Netatmo may not be a household name, but the Paris-based company certainly wants to be the centerpiece of your future home. It's already come out with a smart thermostat, a weather station/air monitor, and a wearable UV detector, and now the company is introducing a Wi-Fi security camera that uses facial recognition to identify your houseguests.
The Netatmo Welcome was unveiled at CES this year, but it hasn’t been publicly available until today. Like most other home-monitoring products on the market today, the tall-boy-sized camera uses a super-wide-angle (130 degrees) lens and streaming video to let you look in on your home.
It shoots 1080p video, which you can view live via iOS and Android apps. It also has an infrared LED for nighttime recording and a motion sensor, so it only records when there’s some action in front of it.
While none of that is revolutionary, the Welcome has packaged it all in a more refined body than the competition, with an aluminum shell and a cylindrical body that makes it look... not like a security camera.
But the big competitive draw is that Netatmo knows who is in your home. The system lets you register and tag the identities of people you live with, then alerts you via the app as to who, exactly, is home. If the camera and facial-recognition technology doesn’t recognize the person on camera, it notifies you know of a possible intruder.
A combination of a live-streaming video feed from your home and facial-recognition might seem like one too many privacy risks, but Netatmo says the system has some safeguards built into it. Users can disable video feeds for individual members of a household and just have the system record and alert the app when a stranger is in your home. And instead of storing video footage and face-ID data in the cloud, the camera saves everything to an included microSD card. There is a cloud service for the system, however, and it’s used to store photos of each triggered event.
The device costs $200, putting the Netatmo Welcome right in line with competing Wi-Fi security cameras like the Dropcam Pro and Piper. The Welcome camera will also be compatible with door and window sensors called Welcome Tags, but those aren’t available yet.
