Tapo C425 Motion Detection Sensitivity vs Arlo Pro3
I recently bought and installed 3 x C425 Solar kits and a H500 hub. These were to replace 3 x Arlo Pro3 cameras that have suffered from repeated offline incidents and have become less than useful as security cameras. I have cancelled my Arlo subscription and redeployed them as "trail cams" in my garden with local USB storage.
I really like the Tapo solution, especially as I can use a mix of my home Wi FI mesh and the H500 AP functionality as a failover. This is so much more reliable than the centralised Arlo hub. Person detection is great as is vehicle detection. Battery life seems good currently with the solar panels. App has great functionality. I have not tried the cloud yet as I have installed and old SSD into the H500.
I have two issues I would like to highlight that I suppose are nice to have but I am sure could be improved with a bit of software.
1. The C425 video quality is not as good as the Arlo Pro3 in low light/night time. Both are battery cameras (Tapo much bigger batter). Arlo are quite old now. Tapo has more motion artefacts and blur than Arlo.
2. The C425 detects people and vehicles well. It does not detect smaller moving objects in lowlight/night time very well at all. Last night the Arlo recorded Deer, Foxes, Badger crossing my garden. I could see the IR light on the C425 blink on occasionally but not a single recording. This is a bit disapointing. I am not talking about the AI (which seems OK for people/vehicle), I think just doesnt detect or decide to record.
My settings are here (just in case support want to recommend any changes).
Wi FI signal strength: RSSI -48dB (which is excellent)
Battery: 100%
Working Mode: High Performance
Auto Power Saving: Off
Wake Up Sensitivity:10
Motion Detection: On and set to 10
People Detection: On and set to 6
Pet Detection: On and set to 10
Vehicle Detection On and set to 6
Activity Zones set individually for areas I know to have movement (from Arlo)
Recording to H500 (No local SD cards)
Video set to Auto and 20fps. No Privacy zones configured or enabled.
Cameras horizontaly mounted between 2m and 3m above ground. Angled down at 15 to 20 degrees.
Areas covered do exceed 8m distance but patio and driveway are easily within 5m with nothing detected.
What have a I missed?
Why do they not detect motion like the old Arlos?
Is the AI making decisions about what to record and the criteria are not being met?
Should I switch AI (and People/Pet/Vehicle) off and just use motion detection set to 10?
Any thoughts are welocome.
Spine
Hi Wayne thanks for your reply. I have been doing further troubleshooting but not really got a full resolution yet. As the sun is setting much later at this time of year (in the UK) Animal activity can be spotted on the C425 until about Sunset time. After that Nothing, the cameras are on 24/7.
Here are some examples
Front C425 just after sunset
The Arlo is detecting in darkness unlike the C425
Here is a C425 screen grab just after sunset
Here is what the Arlo caught the next day that the Tapo completely missed
This Badger was in view for 5 minutes or so. Moving quite slowly some of the time.
All of ther grabs show aninals moving at walking to running speeds. It does vary.
So the issue is that the Tapo C425 does record humans and vehilces in darkness. But ti does not record pets/Animals in darkness. I am not a PIR expert but I would have thought the animal heat signature was more pronounced in the (somewhat) cooler hours of night?
I have moved the back camera now so typical movements are much more of a horizontal traversal of the back camera. This has not made any difference so far.
Spinalize.