Wyze Cam OG Telephoto Security Cam (Refurbished)

In the first sentence describing this camera on the Amazon page, the importer/seller states that this camera has 3x optical zoom. They make the same claim in the detailed specifications for the camera, which is found further down in the page. This is a false claim. This camera has fixed focal length (fixed angle of view). The focus distance is also fixed. The term “zoom” refers by convention to the ability for the focal length of a lens to vary so that the angle of view can vary. More particularly, “3x optical zoom” implies that the focal length of the lens can vary over a range where the long end is 3x greater than the short end. Since there is no such capability, the question that begs an answer is where the number 3 comes from. Since the focal length of the lens is fixed, the best guess (probably) is that they are using interpolation/upscaling to simulate a focal length 3x longer than the actual focal length of the lens. If this happens to be a correct guess, the claim is false on two counts (it isn’t done optically, and while the upscaling simulates a telephoto capability, a telephoto capability and a zoom capability are not one and the same thing). And if this happens to be a correct guess, it would explain why the images do not seem to have as much detail as they should given the 2K claim. The actual, inherent resolution of a sharply focused image taken with this camera is nowhere near as great as it should be for a 1080 x 1920 (2K) camera. For any camera with fixed focal length and fixed focus, one of the fundamental questions is what the minimum distance is, at which the target image will be in sharp focus. For the Wyze OG Telephoto, this distance is about 10’. The next question is what the target width is at this distance (as determined by the angle of view). At this minimum distance, the target width is about 40”. Depending on how you intend to use the camera, these numbers might not matter. An example of when it would matter would be if you were wanting to use the camera to capture close-up images of small birds at a bird feeder. You will need to place the camera no closer than 10’ from the feeder. A typical bird feeder will then take up perhaps 1/5 of the image width, and thus about 1/5 of the horizontal pixels. The number of pixels actually used for the feeder and the birds at the feeder will then be not more than 20% of total image pixels, probably not more than 10%. There are a couple of other problems with the image quality. When I took pictures of a perfectly rectangular target with the target centered in the camera frame and nearly filling the frame, the camera needed to be offset laterally from the center of the target by a distance that was about 1/4 the distance to the target. When the camera was not offset in this manner, the two vertical sides of the rectangle were very different in size, i.e., the rectangle was not a rectangle. This is likely due to the lens not being in correct directional alignment with the sensor, which is suggestive of poor quality control in the manufacturing. Image quality suffers further from the excessive use of sharpening. I am not a fan of image sharpening, because it creates artifacts at the boundary between light and dark regions of the image. For this camera, these specific artifacts are overt, to such an extent that in my individual opinion the images are ruined by this artifact. In spite of the several problems with the image quality, the image quality may be as good as it needs to be, depending on your expectations and on how you intend to use the camera. Security cameras in general are not known for their image quality, especially one as dirt cheap (inexpensive) as this one. During the setup procedure, it is impossible not to notice this displayed message: "Get Cam Plus to remove 5-minute cooldown period and record longer motion”. This message and variations of it, which include a small icon displayed on the “live view” screen, are pervasive in the app running on your phone. If the need for a 5-minute cooldown between successive recordings of motion-triggered events happens to be genuine, there are two observations that need to be noted. First, it is not possible for any subscription service to cause the sensor to cool down more quickly, absent a fan that is controlled remotely, which does not exist in this little camera, and which could more easily be controlled by the firmware in the camera, if a fan existed. Second, any camera that genuinely needs a cooldown period longer than a few seconds is useless in many scenarios, which certainly includes security camera use. My curiosity about this 5-minute cooldown was piqued to the extent that I spent a little time in an endeavor to learn what the actual impact of it is. This endeavor was encumbered by a user interface that struck me as nonintuitive, and also by the lack of a user manual. I would have been happy with a downloadable PDF file, but there is none. Eventually I sought the help of their customer support, which was via chat, which I abhor because for any sort of technical communication, the efficiency of chat is deplorable. The session abruptly ended before my question had been answered, however I was pleasantly surprised later in the day when I discovered an email that the support person had sent me. Here is an excerpt: “Regarding your Wyze Cam OG that has a 5-minute cooldown time …, please check our support article Event Recording Schedules on Wyze Cam v1/v2 and Pan. This applies to all our Wyze Cam devices in terms of event recording length and cooldown time.” Here is an excerpt from the referenced article: “Cool Down Period - There is a 5-minute cool down or ‘rest’ period after Sound or Motion triggers an Event video. Unless you have Cam Plus, which removes this cool down and gives you full length videos, there will be 5 minutes between every 12-second Event video. Sound and Motion are separate triggers. If sound triggers an Event video, but during the 5-minute cool down the camera detects motion, another Event video will be recorded.” Evidently, Wyze believes that the typical buyer is gullible enough such that by using the words “cool down”, the typical buyer will be believe that this really is a physical limitation of the camera (and not simply an artificial restriction put there by Wyze to help selling subscriptions), and that the only possible means by which it is possible to circumvent the make-believe physical limitation is with the aid of a subscription service. In my experimentation, I discovered that it is not as bad as this article makes it seem, for the present time anyway. When the MicroSD card is enabled, motion-triggered or sound-triggered events cause the camera to record both thumbnails and video clips to the card. I discovered that only the thumbnails are affected by the goofball 5-minute cooldown. The video clips, which are all that would matter to me, are not affected. They are all one minute in length (not 12 seconds as the article states), and they can occur with no intervening time gaps. Given that Wyze did this, it would not surprise for them to use a future firmware “upgrade” to apply the restriction to the video clips. Among the several reasons that I abhor this kind of thing, there is the question of what will happen in the event that Wyze goes out of business and the subscription service is shut down. There are plenty of reputable companies who manufacture security cameras of excellent quality and who do not endeavor to use the camera as a vehicle by which they can compel people to pay for a subscription service. I have not looked into the subscription service to learn, for example, if the video clips captured by the camera are automatically uploaded and stored on a remote server. If this is done, then depending on the storage allocation, the service might be worthwhile for all I could say. I don’t know, but I do know that it rubs me the wrong way for a manufacturer to do this kind of thing. I’m not suggesting that there is anything illegal about it, and ethics are subject to individual opinion. I simply do not like it, personally.