Technology is both great to allow us to do things that we did not think possible thru to downright frustrating when something does not work.
Thus is the story for me around the Swann Tracker Security camera. This camera from Swann won a CES award in 2020 (Biggest electronics show in world award) for its innovative technology.
The specific technology is via the wide-angle lens and some intelligent processing power, a zoomed-in image is produced of movement it detects. So let us say you have the camera in your lounge room. The camera will capture everything in front of it at 180 degrees. The smarts will pick up on movements like a person or animal and essentially zoom in on that movement, so you see an enlarged image.
The benefit of this is that that no optical zoom and pan and tilt movement of the camera is required. The camera itself has a 5MP (2560x1960pixel) sensor which after processing the image for the ‘Tracked image” delivers a 2MP (1920 x1080pixel) image. To put this in perspective, most security camera’s these days are around 2MP.
This is very cool tech, but unfortunately, my journey to this point has been a long and frustrating one. This is when tech does not work, and Swann has some experienced some major app issues in the background, which has meant I could not use the product for some time.
The good news is it now has been fixed, and the camera is working with my smartphone. A neat new feature just added to the App is home, night and away mode, which will allow you to get different alerts depending on which setting. This is great when you want all alerts in your lounge room when you are not there but don’t want to be told you have just walked through your lounge room when you are there.
The camera connects directly to your home Wi-Fi router, and I found the connection stronger than other camera’s I have tested in the same position. Remember it takes two devises to have a good connection the sender and the receiver (camera and router).
When compared to Swann’s wireless camera that I previously tested. I found that the Tracker camera was much faster to connect to the live view screen on my phone, but this connection still took some seconds. The view that you get is also different.
Where you expect to see one image for each camera you have connected, the Tracker camera in the same space shows you two images. The wide image and the zoomed image, so it is pretty small on your phone screen. I found this to defeat the purpose but if you download the images or video you can, of course, blow them right up on a computer screen.
The camera is an elegant and attractive package and comes with a 32GB SD Memory card. They currently do not offer a cloud storage option. I really like the magnetic base for mounting but note this is an indoor camera.
The camera has a microphone and speaker, so it is possible to have a conversation with your intruder, but there is a slight delay. Last but not least if you have an Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant with a screen, you can set it up to simply ask to see the Tracker Security Camera. RRP is $150
