Reviews

Blurams Home Pro security camera review: Advanced features for any budget

Blurams Home Pro certainly looks like an elementary indoor security camera, and its sub-$50 price tag does nothing to dispel that impression. But this is a case of looks deceiving because the Home Pro brims with advanced features, including motion and sound detection, human and facial recognition, customizable activity zones, and smart home integration. What’s more, all these features work well and reliably, making the camera an amazing value.

Design

The Home Pro weighs a bit over 3 ounces and has a straightforward design. The camera is attached to a ball joint on a pedestal-style stand that can rest on any flat surface or be mounted on a wall or ceiling with its included hardware. In either setup, the camera can be tilted and rotated on its stem to achieve an optimum viewing angle.

Flanking the camera’s 1080p lens is a sensor, indicator LED, and a microphone. On the back of the camera are a reset button, speaker, and micro-USB port for the camera’s power supply.

The Home Pro has a 131-degree field of view and enhances the image with 3D noise reduction and distortion correction. Six 850nm infrared LEDs provide night vision up to to 7 meters (about 22 feet). The camera can be paired with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant in order to view the live feed on those service’s smart displays.

Event-triggered recordings can be stored locally to a microSD card (up to 128GB, not included). You can unlock continuous recording as well as facial recognition, lockscreen notifications, and the ability to create and share video clips with a subscription to Blurams cloud service. The Standard plan lets you review video footage for seven days for $5 per month or $49 annually. The Premium plan extends the video history to 30 days for $15 per month or $150 a year.

Setup and performance

Setting up the Home Pro is wonderfully simple. Plug in the camera, register or login with the Blurams app, and add the device. You’ll be prompted to login to your Wi-Fi, then point an onscreen QR code at the camera’s lens for scanning. Even with a required firmware update, I had the Home Pro connected in just a few minutes.

As soon as the camera is connected, you can view its live feed in the app. Image quality is tack sharp with excellent color reproduction. You can zoom up to 4x, with no discernible image degradation, by pinching the image or just double tapping it. You can also swipe to pan the image to particular spots when zoomed for a closer look.

There are plenty of settings to customize to get the best out of the security features. You can adjust the sensitivity for both motion and sound detection. You can also create Activity Zones by masking in the areas of the camera’s field of view you want to monitor. The Home Pro will alert you only to motion in these zones, ignoring any movement outside them.

Human detection and facial detection— which are labeled as “someone appears” and “familiar appears” in the app respectively—must be turned on in the settings. Each also offers a rich notification option that, when activated, includes a photo of the detected person in notifications.

As expected, given Blurams’ background in intelligent imaging technologies, all these AI-driven features worked very well. Whenever the Home Pro recognized a person, a thumbnail of their face and the tag “someone appears” was displayed next to the relative video clip in the event timeline. I could then go through the Discover tab on the app’s homescreen to see all these “someones” and give each person a name, at which point they were automatically regrouped as “family” and identified by name in all future alerts.

The Blurams app sorts all detected events into a Library tab. Each video clip is time-stamped and marked with an icon indicating the type of event that triggered it—motion, sound, human shape, or human face. You can sort these by camera, event type, and date using three drop-down filters at the top.

Beyond the AI detection features, the app provides basic camera controls from the live feed screen, including the ability to toggle the resolution up or down, use two-way talk, and trigger the camera’s built-in siren to ward off an intruder. The app also makes it easy to switch between local and cloud storage when reviewing videos, and to share camera access with family members. Perhaps best of all, it provides a “delete data” option that allows you to easily erase the human face info the Home Pro has captured. This, however, is an all-or-nothing option—you can’t pick and choose which faces to delete.

Verdict

Like the Blurams Dome Pro outdoor camera I reviewed previously, the Home Pro puts the lie to the notion you need to spend a lot to get a lot of home security camera. It offers some of the most desirable security features at a fraction of the cost of many competing cameras. That makes it worth considering no matter what size your budget.

Stocked with advanced features, the Blurams Home Pro is a fantastic value.