Pat PilcherSummary
Annke WB300 Security Camera
$112.72
Annke’s new solar-assisted outdoor security camera is smart and nicely priced but PAT PILCHER struggles to get it playing nicely with his Wi-Fi system.
Recently, I reviewed the oddly named Annke Wiffle Smart Doorbell and was impressed by the sheer amount of bang for the buck on offer, especially compared to more expensive big-brand products. So, when the chance came up to check out Annke’s WB300 solar-powered tilt/zoom outdoor wireless security camera (phew!), I leapt at it.
A solar-powered 2K video tilt and pan security for a hair under $113? What’s the catch?
The WB300 resembles the love child of R2D2 and a tank. It might not be compact, but a clever mounting base design for the camera, plus supplied mounting templates, meant getting it (and its accompanying solar panel) installed should have been effortless. Sadly, this was not to be. The provided screws for both the camera and its mounting bracket might as well have been crafted out of recycled marshmallows. Screwing the camera mounting into a pre-drilled pine balcony post saw the screw heads strip, and incredibly, one of the screws actually broke. Replacing the screws with some of my own, I finally got the camera and its solar panel mounted.
A key pain point with most consumer-grade security cameras is constantly swapping out and charging their batteries. The WB300 gets around this by using a bundled solar panel. In theory, it should keep its 9,000mAh battery topped up, freeing you from having to fart about with charging. The solar panel has a generous amount of cable and connects via a micro USB port. At the time of writing (a week after installing and testing the camera), its camera battery is still fully charged.
The WB300 is built like a small white panzer tank with two antennas. As you’d expect, it also comes with an IP54 rating. This means that the Annke WB300 is fine for outdoor use. Its chassis can handle the sun, rain, hail, dust and snow. That said, the rubber flap that covers the micro USB charging/solar panel port has to remain open when the solar panel is connected. Several Wellington storms later, the WB300 is still trucking along just fine.
It might be a shade less than $113, but on the specs front, the WB300 has some tidy credentials. Its camera sensor is rated at 3 megapixels (2304x1296p), which makes it capable of delivering 2K video. This should (in theory) allow users to capture more detailed footage, which is likely to prove useful for getting vehicle license plates, faces, and other details often lost by security cameras with lower video resolutions.
Its night-vision specs are not half bad, either. This is thanks to a dual lighting system with high-powered white LEDs and infrared illumination. With the white LED, the WB300 can capture colour night footage at distances of up to 10 meters. In practice, this gave me a clear, full-colour field of view of my back lawn after dark.
Its field of view (FOV) spec also impresses. Annke says that the WB300 has a 355-degree horizontal and a 90-degree vertical tilt and rotation range, which adds up to a serious amount of video coverage, potentially reducing the need for additional cameras. Camera tilt and pan movement are controlled using an on-screen D-Pad in the mobile app. Sadly, there is often lag associated with directing the camera to pan and tilt, but moving the camera (slowly) allows it to cover my entire back lawn.
An integrated passive infrared (PIR) sensor ensures that people/animal movement is detected. This sensor also helps reduce the false positive detections reported by tree branches blowing about in Wellington’s windy weather. Should any movement be detected, the camera sends a notification to the mobile app. The camera can also blare a siren and strobe its LED light. While this would probably deter most intruders, it’d also earn me the undying hatred of my neighbours, so I didn’t enable it.
If that wasn’t enough, the WB300 also offers local storage via a microSD card (it’ll support cards up to 128 GB), freeing users from the cost of Cloud storage. Last (but not least) is Alexa support. This should allow me to use an Echo Show and voice commands to control and view the camera.
With such impressive specs, the natural question is, how did it perform? Thanks to its wireless design, setting up the WB300 should have been easy. After finally mounting it to Cassa Pilch, I fired up the mobile app, which found the camera and asked for my Wi-Fi network credentials. The app spun its wheels and connected, saying that my Wi-Fi network had “medium” signal strength. That a wireless Mesh node was less than 10 metres away from the camera didn’t seem to make any difference, and it refused to connect or provide a live camera feed over Wi-Fi.
Bizarrely, I can effortlessly get a live video feed and object detection footage notifications using my smartphone’s mobile network. At the time of writing, Wi-Fi connectivity is nonfunctional. While Annke’s support has been excellent, this issue was not resolved and blowing out my mobile plan’s meagre data allowance to check on a camera simply isn’t appealing.
The camera was also stuck facing downwards. I fired up the pan and tilt calibration feature in the mobile app, which didn’t change anything. Applying some gentle force, the camera eventually rotated into the correct position. It appears that the camera had been jammed into a downward-looking position at the factory and was stuck until I applied brute force. Not great.
Other cameras I’d previously reviewed from Swann and Ring offered a seamless and relatively painless installation. They registered and worked with their mobile apps to quickly give me live video and notifications, regardless of whether the connection was via mobile data or Wi-Fi.
Unsure if the camera had issues with the dedicated IOT Wi-Fi Mesh network I use for all my smart home gadgets, I tried changing Wi-Fi networks. The app displayed a large QR code on my phone’s screen for the camera to scan. Sticking my phone under the camera proved to be about as effective as a fart in a hurricane. With that not working, the app suggested I scan the QR on the side of the camera. Unfortunately, the app’s QR code scanning capabilities refused to work. Feeling extremely frustrated, I checked my home network. It was running fine. Sigh.
Based on what I could preview from footage supplied over my mobile data connection, the video provided by the WB300 wasn’t terrible. Under daylight conditions, the footage offered decent levels of detail in both SD and 2K video resolutions. Sadly, the pan and tilt features are incredibly sluggish, with the camera choosing to move up to a minute after being instructed.
Its super affordable price and my earlier experience with the smart doorbell meant my expectations for the WB300 were high. Sadly, it seems to have issues with my Wi-Fi network (even though every other connected camera from other brands works just fine) and features a camera app that really needs some polish. While I can forgive these issues, given its super affordable price, the WB300’s inability to play nice with my Wi-Fi network holds it back. Here’s hoping a firmware fix in the future resolves these issues because, as it currently stands, it’s borderline unusable.
