In this video, I check out the Nooie 360 Camera 2 an indoor 2K camera for home, pet and baby monitoring.
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This 360-degree smart home camera offers 2K resolution, 8x digital zoom, and night vision up to 10metres. In its mobile app, you can access its live camera feed, pan and tilt its camera and use its onboard microphone and speaker for 2-way communication with anyone in your home. You can also let the camera do all the work in detecting and saving any key motion events as well as keep subjects in the frame with its own motion tracking.
In the box, you get a paper instruction manual, there is the Nooie 360 Cam 2 itself, a couple of security warning stickers and transfers, four screws and wall plugs to attach the included base plate for walls and ceiling installations, a UBS-A wall adapter to power the camera, and there is a 1.5m USB-A to Micro-USB power cable.
Design & Features
The 360 Camera 2 shares the same design traits as many other 360 cameras that are selling today. The 101-degree field-of-view camera lens is mounted onto a rotatable base that allows it to rotate 360 degrees horizontally. Inside the top rotating part, the camera lens can be tilted upwards and downwards to capture objects above and slightly below its horizon line.
A TF card of up to 128GB can be inserted into the card slot inside of the tilting body of the camera for local-based storage, or you can choose to backup or send recordings to the Nooie Cloud with a free subscription for the first 2 weeks, and after this period you can choose to sign up to either its event-based recording or continuous recording subscription service.
Install & Mobile App
Once you’ve found a suitable location for the camera, be it flat on a shelf or tabletop, or mounted on a ceiling or wall using the bundled mount, you then download and access the Nooie app to view its live feed, saved recordings, as well as configure its functions and features.
On the app’s home screen, you have quick access to the camera, along with a few easy options to enable or disable the camera and check its wireless signal strength. Tapping on the camera’s main thumbnail will take you through to the main operational side of the camera. From here you’ll see the live feed of the camera, along with quick action buttons to save video, take a photo, and toggle the onboard microphone and speaker. Selecting the settings option allows you to configure how you’d like this camera to function.
All the basic configurations are here, from formatting the inserted TF card and signing up to its Nooie Cloud subscription service, to viewing the camera’s general settings such as toggling the camera’s operating LED light and checking on its firmware. You can also toggle if you want the camera to record audio, rotate the video image feed for vertical mounting, and toggle night vision modes. Enabling motion tracking, setting motion and sound detection sensitivity, creating detection zones and scheduling notification alerts round up this camera’s main configuration options.
You can also use the camera with an Amazon or Google voice assistant. Once linked up you can enable and disable the camera by voice and if you have a smart display or connected media hub to your TV you can ask the assistant to stream the camera feed to a display or connected TV.
This Nooie 360 Camera 2 retails for $69.99 from Amazon US, £55.99 from Amazon UK, and €58 from Amazon DE, and I’ll leave direct links to learn more about this camera and to buy one down below.
My Impressions
I’ve had the camera up and recording my home for over two weeks. I found its design makes it easy to place around the home, and its smooth curves and dark colour can make it inconspicuous in some areas, but it can also stand out in rooms with a lighter theme, so is a shame this newer model only has one colour option.
Like many others of its kind, the 360 rotation of the base is not unlimited. It will stop rotating at the rear of the camera, and to continue to pan towards the other side, it will need to rotate the opposite way to continue capturing. At this point, the subject may have left the frame and the capture of the subject would be missed.
Like other cameras I have tried, I also found its vertical capture a little limiting when mounted on a flat surface, where capturing areas below its horizontal line is limited compared to its above horizon movement. For a camera that’s also targeted toward pets, its limited below horizon tilt can struggle to capture pets roaming below it, so positioning the camera will be very important for pet use.
Unlike some other 360 cameras I have reviewed, its 360 rotation luckily isn’t that audible during its captured footage, but a buzz from the camera can be heard which sounds a bit like a notification vibration from your mobile phone. Its 2K day and night time video quality looked great on my iPhone 13 Pro display, with colour and brightness looking very natural and not over-saturated. Sadly though, its video stream to my Chromecast Ultra sadly didn’t mirror the same level of quality on my 64” Samsung TV.
Audio quality is more of a high and miss, depending on how loud the sound is and how far away the camera is from the source of the sound. At times wasn’t until I was standing right next to it that it could pick up my voice, which I found disappointing. Communicating over its 2-way voice control left audio cutouts and long enough lag that wouldn’t encourage me to communicate with anyone over a live feed again.
Nooie tried to be intuitive when it comes to panning and tilting the camera from the App through gesture control swipes on the live video feed window, but I soon found this to be far more frustrating and I would have rather preferred some on-screen buttons instead to have more granular control over the camera’s tilt and rotation. Pinchin to enlarge the video feed through its 8x digital zoom didn’t maintain a good enough level of quality to continue to use this feature either.
Even with a “Good” level of Wi-Fi signal strength to the camera, I still found it difficult to control the camera responsively, both at home and remotely, this regularly led to me always going beyond where I wanted to position the camera. My video stream was between 20-60K per second over my Wifi6E router, which was a mere few metres away with a clear line of sight to the camera, however, due to the camera only supporting 2.4GHz, streaming video and audio sometimes become choppy and inconsistently reliable with long initial loading times and reloading of video whilst playing back captured events and live feeds. Other 2K security cameras didn’t have as much of a problem on the same network.
I had high hopes for the Nooie 360 Camera 2, but my main issue with it is its App. It generally felt as if it is still in early development with a handful of basic functionality. The app also comes with quite poor gesture controls, that don’t work well with the speed of its hardware. There are also no perimeter privacy controls or privacy scheduling, and the event timeline for local storage is a baron and rather confusing display, and isn’t until you pay for its subscription service that some areas of the app begin to come more alive. But when it does, it doesn’t display its content as intuitively as its competitors. I had issues trying to go back to the previous week, which wasn’t available to me anymore.
So the app as a whole left me more disappointed with this camera than the hardware itself, which is a great-looking and performing camera, but as a whole package, it is greatly let down by its software app which continues to this day to lag behind its competition. Hopefully, regular updates can help redeem what is otherwise a great camera for its price range.
TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Brief overview
0:37 – Unboxing
1:00 – Design & Features
1:26 – Local & Cloud Storage
1:47 – Install & App
3:23 – My Impressions
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