Wyze launches its $50 wire-free outdoor camera – TechCrunch

For the past few years based in Seattle Wyze made a name for themselves by making many smart home devices affordable. The company these days sold Everything from smart plugs and locks to scales and fitness bands, but it all started with the $ 20 indoor Wyze surveillance camera. Today the company is pursuing this with its latest camera, the Wyze Cam Outdoor, which comes onto the market early today.

The starter pack with a base station costs $ 50. As soon as the camera no longer has early access, you can add additional cameras for $ 40 each. As usual, Wyze undercuts many of its direct competitors in this area for simple outdoor surveillance cameras at a price.

This name mostly tells you everything you need. It is a 1080p camera with 20 frames per second for live streaming and recording. It is waterproof to IP65 and retains the blocky aesthetics of the original Wyze camera. It also offers night vision mode and two-way audio through the Wyze app, which, in addition to the storage on the device, also offers 14 days of free cloud storage. Of course, some built-in smarts are also used to perform motion detection using a standard PIR sensor.

Credit: Wyze /

Like similar products, it only runs on battery power, so you don’t have to pull cables across your yard. The company says the battery should last three to six months.

It will be attached to its base with magnets, but you’ll still need to do a little DIY yourself to screw this base into your walls, ceilings, or garden fences.

The base station itself is obviously wired (and this includes WiFi support as well as the option to connect an Ethernet cable). A nice feature here is that the base station also has an SD card slot so you can store videos there too.

Because Wyze is fairly small at 2.3 × 2.3 × 2.8 inches, it also has another useful feature built into the software: offline travel mode. It allows you to monitor your hotel room or campsite while you are away from home.

Credit: Wyze

Based on the examples, this appears to be a pretty powerful outdoor camera, but hardware is just part of the puzzle here. A lot depends on how well the app and motion detection work in front of the camera. We’ll take a closer look at them as soon as we get a test device in the next few weeks.

If you don’t want to wait until then, the starter pack is now available in the Wyze shop and in the Wyze app.