Nest Cam Outdoor review

Our Verdict

The Nest Cam Outdoor offers high-quality video and audio with like shooting fish in a barrel-to-utilize apps, but you'll demand a pricey subscription plan.

For

Continuous 24/7 alive video streaming
Weatherproof design
Clean, piece of cake-to-navigate web portal and mobile apps
Skilful epitome and audio quality
Multiple sharing options

Against

Not worthwhile without pricey Nest Aware subscription
Sharing options separate betwixt mobile apps and web portal

Tom's Guide Verdict

The Nest Cam Outdoor offers loftier-quality video and sound with easy-to-use apps, merely y'all'll need a pricey subscription plan.

Pros

+
Continuous 24/7 live video streaming
+
Weatherproof design
+
Clean, like shooting fish in a barrel-to-navigate spider web portal and mobile apps
+
Good image and sound quality
+
Multiple sharing options

Cons

-
Not worthwhile without pricey Nest Aware subscription
-
Sharing options split between mobile apps and web portal

The Nest Cam Outdoor ($199) is a solid, well-made security webcam that captures good to high-quality video and sound. Designed for outdoor use, it's weatherproof, and because it's wired rather than battery-powered, information technology will monitor your habitation continuously, capturing 24/7 video.

The Nest Cam Outdoor is paired with highly accessible, easy-to-use mobile apps and a web portal. The photographic camera is one of many Nest-compatible products including the Nest Learning Thermostat, and the Nest Protect smoke alarm.

Unfortunately, most of the Nest Cam Outdoor's all-time features won't work unless y'all pay for the pricey Nest Aware deject-storage program (starting at $half dozen per month). But, for some, the price will exist worth information technology.

Editor'due south note (Aug. 2021): Nest has discontinued the Nest Cam Outdoor. In its place is the Nest Cam (battery), which has a 1080p photographic camera and includes for costless three hours of rolling video storage besides equally person, creature, and vehicle detection. For more than details, please check out our Nest Cam (battery) review.

All-time outdoor security cameras

Nest Cam Outdoor: Blueprint

The Nest Cam Outdoor is a sleek, conical device with a white weatherproof beat out and a black face. It'southward fairly big (11 ounces and two.8 10 three.5 inches) and heavy (11 ounces) compared with some other contempo Wi-Fi security cameras, and it attaches to a small round magnetic base that tin be screwed into any flat surface.

(Image credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom's Guide)

Eschewing the bombardment power of other outdoor cameras (such as Arlo Pro 2), the Nest Cam Outdoor has a generous 25-foot ability cord that plugs into a USB port at the lesser of the unit. This gives the camera the power it needs to capture 24/7 continuous video, which would bleed a battery apace.

Cable clips secure the ability cord to the wall. Nest says this setup will deter theft of the photographic camera, nevertheless we could envision a thief popping off the clips with a pair of shears or a flathead screwdriver.

We don't have a preference for either wired or bombardment power, but potential customers should get-go check whether their houses or apartments have outdoor outlets the Nest could plug into. Those with large houses may need to add together extension cords to accomplish locations optimal for both viewing angles and Wi-Fi signal strength.

Nest Cam outdoor review — (Paradigm credit: Jeremy Lips / Tom'south Guide)

The speaker and microphone are placed in front end of the USB port, then that when the camera is installed high upward on a wall, they are closest to the people below. The eight infrared LED lights (for night vision) frame the lens in the black bezel. The condition light, which can be turned off via the mobile app or web portal, is directly above the lens.

The photographic camera is rated for temperatures ranging from minus 4 degrees to 106 degrees Fahrenheit (minus twenty to 40 degrees Celsius). It has an IP65 hardiness rating, pregnant information technology is dust-proof and rainproof simply may not survive submersion in floodwaters.

The Nest Cam Outdoor supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi networks at 2.iv GHz and v GHz, and encrypts data using the mutual TLS/SSL standards. Customers will need broadband internet connections of at least 2 Mbps (DSL may non meet that standard) and a smartphone or tablet that supports Bluetooth 4.0/Bluetooth Low Energy.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Installation and setup

The installation of the Nest Cam Outdoor follows what has become an manufacture-standard process, involving downloading the app, using a QR lawmaking to pair the camera with your mobile device and connecting to the Wi-Fi network. It was a quick, trouble-free procedure.

The camera is rated for temperatures ranging from minus iv degrees to 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

When we unplugged the camera temporarily to move it to our monitoring-test location, the live video feed was almost immediately available later nosotros plugged the camera dorsum in. If we had installed it outside permanently, we would have also used the supplied cablevision clips to affix the long cord to the wall, which would have added to the time and endeavor involved.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Mobile apps

Nest's mobile apps are clean and easy to navigate, with few icons and no pregnant differences betwixt the Android and iOS versions. The apps command not just the Nest Cam Outdoor, but Nest's entire line of smart dwelling products.

The Home screen displays feeds from all connected cameras, as well as round avatars from other continued Nest devices. Tap on the Nest icon above these to point whether yous're home or away. (Borer on Home turns off your cameras.) At that place's a gear icon for decision-making options related to your overall account, such as enabling family sharing.

Tapping on each camera's feed on the Home page brings you to the Sightline screen, a rundown of what'south going on with that camera. The simple Sightline interface hides a nice level of features and controls found primarily through the Settings gear icon in the upper-right corner.

In Sightline's vertical mode, 2-thirds of the screen (beneath the alive feed) is filled with a scrollable timeline of alerts and related thumbnails. If you subscribe to the Nest Aware cloud program, you can tap anywhere on the timeline to play a portion of the 24/seven continuous video recording. Non-subscribers have access to the by 3 hours of still snapshots triggered by sound or motion events.

Automobile-rotate works well-nigh immediately in Sightline when you're viewing either the live feed or an archived video. The horizontal view is cleaner than the vertical one, considering the live feed fills the screen without showing the timeline.

In both views of the alive feed, you can tap the [+] icon to enable a ii-finger pinch/spread and use the 8x digital zoom to look more closely at details. Tap either the clockwise or counterclockwise icon in the middle of the view screen to play the xv seconds previous to or afterwards the electric current displayed moment. Printing the microphone icon at the bottom of the entire screen to talk with anyone near the camera.

The web portal at Nest supports Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, equally long as Flash is enabled. It's quite similar to the mobile app, and just every bit piece of cake to main, but a handful of features and controls are available only in i or the other. For instance, you'll set up full access to Family accounts in the mobile app, simply you'll utilise the web portal to provide non-Family members with access to live-feed links.

The web portal uses a traditional horizontal timeline. Click on the buttons in the lower-left corner to set the timeline to hour, minute or 2nd increments. Y'all tin use the vertical scroll bar to zoom in, and the portal also has standard video buttons for play, pause, fast-forward and dorsum.

Unique to the web portal are Zones and Clips. Tap on the Zones icon in the lower-right corner to create, edit or select activity zones. If you subscribe to a cloud plan, you can tap the Clips icon to easily salve and share a portion of your video history.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Motion and sound detection

Motility and sound detection on the Nest Cam Outdoor works well, though with of import limitations related to whether you pay a monthly subscription fee for a Nest Enlightened cloud plan.

If you're a Nest Enlightened subscriber, yous can ascertain up to four irregularly shaped Zones for monitoring movement. All users can plough overall motion or sound detection (to monitor the entire frame) on or off.

Another Nest Aware-simply characteristic is the person-detection characteristic, which will warning y'all if the camera sees (or thinks it sees) a human existence. In our tests, the Nest Cam Outdoor idea our cat jumping on the counter was a person. The camera was more authentic (though not 100 percent) with its notifications when it actually did see a person.

You can choose when and how to get notifications: via email and/or on your mobile device, all the time or merely when no one is home, or just for selected Zones and/or sounds or motions not in whatsoever zone. When a camera goes offline, such equally when the internet or electricity goes downwards, you'll also receive an alarm.

A rather useful feature is Dwelling house/Away Assist. It turns on your Nest camera(s) automatically when you leave the house, as long equally you have your phone with you. The cameras volition turn off when you (or someone with another recognized phone) return.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Video and audio quality

The Nest Cam Outdoor'south 1/3-inch, three-megapixel CMOS sensor, combined with the 130-caste broad-bending glass lens, captures adept- to high-quality 1080p video. In good light, faces were by and large easy to discern. Details tended to be lost with the 8x digital zoom, but nosotros were still able to recognize faces that were within 8 feet of the camera. Beyond that, zoomed-in faces tended to blur and pixelate.

Withal, in depression light, such as at twilight, at dawn and on very cloudy days, faces tended to exist indistinct. We recommend installing a proficient outside light that volition stay on 24/vii virtually the expanse the camera will be monitoring.

The 8 infrared LEDs effectually the lens helped capture dark-vision video over the full field of view — not only when visible light was quite depression, but besides in pitch-black darkness. However, if you have any outdoor lights inside the frame, the photographic camera's sensors can exist confused and may not turn on night vision automatically. Figures in motion tend to exist blurred in night-vision mode.

By default, the Nest Cam's video resolution is fix to Auto, and will switch among 1080p, 720p and 360p depending on the speed of the internet connection. (Nest told us that its priority is to exist sure the camera is e'er continued and uploading video.) You can manually ready the resolution to remain at a specific level.

Captured sound was make clean and clear, while the live audio from the Nest Cam Outdoor tended to exist soft just commonly aural. On the spider web portal or in the mobile apps, a person speaking inside a ten- to xv-human foot range of the camera was mostly quite articulate and understandable.

When we used the web portal to speak to people (or pets) through the camera, our words were very loud and articulate if nosotros stood right in front of the camera. As the listener moved around the room, the book softened, but even 9 feet away and at a 90-degree angle from the microphone, words were quite aural.

When we used the mobile apps to speak through the camera, the sound was a bit muffled. However, the words were all the same quite understandable with decent volume.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Scheduling

Because this is an outdoor camera, Nest doesn't recommend scheduling off periods, because "you might miss something of import." Merely both the web portal and the mobile apps each have rather good scheduling available for all connected devices, including the Nest Cam Outdoor.

The Scheduling window, which is nearly identical on the mobile apps and the web portal, is quite like shooting fish in a barrel to utilize one time you lot empathize its logic. You can prepare different times to plow the photographic camera on and off for each day of the week, or repeat a certain fourth dimension period for several days. Unlike many other cameras' schedulers, Nest's lets you lot span a selection over midnight to embrace the evening and morning of adjacent days.

Nest Cam Outdoor: Cloud storage costs

Because the Nest Cam Outdoor has no retentivity-card slot, you're dependent on the cloud for all video storage. Unfortunately, that means that after the initial complimentary 30-day trial menstruation ends, you lot'll no longer accept access to your video history unless you subscribe to a Nest Enlightened cloud plan. You lot'll likewise lose person alerts, definable activity zones, and the ability to save and share video clips or time-lapse clips.

Without Nest Aware, yous'll still become live feeds and live alerts, merely you'll have archive admission only to nonetheless images that were recorded when the photographic camera was triggered by a noise or move — and only for the by 3 hours.

For $6 per month (or $60 annually), you can shop 30 days of event history from an unlimited number of cameras at one location; if yous upgrade to Nest Aware Plus ($12/month, $120 annually), you become 60 days of rolling cloud storage, plus 10 days of 24/7 video history.

Security photographic camera cloud storage plans compared: Nest vs. Band vs. Arlo

Nest Cam Outdoor: Library and playback

With the mobile apps' Sightline view, you can scroll up and downwards through a timeline of continuous video recordings. Wherever y'all finish, the video history will play — if you lot're a Nest Aware subscriber.

When an alert is generated, a even so snapshot thumbnail is pulled from the related portion of the video, often zoomed in to prove what, exactly, triggered the alert. Colored dots and dashes indicate which defined activity zone or type of detection was involved. The size of the dot or nuance forth the timeline shows how long the alert lasted.

In the web portal, the size of a colour-coded dot has no relationship to the length of the result, unless it's set to intervals of seconds. Hover your cursor over a dot to come across an event thumbnail, which will be a however snapshot for not-subscribers and a video clip for paying users.

Unfortunately, the valuable information offered by Nest's 24/seven continuous video feed, the very dainty clip library and the great playback features are all negated unless you subscribe to Nest Enlightened. All non-subscribers will get is the by 3 hours of triggered-event still snapshots, which, afterward the trial menses ends, will have no link to the associated video.

MORE: How To Connect A Nest Thermostat To Amazon Repeat

Nest offers both kinds of access sharing that most consumers would desire: Family accounts that include full administrative privileges and playback access, and links (with or without a countersign) that provide not-family members with access merely to the live feed. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, Family accounts are fix in the mobile apps, and live-feed-link sharing is done in the web portal, which tin be confusing.

Nest Cam Outdoor review: Verdict

Both the hardware and software for the Nest Cam Outdoor offer a quality experience with good video capture and audio, and very good functionality and ease of use. However, there's no local-storage pick, and the fundamental features for which Nest is famous are available only to Nest Aware subscribers.

Amidst the all-time outdoor security cameras, the Glimmer Outdoor and the Wyze Cam Outdoor are less expensive options, while the Arlo Ultra provides the best in image quality. But the Nest Cam Outdoor is a proficient photographic camera for those invested in the Google ecosystem.

Sally Wiener Grotta is the president and lead analyst of DigitalBenchmarks test lab (www.DigitalBenchmarks.com). The scripts she created for various tech publications for testing and evaluating digital cameras, epitome quality, software and related technologies have get industry standards. Among her numerous books is the first major volume on image processing "Digital Imaging for Visual Artists" (McGraw-Hill), co-authored with Daniel Grotta. Her hundreds of reviews, stories and columns have appeared in scores of magazines, journals and online publications.