Wemo Smart 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
✔ Full HomeKit Secure Video support✔ High quality audio capture
✔ Good package detection
Cons
✘ Poor video image quality✘ Slow event processing
✘ Inconsistent motion detection
The Verdict
While appearing to have good build quality on the outside, the Wemo Smart Video Doorbell appears to suffer from low quality components on the inside. This doorbell has the worst video quality I’ve ever seen at any price point, and by a long shot. This manifests in both image clarity and dynamic range, with poor detail and a lack of contrast between light and shadow.
My testing also found the processing speed of the doorbell to be lacking. Slow motion notifications and missed events were a regular occurrence where other HomeKit doorbells performed far better on the same setup. The use of HomeKit’s high quality encoding and smart processing helped salvage some score with surprisingly good audio quality in both recorded and live video, and highly accurate object detection, including known faces and packages.
If you’re looking for a dedicated HomeKit doorbell with decent package detection coverage, this is probably your best option. But for anything else, the Aqara G4 delivers far superior performance across the board for a little more money up front.
Type: Wired HomeKit video doorbell
Subscription: iCloud subscription for storage (10 days)
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.
Here’s how this video doorbell ranks compared to the average of other doorbells I’ve tested:
| Data Point | ||
|---|---|---|
| Video Quality | 2.1 | 7.7 |
| Night Vision Quality | 2.4 | 7.1 |
| Dynamic Range | 1.7 | 6.2 |
| Two-Way Talk | 9.5 | 7.4 |
| App Audibility | ||
| Outdoor Audibility | ||
| Recorded Audio | 10.0 | 8.2 |
| Notification Delay | 6.1 | 7.5 |
| Thumbnail Average | ||
| Doorbell Average | ||
| Text-only Average | ||
| Thumbnail Effectiveness | 9.7 | 7.0 |
| Day Success | ||
| Night Success | ||
| Missed Events | 8.1 | 9.4 |
| Day Misses | ||
| Night Misses | ||
| Camera Wake Delay | 10.0 | 7.9 |
| Frame Remaining Day | ||
| Frame Remaining Night | ||
| Event Capture | 8.0 | 6.2 |
| Record Start Day | ||
| Record Start Night | ||
| Package Monitoring | 8.8 | 6.1 |
| Package Features | ||
| Detection Success | ||
| Smart Detection | 10.0 | 6.9 |
| Smart Features | ||
| Day Accuracy | ||
| Night Accuracy | ||
| Live View Response | 7.9 | 8.2 |
| Live View Time | ||
| Doorbell Ring Response | ||
| Privacy Features | N/A | 8.2 |
| App Usability | N/A | 7.8 |
| Battery Performance | N/A | 7.9 |
| After 30 days | ||
| Time To Dead |
The Basics
Tech Specs
Power: WiredRemovable Battery: N/A
Can Use Wired Chime: Yes
Connectivity: Wi-Fi Dual Band
Resolution: 1200 x 1600
Storage: Cloud
Weather Rating: IP65
Field of View: 140 degrees
Compatibility: HomeKit
Smart Detection: Yes
Footprint (WxH): 43mm x 122mm
Notable Features:
- 4s Pre-roll
- Facial Recognition
- Local processing
- Backup battery
As with many wired video doorbells, the Wemo smart video doorbell is fairly compact thanks to not needing space for a large battery. That said it does have a small backup battery, although this is only really intended to weather brief power fluctuations to prevent the doorbell rebooting and losing connection.
You’ll need a 16V or 24V AC power supply using standard doorbell wiring to keep it running. Using the provided power adapter, you can run it with a mechanical chime, but not a digital one. To use it without a chime you’ll need to go through a bypass procedure with it plugged into USB-C power first.
On the face of the doorbell are three light sources. A red/blue LED indicating the recording state of the doorbell as per HomeKit. This is standard across HomeKit cameras with blue indicating standby and red indicating active streaming. A light bar below that provides general status of the device and indicates Wi-Fi connectivity and similar state data. Finally, the button itself lights up white when motion is detected to help guide visitors to the button.
The usual extras are provided including chime jumper wires, wedge, and mounting hardware, along with two Torx security screws and a special tamper-proof screwdriver to hold the doorbell safely to the metal mounting plate. You only need one of these, but it’s nice to have a spare provided since they are pretty unique.
Video Storage
10 days of cloud storage is provided through HomeKit Secure Video if you have a paid iCloud subscription.
Chime Options
Mechanical chimes are supported with the installation of the provided power adapter. HomePods can also be used as chimes through Apple Home.
Secured by single Torx tamper-proof screw
Die-cast mount plate with wire terminals
Rear USB is only used for setting bypass mode
Camera Performance
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell uses an unusual (for HomeKit) 3:4 aspect ratio to provide a more focused view of what’s in front of the door, including on the floor. This ‘head-to-toe’ view is useful for package monitoring and preventing people hiding out of the cameras view. This is particularly true here, as Wemo has also gone with a wide-angle fisheye lens. This gives complete vertical coverage and a wide 140-degree horizontal field to cover a good amount of the sides as well.
Unfortunately, this combination coupled with what must be a poor-quality sensor, delivers an abysmal image quality resulting in the lowest score I’ve yet awarded in this test. I was only able to get a clear read of the test chart at a pitiful 1.7m (5 ft). This is in spite of the recorded video being at 1200 x 1600, a higher resolution than other HomeKit cameras support.
During the night tests, the image quality fared even worse with the introduction on considerable noise. Infra-red output is also lacking, limiting the visible range and further reducing the ability to discern the test chart clearly. Again, the best I could manage, even allowing for significant compression artifacts, was 1.7m (5ft).
This is also the lowest score achieved by any doorbell in my tests by a wide margin.
In the dynamic range test, we can see further evidence of a low-quality sensor with very poor definition of the grayscale swatches in the shade while over saturating the background. While the poor image clarity definitely contributes to the lack of definition, it’s clear in the still image sample that the shades of the swatches themselves are poorly defined, especially on the darker end of the scale.
OECF dynamic range test chart
Audio Performance
Two-way talk worked very well from the live view with crisp and clear voice reproduction both in the Apple Home app and through the doorbell speaker. The volume of the speaker was loud enough to hear normal speech out to 9m (29ft) which was matched by the microphone pickup allowing the app user to hear clearly from the same distance. Delay between speaking and reproduction both ways was also very fast, making holding a conversation easy.
With excellent audio encoding and good microphone hardware, the Wemo Smart Video Doorbell performed perfectly at capturing audio in recorded events. All sounds were clear and easily identified without any observable audio compression artefacts. This earns Wemo a perfect score on this test.
Notification Performance
Notification delivery times provide an indication that the Wemo Smart Video Doorbell is running substandard processing hardware that’s causing delays in communication. The notifications are all delivered via the HomeKit home hub, and the secure local processing does introduce some delay as I’ve observed with all HomeKit cameras. However, the Wemo doorbell seems to fare far worse than others on average.
The overall average of 13.5 seconds was well above other HomeKit doorbells at 9.2 seconds, and the variability was significant with some tests pushing over 19 seconds to arrive. At that level of delay, it’s not much use if you want to respond in any meaningful way. The person triggering the notification will probably be long gone unless they actually rang the doorbell.
HomeKit provides an option to disable thumbnails and use text-only notifications. This normally provides much faster delivery but using that option with the Wemo doorbell did not disable the thumbnails, and actually made the delivery times worse, pushing the peak up to 23 seconds.
Doorbell notifications were a slightly better story with the notification averaging 6.5 seconds, which is still well above the HomeKit average of 4.1 seconds.
Thumbnails (or other rich media content) provide valuable at-a-glance vetting of motion alerts and allow you to quickly determine if action is required without having to pull out your phone and open the app. HomeKit does this well in general, and the handling here is no exception. The combination of a wide-angle lens and pre-roll video recording as standard for wired cameras ensures that the home hub is able to pull a useful thumbnail pretty much all the time.
I’ve rarely had a HomeKit motion alert with a useless image, so it’s always clear what caused the detection alert. The Wemo doorbell achieves a useable thumbnail 96% of the time with only 1 outlier event where I was partially out of the frame.
Motion Detection Performance
HomeKit is known to suffer from missed events due to delays in processing motion events at the home hub. This can be more frequent than dedicated camera systems, and my previous tests have hit about 10%, which is worse than most.
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell again shows some further deficiency here, with frequent missed events after a period of inactivity. This appears as if the doorbell goes into some form of sleep mode like battery powered models do, but it shouldn’t as it’s hardwired. My initial test of a given day would often be missed, with subsequent test passes working fine. This resulted in a miss rate of 19%, which is the highest missed event rate of any doorbell I’ve tested. To keep it in perspective though, this is a total of 17 misses out of 89 tests, so the current scoring criteria doesn’t penalize this too much as the vast majority of events are detected correctly.
This test measures how quickly the camera can respond to an event and is more critical for battery powered models that have to wake the camera up before recording. HomeKit uses pre-roll recording on wired doorbells and cameras which means the camera keeps a rolling buffer which is added to the start of any recording. This ensures events before the recording started are captured.
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell benefits from this feature along with a wide-angle lens to provide excellent coverage of horizontal movement. As a result, the motion recordings in this test always started before I entered the far edge of the frame and recorded my complete crossing to the other side - a 100% capture result.
Wemo scored well in this test, but only because of the pre-roll recording feature. During the zig-zag test that I used to determine the actual maximum detection range of a doorbell
this model only managed to detect me at 3m (10ft), which is at the low end of the scale. Thanks to having the pre-roll buffer added to the recording at the point of detection, most of the recorded events capture my approach from much further out.
Normally, a doorbell with pre-roll would always capture the full test run, and thus get a near perfect score. The Wemo doorbell was highly variable with this result, which indicates more slow processing issues and detection points well below the maximum. Not once was the full test run captured, and some of the tests resulted in very low recorded distances (2.3m), indicated that the recording was only triggered well after I had already passed the camera. This gels with the long notification delivery times as well.
Smart Detection Performance
While package detection is itself a feature of HomeKit Secure Video, the doorbell plays a part in the configuration of its camera and lens. The 3:4 aspect ratio used by Wemo allows complete coverage of the area around the door, including right up to the wall below the doorbell. This allows HomeKit to spot and identify packages in any likely area they could be left, which it did with almost perfect accuracy with both high and low contrast test samples.
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
Smart detection is primarily the responsibility of the HomeKit home hub, but the camera is responsible for passing a usable video stream in time for it to process so we still score it here. The accuracy of HomeKit Secure Video shows clearly here with a 100% object detection accuracy across all tests and object types apart from packages. It also supports the full range of objects types, including familiar faces which are drawn from the owner’s photo library. This uses the people category from photos and uses the names assigned through the photos app.
This is, of course, done entirely locally, with explicit consent, and completely privately with no cloud processing required. It also works amazingly well.
Feature scoring:
✔ Custom motion zones.
✔ Person detection.
✔ Animal Detection.
✔ Vehicle Detection.
✔ Facial Recognition.
Battery Performance
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell requires wired power, either a 16V or 24V AC supply with a rating of 30VA or better.
App Experience
Accessing the live view in the app was mostly fast and reliable, but there was some considerable variation. I could generally expect a response in under 3 seconds, but on a few occasions, it blew out to double that, which could be frustrating when you need to check what’s happening in the moment.
Responding to doorbell rings was significantly slower, with the live view coming up an average of 7.3 seconds after tapping the notification. This is double the response time of other doorbells and, with tests on the slower end of the range taking over 10 seconds to respond, this could leave your caller wondering what’s going on or leaving before you can respond.
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell can only be used with Apple Home and has no app of its own. As a HomeKit exclusive device, all privacy and security functions are handled by HomeKit and so are out of scope for scoring the doorbell itself.
The Wemo doorbell has no app at all, exclusively using the Apple Home app for all functionality and configuration. Setup is via NFC pairing with the Home App, which I found worked flawlessly first time. This was a pleasant surprise given my poor experience with past Wemo devices using this method. The actual functionality or performance of the app is not in scope for scoring here as the app is not controlled by, or specific to, Wemo. For more information about these features check out my HomeKit Secure Video guide.
Smart Home Features
Access live view via Apple TV.
Use HomePod as a remote chime.
Can be used as a motion sensor in automations.
Alternatives
Performance
Aqara G4
8.4 Overall Score
A high-quality, certified HomeKit accessory that uses a standard 16:9 aspect ratio. The G4 can be run with wired power or 6 AA batteries for a couple of months. Camera and audio quality is good, and while it's package coverage is lacking, when connected to wired power it will outperform the Wemo doorbell in just about every other way.
Security
Arlo Video Doorbell 2K
7.4 Overall Score
The Arlo Video Doorbell 2K is an option for HomeKit users, but only in conjunction with an Arlo base station, and only as a basic HomeKit camera as it doesn't support HomeKit Secure Video. For the price this model falls short in video quality and motion detection performance, so it's only really viable if you are invested in a broader Arlo security system.
Video Quality
Reolink WiFi Doorbell
8.7 Overall Score
While not offering HomeKit compatibility, this low-cost wired doorbell from Reolink delivers exceptional video quality and near perfect motion detection. The app experience leaves a bit to be desired, but it's usable, and it's possible to integrate this doorbell with HomeKit using the open-source Scrypted tool if you're game.
Common Questions
What smart homes does the Wemo doorbell support?
The Wemo Smart Video Doorbell is exclusive to Apple Home (i.e. HomeKit). No other smart home platforms are supported
What power does the Wemo doorbell require?
The doorbell runs of a typical AC doorbell transformer at 16 to 24 Volts. A rating of 30VA or higher is recommended if using with a mechanical chime. Without the chime, the doorbell can be put into bypass mode and run standalone on the same voltage. An AC wall adapter can also be used to power the doorbell in this mode.
Who makes the Wemo doorbell?
Wemo is the smart home brand of Belkin, a US based consumer electronics company based in California. Belkin was acquired by Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2018.
See my video doorbell guides to learn more about other models, features, and options.
