Sengled Snap – Smart Home Security Lighting
We have been big fans of the Sengled smart home lighting product line and the way they have incorporated smart technologies into their LED lights. We reviewed the Sengled Pulse speakers here a while ago and have continued to enjoy the high quality speakers in our upstairs office. We also had the opportunity to meet some of the Sengled team at a conference and they seemed really sharp and enthusiastic about their products.
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After our preview of the Sengled Snap at the conference, we were excited to have an LED light with a built in camera, so when came out we bought it right away. It took us a while to figure out where we could mount it, as it wouldn’t really work outside our front door, and anyway, we already have a Skybell there with a motion sensor so two cameras there seems like a bit too much.
We finally decided the Snap would be great to mount near our side gate, as a way to monitor/prevent unwanted intrusions into our back yard. Since the Snap screws into any regular light fixture, we installed it just under the eaves. Now we can get a view of that camera on demand at any time from our phones.
The Snap app has some neat features. You can turn the light on and off, dim the light and add motion detection. We started by turning on the motion detection but the tree branches hanging over kept setting it off every couple of minutes, so that got old fast. We have since trimmed the tree and tried to optimize the area of motion detection so we will see how it goes.
The camera on the Snap is pretty good quality with 720p and 1080p HD video available, though the 720p isn’t good enough to make out faces. The night vision camera has an amazing picture. The HD video streaming really struggles and often freezes our app – we are not sure if that is because of the device or our wifi.
The Snap comes comes with a free trial of 30 days of 1-day cloud storage plan, which allows you to review stored footage from the last 24 hours. There are several monthly plans with up to 30 days of stored footage. We are not using any of those plans but just have the on demand live streaming that comes with the device.
Discover is kind of a strange feature on the app – it allows you to share your feed and look at other people’s cameras. I guess if we had something exciting going on we wanted to broadcast it might be interesting, but I don’t think anyone wants to look at our garbage cans.
In general we like the Snap, it is a really easy to install security camera solution with a nice LED light. It has some room for improvement though, the app can be unstable and we get a lot of cloud errors. Because of the streaming problem, we were considering adding a wifi extender in the garage to connect to it, but if we do that, it looks like we have to start over and reinstall the system again, losing all of our data. It would also be great if it integrated with some of our other smart home platforms – Wink, Echo, HomeKit, etc. Not sure if that is coming or if they will continue to focus on stand alone apps.
Since we bought our Snap, Sengled has also introduced a number of other neat multi purpose LED bulbs, with wifi extenders, batteries, and the ability to connect to your home stereo subwoofer. We continue to be fans and look forward to seeing their other new innovations in lighting.