We've taken a field trip out of the studio and to the tech house where
TP-Link has sponsored this video for us to look at the Tapo C675D
kit. This is a camera system that has a
solar panel, so you theoretically don't have to hook this up to your power at
all. Right out of the top of the box, we have said solar panel and it's nice and
compact. This will feed the onboard battery that's built into the camera
unit itself. On the back of the solar panel, you can see it's got this USB-C
connector, so it's nothing crazy proprietary or anything like that. You
could feed this thing power through just a standard USB-C power brick or even
like a portable battery bank. We've also got a USB-C extension cable with what looks
to be a nice weatherproof housing. Ooh,
this is quite long. 6 ft.
Yeah, 12 ft. This will be so that you can mount the solar panel a little bit
away from where you have the actual camera installation. And as you can see
here, the housing has these rubber seals,
so it fits nice and snug together
and you're not going to get any water in there. If you guys can hear some background noise, we've got some
overhead traffic from planes. It is what it is. They've also included anchors and
then screws to go in for your mounts and a zip tie. A single zip tie. This one is
an A to C cable and it's super short. Before you start using the camera, they
suggest that you charge it ahead of time for 6 hours and this is what this guy is
for. Documentation, a secured by Tapo sticker, reference
template stickers that you can use to help mounting go a little bit smoother,
and a quick start guide. Next, we have a mount for what looks to be the solar
panel. Yeah. That guy will go [music] in
something like that there. Nice and simple. And the camera itself, when I
say camera, I should say two cameras. This is actually two 8-megapixel 4K
cameras, and one of them is a fixed 169°
field of view camera. >> [music] >> The other one can rotate around 360° and
follow traffic of either people or
animals, things that it can recognize with its onboard AI system. Looks like
we have two little antennas on the side here as well that you can adjust for
signal if you're having some issues. I'm just going to peel these guys off.
I believe, yeah, there we go. So, when you're throwing your mounts up, you
screw this directly onto the piece that you're going to mount to, then slide
back together. Clicks in place. It's just that easy.
While the top lens is a fixed wide-angle lens, the bottom one has telephoto
[music] and can go just under 11x zoom. Looks
like we have some LEDs on the front here, both for IR and for some white
light, so you've got some built-in spotlights. On the back, [music] we have
a couple of weatherproof covers here. One of them is for power, reset, and a
microSD slot where you can record all of
your video locally instead of having to send it anywhere in the cloud, and you
don't need some sort of video storage device on the same network that the
camera is. The other one is USB-C for your power. This is where your solar
panel is going to plug into, or if you have some other power source, you could
plug that into there as well. There is a built-in 10,000 mA hour battery, which
is supposed to keep the device alive for up to 90 days. The solar panel should be
able to charge it for a full day in 90
minutes of sunlight, too, which means between the two, you really shouldn't
have to power this thing other than hook up the solar panel and have the battery
that's built-in kind of take up the rest of the slack. On the back, we have an
opening for what looks to be the speaker. The device has two-way audio,
so you can hear what's going on through the video feed itself, but you can also
talk back. So, if you need to like [music] yell at some kids to get off
your lawn, or whatever. Despite having the opening back here, it does have an
IP65 [music] rating, so it's good to mount out in the elements. We've got a
nice spot on the shed just over there that we're going to install it and take
a look. We're going to mount the solar panel first. It says that you want to
the panel to be south-facing in the northern hemisphere or north-facing in
the southern hemisphere. We're going to throw in the mount for the solar panel real quick here.
Not my attic.
>> [music]
[cheering] >> Oh, it's nice to have a lot of cable. It
also means that you got lots to wrap up. Here you go. Now, we'll plug this guy
in. I'm going to get our micro SD card installed, and then we can power it on
and see what it looks like in the app. Power on. Camera on. Oh, it talks to you.
Camera's on. We got a flashy red light. Let's go pair it. TP-Link is typically
known for their networking hardware, such as switches, routers, Wi-Fi access
points, but they've been branching out into smart cameras like the one that
we've put up, robot vacuums, and other home automation to try and tie that all
together. We've got the Tapo app, which you can use to control all of their Tapo
devices. Inside the app here, we're going to try and add devices. Outdoor
cameras. Looking for your device. Is it going to pick it up from this far away?
Found it. Nice. Where have you placed this Tapo device? My only option is
custom, so sure. Location name, shed.
Choose an icon. The closest thing that we have to a shed
is the dog house. We're going to pick the dog house.
You've configured your Tapo device and it's ready for use. Sounds good. Get 30
days free of unlimited cloud storage. So, they do have their own cloud storage
that you can upload to, but it's not necessary. I have an option to start the
free trial or I can just dismiss it. Auto update is enabled to keep your
device up to date. That's actually kind of nice. One of the most common ways for
attackers to get into devices is because of out-of-date firmware. So, it's nice
to see that they prompt you for that auto update right away. So, what they're
doing right now is they're showing an example of what their smart tracking can
do. It's got on-board AI, so it can see
when there is some sort of animal or a human being that's going to be crossing
through its path. It picks it up with the fixed lens and then it uses the
rotating head lens to go and track that target. Inside the app, I can see that
the battery is full because I pre-charged this just in case. Holy
smokes, it's already picked up. That person was detected. Oh, I can hear us.
Yeah, now I can see us on the screen.
And we're even getting feedback from this.
The microphone's really good on that. Like we're
30 ft away, roughly. And I think right now it's actually honed in on Brad. This
is my big moment. Yeah, it's pretty good.
It caught that. It tracked you.
Uh, it sees your head. It's tracking you super well.
It's like the Terminator like it's locking on or something. So, I have the
manual pan tilt control. Like I can go and
move it all the way over to the side. This is me talking through the camera,
through the two-way system. In the app, I have both of you of the
fixed lens and the zoom lens. With the zoom lens, I can pinch and
>> [music] >> zoom in to a subject.
Seems to work okay.
There's Sven's face.
>> [laughter] >> So, this is me zooming in.
It's tracking you. It's tracking me. Yep. How scary.
Oh, it tried It tried to track you right behind the bush. That's terrifying.
The camera is actually set up to capture snapshots on a configurable time period
anywhere between 1 and 60 seconds, and then it uses its onboard AI to analyze
what's going on in the frame and decide whether or not it's a good time to start
recording. It does have a bunch of battery stats that you can look at. The
solar charging data is in beta right now, so we can't test that on, but it's
probably going to be a little while before we get anything on that. You can
see that we started at 100% though, and
right now we're sitting at 97%. I don't
expect that it's going to be charging the battery all the way up all the time,
so I wouldn't be too concerned about that. The price for the whole package is
$199 US, which considering you get two
cameras and a solar panel, it's not a bad deal. The one camera being able to
move around independently is a really nice feature, and not having to worry
about plugging it in to any existing power,
that's really nice, too. If you're looking to upgrade your home security system, give it a look. Thank you guys
for watching, and thank you TP-Link for letting us check out your new camera system. You guys also got to see a
little bit of the Tech House backyard. Don't worry, we will get it in order.