The Tapo Video Doorbell can be stuck to smooth surfaces
Ring’s decision to massively hike the price of its subscriptions has left many smart doorbell owners fuming. Without the expensive subscription, the Ring doorbell is next to useless. However, not every smart doorbell demands a monthly fee, such as TP-Link’s Tapo Video Doorbell Camera Kit (model D230S1) that I’ve been testing this week.
The Tapo kit includes the doorbell and the accompanying chime for only $99 at Amazon currently. With the Ring subscription costing $50 a year, excluding the cost of the hardware, it’s aggressively priced. But is it as fully featured as a Ring doorbell? Here’s what I’ve found after a week of usage.
Tapo Video Doorbell Camera Kit Installation
The Tapo doorbell is impressively easy to install. It’s battery only, with no option to hard wire, but the company claims the battery should last up to 180 days with average usage of 20 incidents per day. I’d be inclined to suggest that battery estimate is optimistic, but after a week of relatively heavy usage here the battery percentage has only dropped by 5%.
There are two ways to install the doorbell. You can drill holes and screw the backing plate on to the wall with the supplied kit. Or you can apply the supplied adhesive strip to the rear of the backing plate and stick it to a clean PVC surface, which is what I did.
I was nervous the adhesive wouldn’t be strong enough and I’d come out one morning to find the doorbell smashed to pieces on the doorstep, but that’s not happened so far. Will that adhesive fail over time, especially as you need to press down quite forcefully on the unit to change its battery? Only time will tell, but I can’t find many complaints about this happening on sites such as Amazon, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt for now.
The chime has to be connected to your Wi-Fi router via an Ethernet socket (supplied), and then set up is a breeze via the Tapo app. If you want to record doorbell rings and motion alert captures locally, instead of relying on Tapo’s paid-for cloud service, you’ll need to pop a microSD card into the chime. These cost around $10 for a 128GB card that provides plenty of storage.
Tapo Video Doorbell Camera Performance
Even footage captured at night is clear and in full color
Compared to my now ageing Ring Video Doorbell 3, the picture quality from the Tapo doorbell is superb. The 2,560 x 1,920 resolution is more than detailed enough to clearly identify the faces of visitors (or thieves caught lurking), and the audio quality is clear.
Better still, the camera is fitted with a lamp, enabling full color capture at night, instead of the murky infrared footage that my Ring provides.
The camera has motion sensing capabilities, with special modes for detecting only people, animals or couriers bearing parcels. You can mark out the zones you want the camera to detect motion in and use simple sliders to change the sensitivity of motion detection. That said, with a front door that’s only a couple of meters from the street, I couldn’t make the detection zones small enough or the sensitivity low enough to prevent it capturing passers-by, but those with bigger front gardens shouldn’t have a problem.
The supplied chime is plenty loud enough to alert you to callers, and you’ll also get alerts on your phone (iOS and Android) and on any Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices.
Surprise, surprise, the Amazon Alexa alerts aren’t as rich as they are with Amazon’s own Ring devices. When someone presses a Ring doorbell, it automatically shows you who’s at the door on Alexa devices with screens. The Tapo can only sound audio alerts, and you have to ask Alexa to show you the camera, which can incur a few-second delay, by which time impatient couriers may have gone.
The Tapo app can also take a couple of seconds to switch to live footage of the door. It’s no better or worse than Ring in this regard. However, Tapo’s app is designed to control all of the brand’s smart home kit, not merely doorbells, so it’s a little more clunky to navigate than Ring’s dedicated app.
What You Don’t Get For Free
Like Ring, Tapo does have its own paid-for cloud storage service, which costs $35 a year. This allows you to see past videos of who knocked at your door or was caught on camera without popping a microSD card into the chime, but given the cards are so cheap, it’s crazy to pay for this.
The only other notable thing you miss out on by not taking out the so-called Tapo Care subscription is rich notifications. These attach a still photo of whoever’s knocking at the door/caught on motion detection to the phone notifications, meaning you don’t need to open the app to see who’s there.
This is a handy feature, and it’s annoying that Tapo fences this off for subscribers, because there’s no technical reason why it requires cloud storage. Still, it’s a feature I can live without for $35 a year.
A Good Ring Replacement?
Would I be happy to replace my existing Ring setup with the Tapo Video Doorbell Camera Kit? Yes, I would. The fact it doesn’t immediately display callers on Alexa screens and the lack of rich notifications for non-subscribers are irritations, but they’re not killer blows.
The camera footage is sharp and clear, particularly at night; the supplied chime is loud enough to wake the dead; and the whole kit is very easy to install. What’s more, it teaches Amazon a much-deserved lesson for fleecing Ring customers with unjustified price hikes.
There are other smart doorbell manufacturers that also offer subscription-free products, including Eufy. But if you’re looking for a Ring replacement, the Tapo Video Doorbell Camera Kit should be high on your shortlist.
