Aosu V8P Video Doorbell Review
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This product was purchased for this review.
Tested with scoring system 1.0
What do these scores mean?
Learn about our data-driven scoring system.
Pros
â Good camera clarity in day and night conditionsâ Accurate person detection during motion events
â Included indoor chime and MicroSD card
Cons
â Two-way talk feature is unsusableâ Motion detection is unreliable in low light
â Access to recorded events is slow
The Verdict
The Aosu V8P video doorbell isâŚokay. I expected a fairly poor showing from this model being the lower end version from a fairly new company, but the results of my testing presented some pleasant surprises along with some serious disappointments.
The good news is the camera in this model delivers high quality video and above average night vision performance with very good dynamic range. Clarity is excellent across the board, but there is a tendency for over exposure where the subject is in bright light. Rich thumbnails were delivered consistently, if a little slow, and the doorbell successfully identified a person being present in all test events with no false positives at all.
Unfortunately, the doorbell also struggled to recognize a valid motion event frequently when the subject was lit from behind or in low light when at the default sensitivity setting. On this setting, missed events skyrocketed at night, especially when the time in frame was short. This could be corrected by turning up the sensitivity, but this resulted in frequent motion alerts during windy conditions.
The audio quality was also subpar, with noticeable static and low dynamic range. More importantly, I found trying to talk to someone outside through the app to be an exercise in futility due to a ridiculously long delay. Without any package detection capability, shorter motion detection range, and poor voice chat the V8P is fine if you just want to keep an eye on the porch and who is at the door, but if you want to actually communicate and use it as a security device, there are better options for the price.
Type: Battery video doorbell
Subscription: Optional cloud storage, required for Face ID
Price Segment: $$$$
Test Results
Each doorbell I review is put through a series of repeated test cycles over a 30-day period. These tests give me 32 data points that make up the 7 overall category scores above. These scores rate each doorbell key performance requirements like video and audio quality, motion capture performance, smart detection accuracy and the overall user experience.
Hereâs how this video doorbell ranks compared to the average of other doorbells Iâve tested:
| Data Point | ||
|---|---|---|
| Video Quality | 9.1 | 7.8 |
| Night Vision Quality | 7.7 | 6.9 |
| Dynamic Range | 8.3 | 6.7 |
| Two-Way Talk | 3.9 | 7.6 |
| App Audibility | ||
| Outdoor Audibility | ||
| Recorded Audio | 3.3 | 9.0 |
| Notification Delay | 7.3 | 7.5 |
| Thumbnail Average | ||
| Doorbell Average | ||
| Text-only Average | ||
| Thumbnail Effectiveness | 8.3 | 6.9 |
| Day Success | ||
| Night Success | ||
| Missed Events | 10.0 | 9.3 |
| Day Misses | ||
| Night Misses | ||
| Camera Wake Delay | 9.1 | 8.1 |
| Frame Remaining Day | ||
| Frame Remaining Night | ||
| Event Capture | 6.6 | 6.0 |
| Record Start Day | ||
| Record Start Night | ||
| Package Monitoring | N/A | 5.6 |
| Package Features | ||
| Detection Success | ||
| Smart Detection | 7.5 | 7.0 |
| Smart Features | ||
| Day Accuracy | ||
| Night Accuracy | ||
| Live View Response | 7.5 | 8.5 |
| Live View Time | ||
| Doorbell Ring Response | ||
| Privacy Features | 8.1 | 8.3 |
| App Usability | 6.4 | 7.7 |
| Battery Performance | 6.4 | 7.3 |
| After 30 days | ||
| Time To Dead |
The Basics
Tech Specs
Power: Wired or BatteryRemovable Battery: No
Can Use Wired Chime: No
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 2.4GHz only
Resolution: 2048 x 1536
Storage: Local or Cloud
Weather Rating: IP66
Field of View: 133 degrees
Compatibility: Alexa, Google
Smart Detection: Yes
Footprint (WxH): 53mm x 137mm
Notable Features:
- Face recognition
- Privacy zones
- Voice changer
- Tamper alarm
The Aosu V8P is a purely battery powered doorbell and comes in a fairly typical rectangular form factor with a clean modern aesthetic and a gloss black face. The front is dominated by the large, flush-mounted doorbell button outlined with an LED ring light to help visitors see it in the dark. The light pulses blue when motion is detected and remains lit for several seconds thereafter.
The V8P doesnât connect to your home network directly, but relays through the included base station. This is a compact plug-in Wi-Fi repeater that also serves as in indoor chime and video storage device. Included in the box is an 8GB MicroSD card that inserts into the side of the base station and provides local, subscription-free storage for recordings.
The doorbell itself clips into a plastic wall mount that is held in place with two provided screws. A simple pin-tool allows for easy removal via a small hole in the bottom of the mount.
While the mount is fairly solid, the spring clip which holds the doorbell in place seems undersized and doesnât give a good secure feel when it clicks into place. Indeed there is a visible gap at the bottom suggesting the doorbell could be forced free fairly easily.
Video Storage
MicroSD in the base station, 8GB included in the box. 14 days with an optional cloud storage subscription, or 30 days with a more expensive multi-camera tier.
Chime Options
Included base station - three chime options measured at 96dB peak.
Google and Alexa smart speakers
Not much to see on the back
Charging is via the USB-C port on the bottom
The mount is simple and chunky
Unboxing the V8P video doorbell prior to running the test cycle.
Camera Performance
The V8P sports a 2K camera running at 2048x1536 giving a 4:3 aspect ratio. This gives a better view of people standing in front of the door and is less likely to cut off heads. Unfortunately, itâs not enough to really give a view below the doorbell which makes keeping an eye on packages unlikely in most cases.
The clarity of the camera at its highest setting (you can choose high or low) is excellent as you can see in the sample video. Everything is sharp and without significant compression artifacts, and the stream was consistently smooth. Color reproduction is a bit washed out, but itâs perfectly adequate for this use case.
The test chart could be clearly seen out to 7.3m (23ft) which is well above average and gains Aosu an excellent score on this test.
As with day video, the night vision performance impressed me on clarity, but didnât give the visible distance to go along with it. The test chart could be read out to 5.4m. This is slightly above average, but not enough to be noteworthy.
Infra-red illumination is nice and consistent with good differentiation between details, and there is no apparent ghosting at the lower light levels as I see in some IR cameras.
The V8P performed very well on the dynamic range test with class-leading color definition. I was able to clearly select 9 swatches out of 12 in the sample image, with another two partial matches. This puts it at the top of the pack in my tests to date.
While this is a good result on dynamic range in the shade, you can clearly see over exposure going on in the sample image. A distant light-colored subject in daylight under these conditions will be significantly over exposed and washed out, losing detail. This was very apparent during the vision chart test and motion detection passes when I was wearing white.
The camera also waits until it has started recording before adjusting the auto exposure which resulted in the first couple of seconds of video being too dark in many cases. This isnât a major issue except in cases where the early part of a recorded event contains important action as it could be hard to make out.
OECF 36 dynamic range test chart
Audio Performance
Audio performance in general is a huge failure for the Aosu V8P. The audio encoding in general is of a low standard, with poor range response and constant low-level static. This alone wouldnât be so bad and could still be quite useable for two-way talk if it werenât for the massive delay in sending voice from the app to the doorbell speaker. This was always delayed by over 10 seconds, and at times this was over a minute late, making any form on conversation completely impractical.
I was able to talk in the app, go outside, wait around for a bit, and then hear myself speak through the doorbell. The longer a two-way talk session continued, the worse the delay became. The microphone on the V8P was able to clearly pick up an outside caller from 6m away (19ft), with a similar range for hearing the sound from the speaker but given that the caller could not engage in conversation at all this is effectively a zero on the audibility test.
The recorded audio core reflects the general poor quality of the audio capture from the doorbell microphone, and the low quality of the encoding in recorded video clips. Thanks to regular breaks in the audio stream, poor frequency response, and constant static, the V8P only scored 3 points out of a possible 9 in this test. The audio is useable but falls well short of the major brands like Ring and Arlo that have superb audio capture.
Notification Performance
Aosu handles notifications in a similar way to Eufy, with a two-stage system that fires off a basic text notification first (âMotion has been detectedâ), followed by an updated notification once the even has been analyzed. This changes both the text of the notification and adds a thumbnail is rich notifications are enabled.
With person detection turned on, youâll get interesting variants like âDetected someone appearingâ, âDetected someone lingeringâ or âDetected someone passingâ. These work well enough at identifying the kind of motion concerned, but the processing only occurs after the video has finished recording completely. If there is a lot of motion in the frame, like on a windy day, the recording will run the full 1 minute allowed and wonât update the notification until after that.
The text notifications arrive in a fairly typical 4.1 seconds, but because of the delayed processing, rich notifications can be quite slow. The best I achieved was 12.3 seconds, with this blowing out to 25 seconds depending on what I was doing in the test pass. Doorbell notifications are, thankfully, very fast. These arrived on average in only 1.6 seconds, which helped bring down the average for this score.
Rich notifications - those with a snapshot of clip of the event - are tremendously useful for quickly assessing if a notification needs further action without you having to open the app. Theyâre a huge time saver and make getting notifications from cameras and doorbells a much better user experience. As such the ability to do this effectively is an important scoring metric in my tests.
The ability for the V8P to generate a thumbnail that showed the cause of the motion event was not bad, successfully delivering a usable image 83% of the time. This is fairly average and showed slightly worse performance in low light.
Motion Detection Performance
NOTE: Motion scores have been revised upwards with the inclusion of a âDevice Detection Rangeâ setting. As paer testing protocols, this was set to maximum and the motion tests were re-run to determine the peak performance capabilities of the doorbell.
On the default motion sensitivity setting, the Aosu V8P performed perfectly well in morning light, when I was lit from the front or side. Back lighting and low light conditions, however, are a very different story. In afternoon and night tests I struggled to get noticed by the doorbell in the crossing tests (camera wake below) where I was only in frame for a few seconds. It didnât matter how slowly I walked across the frame, the doorbell simply would not trigger and event recording or notification.
Turning on the outside lights I could get good detection performance again, the same as during the morning tests, so itâs using the camera to analyze the validity of the motion sensor. Without the right lighting this fails spectacularly resulting in a complete failure on the night tests and very poor performance in the afternoon resulting in an overall miss rate of 36%.
Once the sensitivity is turned up, these issues went away and the doorbell improved itâs motion detection reliability to 100% under all conditions. The catch is that during windy conditions I would get spammed with generic motion alerts for moving plants. Aosuâs motion filtering is not up to the task and fails frequently to ignore this kind of motion.
The wake time on the V8P is actually very good. The measured frame width on my phone is 9.5cm, and for the daytime crossing tests it captured me for almost the entire frame for an average remaining frame width of 9.2cm. That equates to using 95% of the viewable area to record me passing in from of the camera, which is excellent for a battery-powered model with no pre-roll buffer.
At night this dropped to effectively 0 on the default sensitivity setting as I could not get the doorbell to capture a motion event on a pure crossing motion. I had to stand in front of the doorbell for several seconds for it to even notice me, meaning that on any direct crossing test it missed completely. With the sensitivity turned up, I was able to achieve the same start reliability as during the day, but had to mark down the recording distance. This was primarily due to that late triggering of the infra-red LEDs which meant the first part of the recording was dark. The doorbell did actually start as early as during the day, you just couldnât see anything for a couple of seconds.
Approaching the camera to determine how much distance would be recorded resulted in some curious results. Motion detection in general was more accurate in the morning tests, the recorded distance was also the highest under these front-lit conditions with an average of 5.7m (18ft) of travel captured. This went down to 2.8m (9ft) in the backlit tests and came back up to 4.7m (15ft) at night.
The improvement at night may be due to background lighting in the scene assisting the person detection to pick me out of the clutter, or the infra-red illumination makes the person much easier to distinguish from a distance compared to backlit daylight. This is an interesting result given how poor the crossing test was able to detect me under the same conditions when on the default sensitivity setting.
Smart Detection Performance
The aspect ratio of the V8P does not provide any visibility of the floor in front of the doorbell. At typical mounting height the ground was not visible until about 1.5m (5ft) away, meaning that most packages would not be seen. There is also no package detection or alerting feature included. As such, this test was considered not applicable.
Feature scoring:
â Visibility of the test package directly below doorbell.
â Visibility of porch area in front of the doorbell.
â More than 30 degrees off center visibility to the side.
â Presence of active package alerting feature.
â Presence of additional package alerts
Aosu includes custom motion zones, person detection and an optional facial recognition feature is you subscribe to their cloud storage plan. This means that facial recognition processing, as well as the storage of familiar faces is done on Aosuâs servers.
The smart detection works very well, correctly detecting my presence and the type of motion involved in motion events 90% of the time under all lighting conditions with no false positives recorded. 3 misses were recorded during daytime tests, with all night tests identifying the person correctly.
Feature scoring:
â Custom motion zones.
â Person detection.
â Animal Detection.
â Vehicle Detection.
â Facial Recognition.
Smart detection settings for the V8P
Aosu's facial recognition explainer
Battery Performance
The Aosu V8P demonstrated a fairly typical run-down rate hitting 61% after the 30-day test cycle. This puts it on par with major name brands. The run down itself showed some anomalies, with the doorbell reporting 100% for over a week before starting to tick down. After this a more typical decrease of approximately 1% a day was observed.
Overall the doorbell ran consistently well for 76 days, and then turned off. I received notifications to recharge it several times from 10% downwards. The reported charge level stopped at 4% and stayed there for a full week before it shut down.
Aosu V8P Battery Level
App Experience
Starting the live view in the app took a little longer than the average doorbell with an average start time of 4.9 seconds. That can be painful if you want to urgently check on something thatâs going on outside. There was considerable variability here as well, with some tests running over 7 seconds, although this was uncommon.
Curiously responding to doorbell rings wasnât any faster. This is unusual since the camera is already awake and recording by this point, so many doorbells are able to initiate the stream faster for this specific situation.
Aosu impressed me with the security offerings in the app, which I wasnât expecting. Login is device based, which provides secure access without inconvenience (so long as the device itself is secured) and the camera sharing functionality is tied into this with good built-in controls.
Some extra score could have been gained here by offering two-factor authentication, but itâs not there unfortunately. This is a significant omission that many other brands are now picking up. Aosu needs to step up here.
Firmware updates - an important mitigation for discovered security vulnerabilities - are handled automatically in the background, so you wonât have to worry about checking for these all the time. The option is there to do so if you wish, however.
A good range of privacy controls are also on offer. You can block out sensitive areas with privacy zones, disable recording audio with a simple toggle, and turn off recording entirely equally easily. Live view will remain available, however, and I did see any way to block that.
Overall the Aosu app scores 13 out of 16 points in this assessment.
The layout of the Aosu app is fairly typical for security camera apps. A dashboard presents each device with a thumbnail of the last motion event detected. From here you can access the live view, recorded events and device settings with simple buttons along the bottom.
Unlike many security apps, all the features were easy to find, clearly describe, and offered explanations in most cases. Nothing was in an odd place that I had to go hunting for, and the menu structure is pretty flat, making it easier to discover where things are.
New features and offers are prominently displayed on the dashboard until you clear them, which includes a fairly pushy attempt to get you to sign up for their cloud storage.
I didnât experience any bugs or issues using the app throughout the test cycle, so no points are deducted for this.
The biggest issue I had was access recorded events. While the layout is very typical - a simple chronological listing of recordings with thumbnails, time stamps and motion type - accessing the list is slow. Indeed, if there was one word I would use to describe the Aosu app, itâs âslowâ.
Everything seems to take some thinking about, and this is especially true with the event list. Using local storage on the base station memory card, this would typically take over 6 seconds to pull up each time. Sometimes it simply would spin itâs wheels and not load, so Iâd have to back up and try again. Similarly, sometimes trying to play the most recent recording wouldnât start and Iâd have to retry. This can happen if the recording hasnât quite closed off yet. Itâs an unlikely but frustrating situation.
The video player also provides no way to easily scrub through a recording to fast forward or skip to a portion of interest. You can move the playback position slider, but it simple stops the playback and restarts the stream from that point. Itâs a bit klunky and not very useful.
The V8P Settings page
Recorded events and video player
Notification options in the Aosu app
Smart Home Features
Access the camera via Google and Alexa smart displays, or use their smart speakers as chimes.
Extra Features
Tamper alarm - Triggers and audible alarm if someone tries to remove the doorbell. Needs to be disabled in settings before recharging the doorbell.
Voice Changer - A basic voice filter is provided for two-way talk with the options âUncleâ or âClownâ. Given the unusable two-way talk delay this is not really a selling point.
Facial Recognition - Allows programming known faces which are then tagged in notifications and recorded events to simplify review.
Alternatives
Package Security
Eufy E340
7.5 Overall Score
A dual camera design from major player Eufy Security provides far superior package security thanks to a dedicated package monitoring camera, built-in LED porch lighting, and the Delivery Guard feature. Delivery Guard not only detects packages and alerts you, but actively monitors them for interference and reminds you to collect them if you forget for too long.
Security Monitoring
Ring Battery Doorbell Plus
8.1 Overall Score
Ring's more expensive battery doorbell plus has far better audio performance with little loss in video quality, but with considerably better motion detection allowing for earlier triggering of recording at longer distances. It also benefits from very fast notification and live stream performance, ensuring you can respond to events in a timely manner.
Smart Home
Aqara G4
7.5 Overall Score
The G4 from smart home brand Aqara provides a wider variety of smart home integrations with Alexa, Google, and full HomeKit Secure Video support. You can use wired power, or regular AA batteries for surprisingly long life, and all without a subscription.
Common Questions
How long has Aosu been around?
The company was established as a legal entity in the United States in January 2021 with $3M in VC seed funding. Aosu is now a private company with 4 venture capital firms having minor holdings.
Where is Aosu based?
Aosuâs headquarters are in Shenzhen, China. Their products are manufactured in China and Vietnam.
Is Aosu secure?
Aosu provides no significant information as to how they secure their servers or data other than very basic, vague statements in their privacy policy. There is no sign of any independent security audits or bug bounty programs, although they do provide a reporting form on their home page. There have also been no known security breaches or vulnerabilities reported for their products.
See my video doorbell guides to learn more about other models, features, and options.
