WYZE Cam Pan v3

I have several different brands of cameras at 3 different properties in two countries, and I wanted to include Wyze as it is one of the few affordable gimballed outdoor cameras out there. It seemed like an established brand with good features. Here are my results: The price is right for a gimballed outdoor camera. However, after testing in several environments, it seems that the firmware, software and hardware designs are integrated and developed up to a point, such that none of the intended functions work entirely well or at all. It's as if the design was executed and put on the market, yet never ever tested. It's fairly astonishing to be honest but I've see this sort of engineering snafu in other areas: it strikes me that someone took the company down a design path that just doesn't work and the company said, "well we're releasing it anyway and we'll fix it later". The most claring example: the motion detection function is largely useless: from a mount about 12 feet off the ground, it only really detects things the size of people or vehicles. Then, at any sensitivity setting at all, it will detect specs of dust, insects, droplets of fog, etc. So you get motion detection pretty much every couple of minutes 24/7. I then mounted a camera at my desert location, and found the same astonishing thing: at night, in 'night' detection mode, you get a barrage of detection of specs of....moisture in the air? Bugs? All of the above? Whatever it is, the motion detection is rendered completely useless. I then turned IR off, so that it just sees light at night, and this settles it down but I have numerous detection events for "people" where it's actually a bouganvillea plant branch that the motion detection is mistaking for people. So, this is almost as if the sensitivity of the camera was set to max, and no attempt was made to see if this setting would defeat the motion detection function, which it does entirely. As for the set scan function where you set in 4 waypoints and it scans those areas, it regularly drops them i.e. you set them in and then it winds up scanning off those waypoints, in this case higher than the waypoints so I am scanning the trees not the ground. Sound detection is also way too sensitive. It appears it's set to full sensitivity, with no way to adjust it, so that if you have this detecting sound, it detects sound far from the scanned area and not of interest. I get sound detection events from traffic a mile away. As noted by others, you set up the camera and then it gives you serial notifications of updated firmware, one version at a time. This could mean a dozen firmware updates. Nobody would find this acceptable. How did Wyze send this out the door with this feature? Any sensible system would allow you to update firmware in one compiled firmware update (or if there were significant architecture changes, a couple of updates). So ultimately I use these cameras for manual viewing, where I monitor my remote property, but I don't rely on the motion detection at all as it is not a useful function. As I said earlier, I had this experience with a tech company that went down a design path until it ultimately determined that the architecture wasn't going to work, so they junked the architecture and redid it with a different philosophy. I hope that isn't the case here as it would mean the hardware is probbaly useless as well. Hopefully Wyze will seriously test these machines and find a way to make their cameras function as apparently intended. The form factor of the camera is good and I have high hopes for it. Hopefully Wyze gets serious about their cameras. I'd pay more for the camera if it worked. For now it's not a very bad value given the limited function but would be a great value if it worked. ***Update**** I just have to mention this new nugget discovered, of yet another illogical UI design feature that points to the quite substandard engineering and design of the user interface. I wanted to update the time on two of my cameras due to their being in an area that does not adjust for daylight savings time. Both cameras were off by an hour. So I went to advance settings, then "sync time" and what does it do? It sync's the *camera's* time to the *app's* time. Yes, I am sitting 3 time zones away and now the date stamp on the camera is my time not the camera's time. And, there does not seem to be a way to set the time manually or to the local time unless the app is there. I suspect I can set my phone to the wrong time zone then sync it. However, it's just clear that when specifically designing this feature, nobody considered the possibility that the camera might be in a different time zone than the app. The rating stays at 3 stars as the unit does function well *as a camera* but the UI, firmware and software are woefully misengineered.