myQ Outdoor Battery Camera review: Truly wireless surveillance

Price When Reviewed

$99.99

Best Prices Today: myQ Outdoor Battery Camera

Just a few months ago, Chamberlain’s myQ brand extended its home security camera lineup with its first outdoor model. Now the brand is back with another iteration, this time one with a built-in battery.

The industrial design maintains the long-running overturned-coffee-cup look used for every myQ camera to date. The main departure for the battery-powered model reviewed here is a new base that allows the camera to affix magnetically to its swivel mount. (It can also affix to another metallic surface, though you won’t be able to aim it easily.)

Specifications

Chamberlain does not specify the size of the battery—it is not removeable nor replaceable—but suggests it will run for 4 to 6 months before needing a recharge. Charging takes place via a recessed USB-C port on the underside of the device. You can also leave it plugged in 24/7 if you don’t want to take advantage of the battery feature (or if you’re afraid you’ll forget to take it down for charging, potentially missing a crucial event).

In addition to the battery, the camera offers another upgrade over the wired myQ Outdoor Camera: increased resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels—a significant improvement over the 1080p image sensor in the older camera. An integrated spotlight is another new feature; it’s activated when motion is detected at night or on demand. Note that this spotlight is in lieu of infrared night vision: In the dark, the camera can’t see anything without the spotlight on; the image goes fully black.

A 130-degree field of view and two-way audio remain standard. Chamberlain makes no weatherization claims—or at least it doesn’t publish an IP code for the camera—but its USB-C port and its reset button are covered by thick rubber flaps, suggesting a reasonable level of weatherproofing.

Setup isn’t complex, requiring you to press and hold the reset button on the underside of the camera while onboarding it to the app. The location of this button is hard to reach without a pen or other implement, but once that’s resolved, it’s a simple process to connect the camera to your 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network.

Performance

Chamberlain Group

Functionally, the camera is identical to every other myQ camera: A live video feed is available on demand, and recordings are made only when motion is detected. These are stored on myQ’s cloud service exclusively (there is no onboard or other means of storage). Video looks good—even better now, thanks to the resolution upgrade—either by day or under the surprisingly strong spotlight, which has a significant range of at least 50 feet.

Clips are initiated when motion is detected; as with other myQ gear, there’s no way to manually record video clips or to record 24/7. Clips are limited in length, ranging from a minimum of 10 seconds to an unknown maximum length, though the longest I achieved was 43 seconds across my testing over multiple days.

The camera categorizes clips based on the type of motion, including person, animal, package, and vehicle. Faces can also be registered, which lets you tag clips with the names of family members and frequent visitors. Each of these AI-powered modes can be turned off, but there doesn’t seem to be any strong reason to do so.

Motion-sensing range can be adjusted (namely as a battery-saving measure) and up to three detection zones are supported if you want to screen out parts of the image, for the sake of neighbor privacy for example.

Most of these features work well, although the camera often failed at recognizing my cat and rarely assigned an “animal” designation to those clips—this despite her walking directly through the frame. Motion detection was otherwise on point. Skimming through clips is simple in the monolithic archive of recordings, and a filtering system lets you easily drill down if you’re looking for a certain type of activity.

Chamberlain Group

Because myQ cameras store all their video online, playback can be a bit slow, though things seemed improved in my testing this time around compared to my experience with the wired outdoor camera. I didn’t encounter any crashes or other operational bugs, except that I could not disable the spotlight. You can turn it off after motion detection has turned it on, and you can turn it off after manually turning it on, but there’s no means of preventing motion detection from turning it on.

The settings in the myQ app’s Night Vision menu did not do anything: the Automatic, Always, and Never options all made the camera behave the same way, activating the spotlight at night when motion was detected. I imagine there’s a strong possibility that this behavior is not what myQ intended and that it will be fixed or revamped down the road.

As with all other myQ devices, you will absolutely need to subscribe to myQ’s video storage service if you want anything beyond a live stream. Pricing hasn’t changed of late: It’s $4/month or $40/year for seven days of storage on a single camera; or $10/month or $100/year for 30 days of storage on multiple cameras. A 30-day trial of the single-device, seven-day plan is included with purchase and automatically activates upon installation.

Should you buy the myQ Outdoor Battery Camera?

Chamberlain has put a suggested retail price of $100 on this camera, and at the time of this review, its street price was around $89. Compare those prices to the wired myQ Outdoor Camera, with its $80 MSRP and current street price of $75. The addition of battery power makes setup more convenient, but the boost in resolution is an even more compelling reason to spend an extra $15 or $20 to pick up this newer model.

If you’re already in the myQ camera ecosystem and are paying for a subscription, adding this model makes excellent sense, since there will be no additional cost to add cameras on the multi-device plan.

That said, the absence of infrared night vision and the inability to prevent motion detection from turning on this camera’s spotlight are significant drawbacks. If either of those limitations is even remotely important to you, consider this camera a pass.