Arlo Pro 5 is the latest offering Arlo, improving on the already impressive Arlo Pro 4 camera, offering better resolution, better ability to see at night, as well as improved battery life. It connects seamlessly to your WiFi router, allowing easy connectivity, and near week-long battery life allows this to operate very nicely as a complete wireless solution. ]
Arlo Pro 5 – Features
- Offers advanced 2K colour night vision, with the help of a powerful night light.
- Comes with a new and improved Arlo Secure app, making it faster, allowing better personalised settings and great control of your security.
- Long-lasting battery life, giving you nearly a week of charge time. Easily recharge using the supplied USB cable.
- Dual-band WiFi allows a very simple and easy setup and great connectivity.
- Powerful spotlight is able to see up to 7m away.
- Subscription offers the ability to store videos in the cloud, as well as ability to identify and prioritise people, cars, pets, packages, as well as ability to control activity zones. Also includes theft protection.
Look and feel
Generally speaking, the Arlo Pro 5 doesn’t look that different to its predecessor, and really isn’t that much different from the usual sort of security camera that you will probably see in the market. A curved body holds the battery, the electronics as well as the lens/optics. Also included around the optics on the front is the light, as well as microphone holes.
Below the body is the port to allow you to charge your camera, which attaches magnetically to the supplied USB cable, making it a fairly seamless process.
Behind is a screw fitting allowing you to attach this.
The device comes with an attachment bracket and screws, making it quite easy to attach it to any wall or surface that you want to mount this to.
Setup
The setup is fairly seamless. You install the app, and it just guides you through the process. It didn’t take more than a few minutes, and after that I just needed the app to access the device. You do need to have an active WiFi connection, as that is how it connects to the Arlo network, which then allows you to communicate with this.
General Usage
Generally speaking, the camera works quite well. The image quality is great and you are able to hear quite well too. The same goes for 2-way communication. The built-in speaker is adequate, though you’re not really supposed to use it for any more than speech.
Triggers, false and missed ones
I ended up attaching this near some branches, and they were responsible for quite a few false triggers. Just something to be aware of.
However, I did notice that some of the very basic movements were not being captured. I tried very hard to find a pattern, but couldn’t. For example, I would happily pick up animals going around the street in the night, or myself and family coming home, but might not pick up deliveries happening. I tried to work with Arlo support on this one, and while they were very helpful, we couldn’t quite get to the bottom of the issue, so it remains unresolved.
Subscription vs without
You get 3 options in total. No subscription, the Secure, with one camera costing you £3.49 per month, or £9.99 for unlimited cameras, or Secure Plus, which gives you some extra advantages, and only allows the unlimited camera model for £13.49 per month.
While there isn’t much of a difference between Secure and Secure Plus apart from better quality as well as better and longer cloud storage, the difference between having a plan and none is huge.
And just so you know, you do get a month’s free subscription when you buy one of these, so you do get to try out all the features.
A subscription will get you:
- Live streaming and notifications
- 30 days of cloud storage, with 2k video quality
- Animal, person, vehicle and package detection
- Activity zones
- Rich notifications
- Call a friend
- Theft protection
More details can be found on their website.
However, the important thing to note is that without the Secure subscription, you just get the live streaming and notifications. So while you may be aware that something happened at 3am, you won’t be able to see it in the cloud, only what you see now. So really, for this camera to be useful, you have to look at what it tells you as soon as you get the notification, otherwise you might miss out. Or you get the subscription where it gets you all the features.
Battery Life
As mentioned before, the battery life for this is nearly a week, which is pretty decent. It is also very easy to charge it, as you remove it from its mounting position, attach the USB charger to it via the magnetic cable, and that’s it. It takes a few hours to charge, and you get a notification when it is fully charged so you can remember to take it back. You also get a notification when the battery is nearly empty, and it offers you a low battery mode, which disables certain features like the spotlight and reduces its sensitivity.
More information
More information on the Arlo Pro 5 Spotlight Camera can be found on the Arlo website.
It can be bought directly from the website, where it retails for £219 (at the time of writing). You can buy it as a kit with multiple cameras too, with multiple discounts as the numbers go up.
It can also be bought from other online retailers such as Amazon. At the time of writing, it is £10 cheaper on Amazon compared to the Arlo website.