Hive Camera review

Hive Camera features – zoom, record and more

The Hive Camera is pretty well served when it comes to features, without having any that you won’t find elsewhere.

As with the Nest Cam, you can use it to communicate with an intruder, pet or family member using the built-in microphone. Just tap on the microphone button on the app and either yell something like "Get the hell out of my house!" or say something like "Hello Poochie, Daddy misses you". Don’t get these the wrong way round.

Speaking of audio, you can also play some rather silly alerts – a police siren, dog barking or alarm. However, the fact that the speaker on the Hive Camera isn’t that loud doesn’t exactly make it a strong deterrent. Yes, you can tweak the volume in the app, but it never reaches bone-shaking levels.

Other app options enable you to boost the brightness of the picture and change the orientation of the video, depending on how you’ve mounted the camera. In full-screen mode you’re offered a few more options – including the ability to zoom in on specific areas (up to 4x).

You can also set up motion-detection zones by drawing an orange box over the area you want to monitor. This is handy if you only want to detect motion at the back door, for instance. You first have to enable the Motion Detection feature in the ‘Event’ settings. Here you can up the sensitivity on both motion and sound detection – so for the latter, when the slider is at its lowest, you will only be notified if there’s a loud noise.

There are a few other nice features, such as Night Vision mode, which works well and is great for monitoring the home when you’re on holiday in another time zone, say. And then there’s the fact you can use an SD card to record any motion automatically – and then play the clips back using a calendar interface. But, you can’t record to the cloud, meaning that if a nasty intruder sort spots the camera and pinches it, you won’t have a backup. Personally, I’d be happy to pay a little more for cloud storage, as you can do with Nest Cam and Ring Video Doorbell, for example.

Hive Camera performance – 1080-yippee

The Hive Camera’s performance is, thankfully, very reliable. Obviously you’re going to get a better picture with a strong Wi-Fi connection both ends, but even with relatively low upload speeds and 3G data I was able to view high-resolution output without any glitches.

There are three resolution options – low, medium and high, and you can switch between them at will, as well as setting a default. The best idea is to do a test with your connection(s) and see what works best for you.

I was impressed with the 1080p output and recording – everything was sharp and I was able to monitor my dining room in pretty much perfect clarity. Of course, you can have multiple cameras – which you can manage through the app. But you can’t view multiple cameras at once, something I’d very much like to see.

There’s a load of potential for multiple Hive Cameras to communicate with multiple motion sensors for a truly smart security system. However, as it stands you have to manually flick between cameras if you want to monitor different rooms. And there’s no smart home integration, for instance switching on Hive lights when motion is detected.

Hive Camera verdict

The Hive Camera is best described as ‘fine’.

It’s unassuming, records sharp video and has a plethora of options for viewing and getting notifications via the app. Taken as a standalone cam it’s up there near the top of the second tier – below the Nest Cam and Netatmo Welcome, but still pretty good.

But really this still feels like a massive missed opportunity. The lack of any kind of cloud recording is one of the major turn-offs here, but an even stranger omission is the inability of the Hive Camera to link with other Hive gear, let alone third-party products.

For instance, I’d have liked to have seen it at least able to plug in to the main Hive app and interact with other Hive devices – being able to use a ‘recipe’ to turn the camera on when a motion detector or window sensor is triggered, say. And if you’ve already bought into the Hive ecosystem, having to use an additional app is a bit of a pain.

Hive has a massive user base due to its origins in British Gas, and already has the other trappings of a smart home. Why it can’t work with them, or at least use the same app, is simply mystifying.

So while there’s nothing much wrong with it in its own right, there’s also little reason to buy it over any of the many, many other options out there. Shame.