Hive View Outdoor camera review

Finest Costs At the moment: Hive View Out of doors

Not Obtainable

Hive has plenty of good residence gadgets in its ecosystem. We’re reviewing its outside safety digicam, which is just known as the Hive View Out of doors.

Worth and availability

The Hive View Out of doors digicam is not in the stores within the UK from Hive itself, though you could possibly get one from one other retailer. Hive has made the choice to finish help for present Hive View Out of doors cameras on 1 August, 2025. Because of this in case you have already purchased a Hive View digicam, it’ll not work from that time on.

Try our round-up of the very best good safety cameras for some options.

Design 

The design has been impressed by their earlier good digicam system the Hive View. Actually, because the View, it was additionally created in collaboration with designer Yves Béhar, and appears virtually an identical however in a barely bigger bundle.

The clear design may be very welcoming. Nevertheless, what you don’t see on the skin is that this digicam has been designed to resist the weather and climate circumstances. It being an outside digicam, it has weatherproofing to IP66 and may face up to mud, rain and temperatures all the way down to -20c.

From what we will see the digicam contained in the Hive View Out of doors’s casing has not modified and remains to be the 1080p HD decision as its smaller indoor brethren. Together with 130° extensive angle lens and as much as 8x digital zoom, it additionally options issues like Evening Imaginative and prescient, Particular person Detection and two-way audio. We’ll get to a few of these options in additional element later.

The Hive View Out of doors makes use of a intelligent magnetic ball mount to hooked up to the skin of your property and may be simply adjusted in any course. It makes use of a USB cable for energy, which is a beneficiant 7.5m in size, and is sufficiently small to go thought a 12mm complete within the wall. The USB cable additionally acts as a safety wire which attaches to the digicam with a safety screw, and is supposed to stop somebody from merely working away with it.

We didn’t attempt to verify how robust the USB cable actually is, however we wouldn’t assume it may possibly cease somebody, in the event that they yank on the digicam arduous sufficient. So inserting it out of simple attain could be our advice. And actually Hive suggests a top of two.2m.

Set up

You’ve the choice of putting in the digicam your self, or for an extra £89 you will get Hive to professionally set up it for you. Simply understand that you’ll require a spare wall energy socket inside 7 meters of the place you need to place the Hive View Out of doors digicam.

We additionally suggest that your Wi-Fi sign is powerful sufficient on the digicam’s location, particularly should you plan to make use of the very best 1080p HD video setting. Because the digicam doesn’t have any inside storage or media card slots, it will depend on the wi-fi sign to switch the video feed. So it could be a good suggestion to set it up first and check it out earlier than drilling any holes in your house.

Should you’re going to put in the Hive View Out of doors digicam your self and also you’ve now determined the place it’ll reside, the Hive app has a really helpful step-by-step becoming information which is able to assist with the set up.

You’ll need to drill into your wall to anchor a screw and dangle the magnetic mount on it. The digicam then merely snaps onto the mount. Feeding the USB energy cable inside would require both drilling a gap via or discovering an present gap. We selected to feed it via a window as a brief measure, because the cable is skinny sufficient to permit the window to close… simply.

In fact a clear set up would require a bit extra work, so it’s good that Hive consists of equipment like screws, wall plugs, nails, cable clips, and grommets and even a small screwdriver within the field.

After you have the Hive View Out of doors digicam put in outdoors it’s time to attach it to energy and the remainder of the Hive system. You’ll first have to obtain the Hive app and create an account should you don’t have already got one.

Should you’re an proprietor of different Hive merchandise you simply have to open up the Hive app and add a brand new system. Presently, the Hive View Out of doors digicam just isn’t supported by the Hive net utility, so you will want an Android or Apple system.

Now simply observe the step-by-step directions within the app to setup the digicam. Our setup took just a few minutes and after a firmware replace and reboot, we had the Hive View Out of doors digicam on. Similar to the Hive View, the Out of doors View digicam has most of the similar choices which you’ll play with and setup as you want within the settings menu of the app.

Efficiency

We positioned our Out of doors View digicam in our entrance backyard, and this might imply that each time a automotive glided by, or a tree department moved, it might set off an alert. So we switched the setting to solely alert us if it detected an individual as an alternative.

This appears to work fairly effectively. Nevertheless, the digicam did get fooled a number of occasions within the month we’ve had it put in. As soon as by a pair of automotive tail lights, which type of resembled a cheerful face. But additionally by steam popping out of a boiler air flow pipe within the wall.

We discovered that the 1080p decision of the digicam is okay, and will likely be ok to can help you see some element, even when zooming in somewhat. Nevertheless, as this appears to solely be digital zoom, we’re not so optimistic concerning the quoted 8X zoom. Issues begin to get fairly blurry fairly rapidly.

Evening imaginative and prescient mode is once more usable, nonetheless, as you zoom, it will get very pixelated and also you received’t see any element.

Don’t overlook, that there’s a month-to-month charge for further cloud video area. The Video Playback Membership subscription prices £3.99 per 30 days and is for 30 days of storage.

In any other case you’ll be able to depend on the free service which shops video for twenty-four hours. You possibly can in fact obtain any video clip that the digicam information then it’s triggered onto your cellular system.

Verdict

Over all we discover the Hive View Out of doors digicam addition to the remainder of the Hive ecosystem of safety merchandise.

The design appears to be like strong, and it has survived each rain and temperatures all the way down to -4. Nevertheless, should you purchase one now, you’ll solely be capable to use it till August 2025.