WUUK Video Doorbell Pro Review: Feature Packed With No Fees
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WUUK Labs provided the sample for this review.
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Learn about our data-driven scoring system.
The Verdict
In This Review
The WUUK Smart Doorbell Pro provides a good range of video doorbell features, plus a few extras like a voice changer and tamper alarm, in an affordable package. I’ve been impressed with the camera quality, both in daylight and at night. Night vision in particular is a standout performer with some of the brightest infra-red night vision I’ve yet seen in a doorbell.
The superb image clarity is, unfortunately, let down by sub-par audio quality. A weak microphone and speaker combination means you can only really use it for talking to someone right in front of the doorbell. This is fine is you only need to talk to visitors and delivery drivers, but if you want to capture audio over a wider surveillance area, it’s a no go.
Motion detection is fairly reliable thanks to a dual sensor arrangement of infra-red and radar sensors but falls short of more expensive offerings from the major brands, and the human detection is not consistent enough to provide much value. If you are happy capturing all motion and relying on thumbnails, built-in filtering, and basic motion zones to cut out the noise, then it’s a decent buy for this price point and will capture most activity without issue.
If you want to keep an eye on deliveries, however, you’ll need to look elsewhere. There are no package detection features, and the doorbell camera can’t see the ground at all, so you won’t even by able to check on them manually.
Installation
Tech Specs
Power: Wired or BatteryRemovable Battery: No
Can Use Wired Chime: No
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 2.4GHz, Ethernet
Resolution: 2052x1540
Storage: 32GB local
Weather Rating: IP65
Field of View: 108 degrees
Compatibility: Alexa, Google
Smart Detection: Yes
Notable Features:
- Voice Changer
- Radar sesnsor
- Quick voice responses
The starter kit for the Smart Doorbell Pro naturally comes with the required base station and all the various extras you’ll need, including jumper leads to bypass a wired chime if using wired power, wall plugs and screws for mounting, and both a flat mounting plate and a 15-degree wedge plate for off angle installation.
I found the mount to be a softer plastic than higher end brands use, and it has some flex to it. While it holds the doorbell very well, I can see it would be possible to break it off the mount with enough determination as it’s only held by the top and bottom clips.
The installation of the Smart Video Doorbell was very easy. You’ll need to connect the base station to your network directly with the provided Ethernet cable to start. You can switch it over to Wi-Fi later if desired in the WUUK app, but this is limited to 2.4GHz only. The base station itself could have been done in a smaller form factor. I appreciate the need for aesthetics given it may need to be placed in the open for best effect, but it’s mostly empty space inside.
With the app installed and an account created you’ll be prompted to pair the base station. Providing your phone is on the same network this will happen automatically. You can then pair the doorbell easily by selecting it as a new device from the list in the app, holding the power button for 3 seconds and letting the base station connect to it.
You’re guided through this with very clear instructions in the app itself. The included printed booklet is well written, but a bit lacking in detail, so the app is the way to go for this.
Location is important as WUUK uses proprietary radio channels between the base station and the cameras. This makes the base station a repeater rather than the doorbell connecting to your Wi-Fi directly. This both makes for easier setup (no messing with Wi-Fi pairing) and allows more flexibility in placing the doorbell where it needs to go. Other wireless camera brands have taken this approach, notably Eufy Security products, and it can work well.
Interestingly the base station includes a fast USB-C charging port for charging the doorbell which can do it in less time than a standard USB charger. As such this is the recommended charging method, and they only include a USB-C cable rather than a separate charger.
What’s in the box
The charge port is under the on/off button
WUUK and Eufy hubs side-by-side
Camera Performance
WUUK is using a 2K 4:3 aspect camera with HDR in this model. While fairly common in video doorbells coming out now, Wuuk are using a more modern compression algorithm which helps to achieve surprisingly good clarity at this price point. The test chart was clearly visible out to a distance of 7.2m (23ft) which exceeds far more expensive doorbell models, and the image was stable with no noticeable video compression artifacts during multiple test attempts.
Night vision is provided by on-board infra-red LEDs, no color night vision feature is provided in this case. Again, Wuuk has impressed me with a superb 5.9m (19ft) reading on the test chart in the dark. This is almost at the maximum scoring limit for this test and provides excellent clarity in the near and middle distance.
Above average infra-red illumination from a small LED array is an obvious factor, but Wuuk has also boosted the exposure by cutting down the frame rate in this mode. This does result in some motion blur, but it’s not really noticeable when approaching the doorbell and only becomes apparent with lateral motion. There was no apparent ghosting of moving objects as I’ve observed with other consumer night vision cameras.
The high dynamic range on the camera in the Smart Doorbell Pro is on by default, and there’s no app settings to change this. I was able to clearly make out 8 of the 12 grayscale swatches on the test chart, which is a respectable performance on par with Ring’s more recent offerings, and which allows facial details to be seen without issue in the shade.
While this yields good performance with shadows, in bright sunny conditions the sunlit portion of the image had a tendency to some degree of over exposure. While not a cause for concern in terms of seeing activity in the scene, it does wash out fine details. This became apparent during the video quality test, necessitating a shade over the test chart to prevent the white background being blown out and obscuring the chart itself.
This appears to have had an effect on motion detection filtering, with afternoon approach tests triggering noticeably later than the front lit or night test cycles. We’ll look at that more in the motion detection section.
Audio Performance
The speaker and microphone in the Smart Doorbell Pro probably constitute its biggest weakness. Both audio pickup of spoken voices from the outside party, and the audibility of responses from the app user were extremely limited. Normal speaking volume could only be heard on the app if the visitor was 1.1m (4 ft) from the doorbell. Beyond this distance it was completely inaudible. The app does include a ‘volume’ button in the live view screen, but this is actually just a mute function with only an on or off state. Similarly, the responses from the indoor app user could only be heard from the outside out to 1.5m (5ft) from the doorbell due to low volume output and there is no volume control provided for this in the app.
Some score was recovered thanks to good in-app audio reproduction, despite the limited pickup volume. The indoor app user did not experience any artifacts, distortion or breakups in the audio stream from the doorbell. Unfortunately, reproduction by the doorbell speaker was not as good. Significant distortion was present for the outside user, although the stream was unbroken.
These factors limit the usefulness of the two-way talk function to someone standing directly in front of the doorbell, and would be useless for warning off intruders. For conversing with a visitor, however, it will still be fit for purpose.
Recorded audio suffered from similar issues as the two-way talk function with limited pickup clarity and distance, but significantly more static and distortion was present in the recorded audio stream. This could be down to compression or low-quality encoding, but the poor microphone quality is certainly a factor here. The resulting score is at the low end of the competition and would rule this model out if recording audio of events in your front yard is a significant requirement.
Notification Performance
Notification performance is a significant factor in the usability of a video doorbell. There’s no point getting alerted to something if the person is gone by the time you can respond. WUUK offers a few options around notifications, most significantly whether to include thumbnails or not. Including thumbnails (aka rich notifications) takes some extra processing time, and often results in slower delivery. Some systems allow for sending a basic one first and then updating it if a thumbnail becomes available, but WUUK doesn’t appear to do this.
Basic text notifications arrived reasonably quickly, and in the ballpark of the best systems I’ve tested, with a minimum delay of 4.5 seconds and a maximum or 6.6 seconds. That’s a fairly small variance, and over 6 seconds was definitely an outlier here. Adding thumbnails effectively doubled the delay up to 12.8 seconds. The best I was able to achieve in this mode was 8.7 seconds, which is not too bad, but was also an outlier with most results coming in around 11 seconds.
Receiving a thumbnail is only useful if it shows what triggered the notification. The Smart Doorbell Pro was able to do this only 66% of the time, but it’s worth noting that all of the failures were during lateral crossing tests where I was out of frame (or barely on the edge) when the snapshot was taken. All approach tests were successful in capturing the approaching person fully in the frame before I was able to exit to the side.
Performance at night seems to be better on the lateral crossing tests. This may be due to more consistent illumination in infra-red mode compared to the variability of contrast during the day, but that seems unlikely given the recording delay on the lateral tests was consistently excellent, and fully captured the motion event in question.
Motion Detection Performance
Overall motion detection was reasonably consistent with most test days working perfectly on both lateral and approach detection tests. There were a handful of frustrating days where the Smart Doorbell Pro stubbornly refused to detect me on multiple attempts, both from the side and the front. Given all processing is local on either the doorbell or the base station I don’t have an obvious explanation for this inconsistency.
Apart from those days where all tests were impacted, there were statistically more missed events from nighttime lateral crossing tests, where the doorbell did seem to struggle with motion detection at close range. As the doorbell performs some rudimentary filtering of detected motion to cut down on noise like fluttering leaves and grass, it’s likely that these events were detected, but filtered out due to the short time I was in the frame.
This filtering behavior was likely the cause of some afternoon detection approach delay issues (see below) as the glare from the sun limited the cameras view of me approaching until I was filling more of the frame.
This test evaluates how much of the video frame effectively captures the subject moving across the camera as a proportion of the screen size. The measured maximum frame size for the test was 9.4cm, and the WUUK Smart Doorbell Pro performed admirably by capturing an average of 9.3cms of the motion event.
This means the camera began recording the detected motion (when the event wasn’t filtered out as above) effectively as soon as I entered the field of view most of the time. With only a few outliers below 8cm, this was almost a perfect score. As the Smart Doorbell Pro doesn’t have a pre-roll recording feature, I put this down to the radar sensor having a wider field of view than the camera, allowing it to detect motion and wake up the camera before the subject enters the frame.
Given how effectively the events were captured by the camera it’s curious that the thumbnail performance suffered from late captures in these tests when considering that the whole event was recorded.
Approaching the Smart Doorbell Pro from the front produced some wildly variable results. Ranging from an almost perfect 9.5m (32ft) detection, to an abysmally late 1m (3ft) capture that barely caught me before leaving the frame to the side.
Lighting conditions definitely had an effect here. Afternoon (back lit) tests were consistently late, averaging only 2m (6ft) of recording. Night conditions were more consistently around 4m (12ft), which is reasonable, and morning (front lit) tests giving the full range of results seemingly at random.
On the upside, despite some being late 90% of approach tests did capture the event successfully and always produced good thumbnails.
My only conclusion for the variability in these results is an overly aggressive, and very basic, filtering algorithm that was ignoring my approach until it considered the motion large enough to trigger recording. Night tests would have benefitted from this as the infra-red reflection of my shirt was typically bright and an obvious large movement area on the darker background. Daylight tests would have varied more depending on lighting and contrast.
Smart Detection Performance
The WUUK Smart Doorbell Pro does not have a package detection or alerting feature. As such the detection success rate could not be tested. Additionally, since the aspect ratio and typical doorbell placement precludes the ability to keep an eye on packages through recorded motion events and live view, package monitoring was not assessed. The feature score evaluates how well it can do this, as well as the presence of specific package features, and these clearly show there is no capability here.
Feature scoring:
✘ Visibility of the test package directly below doorbell.
✘ Visibility of porch area in front of the doorbell.
✘ More than 30 degrees off center visibility to the side.
✘ Presence of active package alerting feature.
✘ Presence of additional package alerts (Delivery Guard: pickup notifications, pickup reminders, audio warnings, live check assist).
WUUK supports basic human detection for motion detection, recordings and notifications. You can elect to limit motion detection events to human only, record everything but only send human notifications, or just record and notify everything. Oddly, you can also turn off Human notifications in the notification settings, although I’m not sure why you would want to do this.
Even with Human notifications turned on, if the motion detection mode is to record and notify about all motion, you don’t get human notifications, just generic ones. With the other two settings the notification will be labelled as Human detected, providing the detection is successful.
This can be problematic. Human detection was only successful 33% of the time and very rarely worked on the lateral crossing tests. It seems the detection only works if the human is fully in the frame and large enough to be identified. The crossing tests only capture above the waist, and almost always were recorded as generic motion. Even many of the approach tests failed to detect a human, but it was always successful when I was walking away from the camera. I can’t speculate as to why approaching the camera didn’t work as well given the human profile would be the same.
Best results were again achieved at night, likely due to the consistent high contrast profile produced by the infra-red lighting. Backlit situations almost always failed which suggests over exposure or glare impacted the ability of the camera to see a human shape. Overall, this is a disappointing performance for a signature feature, and one which is especially useful for security purposes.
Feature scoring:
✘ Custom motion zones.
✔ Person detection.
✘ Animal Detection.
✘ Vehicle Detection.
✘ Facial Recognition.
WUUK does support motion zones, but not custom shapes. Motion zones are limited to only 5 basic rectangles, which limits the effectiveness of motion zone placement, depending on the specific situation outside your door.
Battery Performance
The WUUK Smart Doorbell Pro supports using standard AC doorbell wiring. WUUK specifies a 16-24V 30VA transformer for this purpose, with the wired chime either removed or bypassed (a jumper wire is provided for this purpose). An 19VAC 600mA plug-in transformer can also be used. Either of these options will simply provide constant charge for the internal battery, which is the actual power supply used by the doorbell whether it’s wired or not.
The battery is charged using a standard USB-C port on the back of the device. Running only on battery power for the 30-day test cycle resulted in a very good 69% remaining. This puts it well into the top 10% of battery video doorbells tested.
App Experience
As all processing is done locally in the base station, I expected the live view response time to be good and was not disappointed. Over the local network using Wi-Fi connection to the base station the stream would start consistently between 2 and 3 seconds, which is very usable. There were only a few outliers over 3 seconds, and nothing over 4.
Video quality is excellent as per recordings, but the audio suffers from the issues discussed above, with significant static, distortion, and poor pickup range.
From the live view screen you can initiate a recording of the event, take a still image, trigger one of the built-in quick replies, adjust your voice with the voice changer feature (to use a male, female, or neutral tone), or trigger the built-in alarm siren.
The basics necessities are here, with device-based authentication tokens and basic two-factor authentication on offer. Two-factor is not mandatory, and is a bit buried in the account general settings menu, so it’s not obvious that it’s there. It’s also only text message based, so less effective than an authenticator app or passkey.
Firmware updates are delivered seamlessly without user involvement, but there is no log of change notes to show you how often or what was updated.
User management is fairly easy, and you can add as many other users to share your doorbell as you like. They will need an WUUK app account, of course, as this enables the necessary authentication to prevent just anyone getting in. This taken care of via an invite email that helps them, get set up. The user permissions are per base station. This means you could have different base stations for different purposes and keep the sharing access separated. Useful if you have different properties, for example.
The app supports basic Modes which allow you to define quick presets for video recording and notification preferences. This allows you to switch these off if you don’t want to be nagged, or if you want some privacy. You can define your own modes as well, although only with the same handful of settings. I haven’t seen a way to have these switch automatically, which is less useful. There are also no specific privacy features, such as privacy zones or audio recording control.
The WUUK app itself is simple, with everything laid out largely where you would expect to find it. There are some exceptions, however, that led me to hunt around for a feature. Examples include Quick Responses, being located under the user profile settings, and two-factor authentication being under the General account settings. This makes sense in hindsight as they would apply to all your devices and not just the one that you’re configuring.
Recordings can be accessed easily from the dashboard screen by tapping a play button with a backwards arow encircling it. The icon wouldn’t be obvious to everyone, so some exploring might be required to realize what it means. Another play button is on the thumbnail image that represents the doorbell, but this one initiates the live view.
The recording list loads quickly and reliably when tapping this icon, with themost recent events shown, even across multiple days. Pulling up the list loads the next batch of events, and you can keep doing this as long as you like. Each event is time stamped and labelled as either a generic motion event of a Human event, along with a thumbnail and play button. Basic filtering and the ability to jump to a specific date are also provided right on this screen.
Video clips will play in the top portion of the screen and will auto-play one after the other going back in time until you stop it. Turning the phone on it’s side gives you a full screen view as with most camera apps. Starting a clip takes a couple of seconds, roughly equivalent to starting a live stream, as the clip is fetched and buffered from the base station.
The only bugs I’ve encountered are around opening the app. I often find that it displays an ‘operation failed’ message, or shows the base station as offline (which it isn’t) and necessitates pulling down the screen to refresh it - sometimes twice when I get one error after that other. This can be frustrating when you’re trying to quickly review an event, although tapping the notification to jump to live view seems to be more reliable and hasn’t cause any issues.
This combined with limited user support documentation pulls down the usability score somewhat, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Smart Home Features
WUUK offers integration with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and IFTTT. This integration, like any other doorbell product, is fairly limited and mostly allows you to use smart speakers as doorbell chimes.
Other Features
A voice changer feature is included that you can use in live view. You can choose between Original, Male, Female, or Neutral voice tones. Nice if you don’t want to reveal anything about who is at home to a stranger.
Button illumination is optional, and on by default. This feature lights up the ringer button when motion is detected close to the doorbell and provides some assistance to visitors arriving at night as to where to press.
The network diagnosis runs and end-to-end tests to find where things might not be working quite right. This works pretty well and can be handy to help identify the problem if you’re having issues.
The tamper alarm allows you to set the doorbell to sound its on-board siren if the doorbell is removed from the mount. This is triggered by a magnetic switch on the back of the device matched to the mounting plate, and is probably a good feature to have given the mount isn’t particular high quality. You do need to remember to turn it off before charging the battery, however.
A power management feature keeps tabs on battery run time and how many events the doorbell is processing vs how many it actually accepted as valid. This can show if the doorbell is detecting a lot of junk motion (like plants blowing in the wind) that may be causing battery drain.
WUUK events list and filters
Smart Doorbell Pro settings page
Smart Doorbell motion settings
Alternatives
Eufy Video Doorbell Dual
Eufy’s camera products are designed around a base station in the same way as WUUK. Performance and features are also similar, although WUUK offers more extras such as the voice changer and power management report. Conversely, Eufy has a wider range of security products that can be added to your setup as you go forward.
The Video Doorbell Dual, while similar in features the the WUUK Smart Doorbell Pro, offers a unique second downward looking camera in addition to the main 2K camera. This is used for their package monitoring feature which allows you to keep a better eye on any packages left on the doorstep and alert you if they get tampered with.
Aosu V8S Video Doorbell
Startup brand AOSU has a similar video doorbell offering sporting the dual motion feature that’s becoming popular, that is including a radar as well as PIR sensor for motion detection. The aosu V8S Video Doorbell supports dual band Wi-Fi like WUUK, along with a slightly higher resolution camera and IP66 weather resistance.
You can use this either battery powered or with standard doorbell wiring, and they’ve also included the voice changer feature like WUUK. You’ll only get 8GB of on-board storage in the included remote chime, and there are some questions over quality control. We don’t really have much info on this company at the moment, so there’s also a question of how thorough there security and privacy controls are, even with local storage. Still, it’s hard to beat the price on this one.
Blink Video Doorbell
When talking about value for money video doorbells it’s almost mandatory to mention Amazon’s Blink range. If used with the Sync Module 2 you can avoid subscription costs. This is most definitely a budget model, with a more basic 1080p camera, narrower field of view, and fairly basic app features, including having to manage the video files yourself. If you don’t want anything fancy, and want to save a few bucks, this one can be worth a look.
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