arming when we leave and auto-arming at night, we can basically leave it and forget about it, until we get a notification and can take a look. It's also great for making sure everything is fine using the "Watch Live" function to give you peace of mind. So if you want an inexpensive smart camera to look after your home while you're not there, this is perfect.
buy
I weighed up the pros and cons of Canary vs a 'traditional' security system, like the excellent wireless Yale kits, for a long time. Basically the BIG difference, and the reason many people think Canary is no good, is that with the Canary, an intruder will not automatically trigger the alarm. Yes, that's something that you have to do. So if you don't get and check any alert sent by Canary quickly enough to see the intruders still there, you'll miss them. And that is why many people claim Canary is no good, and why I nearly didn't get one. Until one day, I was relaxing at home reading the 'paper while a neighbour's house alarm went off. Doing what everyone does when they hear a house alarm.... ignoring it! But due to a recent break-in at my house, I went to investigate. I of course found that no one was robbing them, but more importantly I discovered that the alarm, that was a full TEN houses away, was being ignored by EVERYONE. And then I realised.... I would rather capture burglars in HD video saved in the cloud, but maybe not have an alarm go off, than I would have an alarm auto-triggered, but without capturing any evidence. So I decided on the Canary. So far, so EXCELLENT. You need reasonably fast and reliable wifi of course. Oh, one more thing..... you'll be amazed how people don't notice it... I thought that any burglar would immediately smash it, but people have no idea what it is. Often, even when I show visitors the live feed, they still fail to work out where it is.. the 2-3 second delay confuses them and it looks like a ton of other appliances that people have in their houses like speakers, fragrance devices, etc. Brilliant. I will likely buy one or two more. AND (I'm nearly done)... with the home-automation protocol in the app WINK, you can handily schedule it to arm and disarm, so we have it active when we're in bed at night, just in case. Fabulous.
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