Alright people, this is the blurams Outdoor Pro. It’s more than just a security camera. This is a web-accessible, app-accessible camera with deterrent alarm, two-way audio, excellent night vision (believe me!) and facial recognition.
Wait, facial recognition?
Yes indeed. When you take this one out of the box you’ll get 7 days of cloud storage to test. This, of course, is where a lot of security camera makers get additional revenue, but I’ll admit that here there’s an additional reason why you should consider the cloud storage over the microSD slot sitting underneath this camera.
Firstly, with the blurams cloud storage you get an “Intelligent Alarm” system. This will use an intelligent AI to detect if there’s movement or a person coming near to your house. If it’s a person, it’ll get a shot of their face and compare it to “known people” that you setup. This is great if you want to see if your friends are at the door, or your son / daughter has got home safe from school. During my testing, we even got to know the postman and couriers. You can label and name family, friends and strangers. In this sense it works a lot like the doorbell cameras you’ve seen people putting up, like the vivint doorbell camera and the Ring Video doorbells.
The cloud recording also builds in a “quick search” feature, meaning that you can quickly zip to important clips from the various categories. Motion is shown on a slider, as is sound or a human face appearing. It’s quick and easy to zip through the footage and find that moment when something strange may have happened. With SD card recording, you’ll instead just need to go through every part of the recording to find out when something happened. Plus, with your camera available on the phone and the web, you can access the cloud storage anywhere.
As I type, a 1 year subscription to a 15-day loop is $59. A 7-day loop is $4.99 a month, which works out at roughly the same price per year as the 15-day loop. Currently $59 works out at about £47.68. You can also have a year subscription of a 30-day loop at $149 per year. Prices are always changing though, and I pay $1.99 per month for 3 days worth of recordings.
But wait! We need to get this out of the box.
In the box is a manual, a “footplate” for attaching the camera to the wall, a charger and the camera itself. You also get some screws and the wall plugs / anchors / rawlplugs. Here’s me mid-way through the install. Before you do all this it’s worth planning the location and the hole for the power cable.
The camera is powered from a USB charger and you can plug it into any USB port really. I’ve got mine actually powered from a NAS box in the garage but you have to consider putting it somewhere where..
1 – The camera can see the faces of visitor
2 – There’s a USB port / power socket nearby.
3 – There’s a hole in the wall for the USB plug and cabling to be threaded through.
I’m going to call this the “footplate” – it basically fits to the wall and you click the camera into place on it. Fitting it is simple enough – just get yourself a drill, make some holes in the appropriate place, pop the plugs in, then screw in the screws. I’d planned for the cable to go into the garage via the UPVC panelling on the upper right of the photo. This, of course, is another consideration if you’re choosing not to use the “cloud” recording. If someone chops the cable or pulls your camera off the wall, you’re potentially going to lose “SD card” recordings, but not if you’ve chosen the cloud system.
It’s just a matter of clicking the camera onto the base / footplate. You may notice that I moved the camera sightly here – that was purely to reduce the amount of cable on show.
The next step is to grab the blurams smartphone app. This is free and available from your friendly smartphone app store. You’ll need to go through the creation of an account, but this is required because you’ll be accessing your camera with these credentials.
It’ll take you through the device setup process, which involves you powering up your camera and holding the reset button. This will start the red light flashing on the cam and will effectively start it broadcasting a WiFi hotspot which the blurams app will connect to. Once it’s done that, you simply tell the camera the details of your home WiFi network..
Once you connect, it’s a great opportunity to check the image and whether you can see everything you want to see. The 1080p quality of the image is amazing and it captures a near-130° wide-angle video.
There’s 4X digital zoom and distortion correction, plus you can set areas of the image to be tracked so that you don’t get any erroneous results..
For the app, I’ve decided to take you through it via video, so here’s a look at the interface.
Head to the blurams website and get this for £59.99 on Amazon UK or $72.99 on Amazon US.
Overall, an absolutely fantastic camera which is simple and VERY quick to setup, easy to use and cheap too. Get yourself one of these, you will not be disappointed!
UPDATE – As I type, there’s an Amazon Prime Day Deal on, and you can get 63% off the price with the discount code XGXGXGXG. This brings it down to just £29.99, although weirdly the discount code seems to be a little too generous and knocks it down to just £19.99! Get one now – it’s only available at this price today and tomorrow!!
