Best Cheap WiFi Indoor Security Camera on Amazon | IMOU Ranger 2C Camera Review

Enjoy my IMOU Ranger 2C 4 Megapixel Indoor Security Camera Review. You can buy this indoor camera currently for $43.99 on Amazon US here →https://amzn.to/31TVHjk and for a bargain price of £26.99 (with its £10 voucher) on Amazon UK here → https://amzn.to/30AQ3SV

Overview

I have covered a few security cameras on this channel, however, most of them were aimed at use outdoors rather than protecting your home indoors. Indoor cameras are great for a number of reasons, they not only allow you to monitor indoor recordings of any potential house break-ins, but they are also handy to check up on your children or the pets in your house when you’re away. It’s also a great way to quickly check if you left the house lights on, or a door or window open when you’re already too far away from your house to turn back.

Over the past few months, I have recently been using the IMOU Ranger 2C 4MegaPixel indoor camera. It is a fairly compact 360-degree camera that features a 4-megapixel sensor, a 2K recording resolution, it has human detection and tracking, and there is a built-in alert siren to deter any threats in your home. With geofencing you can choose to manually or automatically enable privacy mode, it can store recordings locally and also upload recordings into the cloud, there’s abnormal sound detection and alerts, and it has night vision up to 33ft and two-way talking should you wish to talk with anyone at home remotely through the camera and built-in speaker.

Unboxing and installation

In the box, you get the Ranger 2C camera itself, a long USB-A to Micro-USB lead, and a USB-A wall plug adapter to power the camera. There is a small bracket, screws, and a paper mounting guide to vertically mount the camera, and finally, there is a number of manuals and paperwork that tell you how to get the camera up and running.

Installation is very simple. You first plug the USB cable into the camera and also into the supplied wall adapter, and power the camera on. Once powered the camera will come alive and begin to configure itself. You’re then prompted to download the app from the Apple or Google app store, create an online profile, and scan the bottom QR code to install the camera and pair it to your Wi-Fi 2.4G network. Sadly this camera doesn’t support 5G Wi-Fi networks, but most decent routers will have a dual-bandwidth mode to support both of these types.

Once paired to your Wi-Fi network you then might be prompted to update the camera with any detected firmware updates. I recommend that you carry these out to make sure the camera is updated with the latest security and stability updates, as well as any new features its developers have added to the camera and the app you control it with.

Operation & features

When the updates are done you can get to play with the camera’s many options within the app. From viewing its live feed to checking historic recordings, setting up location-based modes for when you are away and when you return, and much more.

The live feed is handy to view and set up the best location and to position the camera. I tried both desktop and vertical modes. With the 360 degrees rotation of the base unit, the camera is able to rotate around and capture any angle horizontally, whilst the camera ball inside can tilt up and down 85 degrees to capture a large area around above or below where it is positioned in your home. 

Whilst it is on a flat surface or shelf, you are limited to what you can capture horizontally and up to 85 degrees vertically upwards, because it cannot look any further down than at its horizontal level. So for this reason I found vertically mounting it so it points downwards the better position. This is so that the camera has more freedom of movement to capture what’s below it, for things like monitoring pets on the floor.

I was fortunate to have the camera at the same time as adopting a 6-week old kitten. Mounting the camera in its den allowed us to keep an eye on it and its behaviors. I can imagine this camera would be great for monitoring young children or babies too. Its night vision and object tracking are decent and it does a great job at keeping up with tracking humans and even pets, however, the camera can pan a little too aggressive at times. Keeping the subject in the center of the view, and returning to the default start position when tracking is lost or if the subject has left its sight.

You can geofence your location in the app, so when away you can have it start recording and send notification alerts, and stop all this when you return home. This allows you to limit the amount of recording events that it saves, which makes it easier to go through past recordings and pick out anything worth viewing back.

The camera continuously records on to an inserted micro SD card with H.265 compression to save up to 50% of storage space. With a 32 GB SD card, I had enough storage for around 25 days of event-based recordings. Unfortunately, the app could do with a few improvements, however. Local storage doesn’t show thumbnails of events, so you have to guess and tap through each video to learn what has happened. Cloud storage does generate thumbnails. Also navigating through days of events can be time-consuming and not as easy as Google’s Nest app for browsing through historic video captures.

Event recordings and images can be saved in the app if you wish to keep key moments or videos from being overwritten with newer recordings. You can opt to use their premium cloud service if you want the security of an offsite backup for your recordings or to avoid the scenario of the local storage getting corrupted. 7 days of cloud recordings are stored and its monthly price is relatively cheap. There is a 30-day trial to check it out first to see if it performs well enough for you, however, I found the local storage to be just as good though, so if you want to save money, the local storage option is worth buying a large microSD card for.

This camera 2C is able to detect abnormal sounds and alert you to them so that you can view any captured video whilst this sound is occurring. Anything from loud bangs, sneezes, and baby cries can be detected and you can be alerted through the app through a notification or an email.

My Impressions

Overall it is a relatively cheap way to add a decent level of security inside your home. I found it very helpful to monitor our new kitten when we were out of the house, and it also helped me monitor my house when I was away for a few days. With its 7-day storage online and its up to around 30 days worth of recording storage on a 32GB card, I also found it very helpful to look back and see various moments and events that were captured on camera.

If privacy is a concern, it is very quick and easy to enable privacy mode. This will automatically roll the camera up and into its base, out of sight. So you can safely tell from a distance if the lens is visible or not and whether it is able to capture you. You can also link this to geofencing, so when you return it can enable privacy mode, and roll back out when you leave the house.

I found the recording quality to be very good. Its 4 Megapixel captures very well, with good natural colour and its 2K resolution makes sure small details are captured well too. Viewing all the footage and alerts back in the app is very easy, and from here you can upgrade to cloud storage and manage the camera and its functions very easily too. I found its £2.59 for 7 days capture per month of its cloud subscription was very reasonable. You can save a little money paying yearly at £24.99, and there are cheaper 3-day plans, and there are also 30days at £5.99 per month or £54.99 annually. Compared to Google’s Nest plans, it is a fair bit cheaper. 

You don’t have to use this camera with the cloud though. Local storage is just as good and you get your recordings stored for as long as your memory card can hold onto it before older recordings are overwritten.

The playback is decent in both day and night. There was one issue that I found, and that was the noise of the rotating gears is quite audible when the camera rotates and tilts. This is captured quite loudly, which might mean you might miss out on any key audio from the event being captured. It also doesn’t rotate continuously around either as it pans through detection or manually with the pan and tilt controls in the app. It will stop roughly towards the rear of the camera, and to capture further you would need to rotate the other way to get to this point and continue tracking.

So if you’re looking for a relatively cheap indoor security camera with detection, 360 tracking, great day and night recording, and options for local and online storage, then I would take a look at this IMOU Ranger 2C indoor camera.

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