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Samsung SmartCam HD Pro

Eric Griffith
 & Eric Griffith Senior Editor, Features

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Samsung SmartCam HD Pro - Samsung SmartCam HD Pro
3.5 Good

The Bottom Line

Samsung continues to improve its SmartCam line in just about every way—but not quite enough to overtake the design and features of the competition.
Best Deal£545

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£545

Pros & Cons

    • Excellent full motion video.
    • Local storage on microSD card.
    • Simple Wi-Fi Direct setup with free Android or iOS app.
    • Ethernet setup option for desktops.
    • 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi supported.
    • Excellent night vision.
    • Lacks the home automation options of the competition.
    • As big as a hockey puck.
    • No online "DVR" recording.
    • Desktop Web viewing requires extra browser plug-in.

Samsung's newest SmartCam not only has a simpler name than the last version (HD Pro vs. "WiFi Home Security Camera"), it's vastly improved. It's easier to install, you get on-board storage (you supply the microSDXC card), there's better Wi-Fi support, and video footage is infinitely better looking. And the price increase isn't substantial; $189 compared with the $149 the WiFi Home Security Camera originally sold for.

Most importantly, Samsung is finally giving some real competition to the cameras that excel the most, primarily our Editors' Choice home surveillance cam, the Dropcam Pro, and the Piper. If Samsung had done a little more with it, the SmartCam HD could have been our top pick.

Design and Setup
The Samsung SmartCam HD Pro won't win any points for surreptitiousness. It's a big round camera, about the same size as a hockey puck, and that's before it gets mounted on its plastic stand. With the stand, it measures 4.7 by 3.3 by 3.1 inches (HWD). It's white, unlike the sleek, black Dropcam Pro. The stand comes with screws or a double-sided tape unit to mount; it's pretty much unusable without the stand.

Because it's so big, it has room to spare for the extras that even Dropcam Pro lacks, such as an Ethernet port (if you're lucky enough to have it close to your router) and a slot in the bottom for a microSDXC card. The camera doesn't ship with a card, but supports cards up to 64GB. Samsung claims a 64GB card can hold 24 hours of continuous video.

Inside, the camera supports Wi-Fi on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands, which is the same as the Dropcam Pro. If you own a dual-band router, you can keep the crowded 2.4GHz spectrum free, since the majority of devices still don't support 5GHz.

Setup was simple with previous Samsung SmartCams, but it's actually gotten better, due to improvements in the free SmartCam mobile apps (for iOS and Android). Thanks to the use of Wi-Fi Direct, the app can be set up to recognize the camera and configure its use of Wi-Fi on your home router without even plugging it in via Ethernet. Simple and fast—much like on the Dropcam Pro, in fact. You do still have the option of plugging the SmartCam HD Pro into a router and finding it with your account at www.samsungsmartcam.com—the same account you'll use on your tablet or smartphone with the app.

Features and Performance
I like to say the updates on these cameras are all about the optics. When Dropcam went from HD to Pro, the improvements were in the camera and the software. The same goes here for the SmartCam. The HD Pro's camera has a wide-angle 128-degree lens (just a hair under Dropcam Pro's 130-degree lens) and a 1/2.8-inch CMOS sensor that tosses out a hyper-crisp, full-motion video stream. You don't get any of the fish-eye lens results like with Piper. You can view the stream in 1080p on the desktop, or 720p on mobile—just hit the HQ (High Quality) button. Of course, the speed of your Internet connection can impact how high that quality actually is. You'll certainly see a difference on Wi-Fi vs. 3G, for example, but when the image starts out good, it helps all the way down the series of tubes. It's also assisted by Wide Dynamic Range (WDR) tech to improve backlit images, and the Samsung Light Enhancer (SLE) which brightens up grainy, dark footage.Samsung SmartCam App

The HD Pro also hits on all the right drums that the previous SmartCam lacked. The internal storage option is overdue (and one thing still lacking on Dropcam). The night vision is much improved with use of 10 infrared LEDs instead of just six. There are email and push notifications based on motion and audio detection, motion detection zones you set up on the mobile app so your ceiling fan or pet won't set off an alert, two-way audio to talk to people you're surveilling, and a nice Web interface. Unfortunately, the Web interface still requires a special browser plug-in to view video, the same issue Samsung had a year and a half ago. It's inexcusable at this point.

The mobile apps have undergone a transformation, adding some items that are very useful, such as the aforementioned motion detection zone setup, plus wireless printing, and playback of the microSDXC card's contents on the app. There's even an option to start the camera playing some MIDI music tracks of lullabies if you use it as a baby monitor. The app still has bugs: Trying to watch a video clip by date wouldn't work until I picked the wrong date, for example. And I'm not sure why Samsung's app needs a clunky voice recorder feature.

But these days, it's not just the optics or the apps. Which brings up the important question: What is the SmartCam HD Pro lacking?

Comparing it with the Dropcam Pro and the iControl Piper, the most glaring omission is the option of being more than just a camera. The other two are hubs for total home control; Dropcam recently announced that its built-in Bluetooth LE would finally be put to good use with new movement sensors called Dropcam Tabs, coming soon. The Piper, which started life as a crowdfunded product, has full support for Z-Wave and all the ancillary devices that use it. In that respect, buying a Samsung device isn't exactly future-proofing your home automation and security.

The last big item is cloud-based video recording and storage (a "DVR" service). It's the bread and butter of the Dropcam Pro. While the DVR feature adds a regular subscription charge to the use of the Dropcam, it's worth it based on the quality and the peace of mind. Samsung offers some other extra features—like manual recording and sending images to Picasa on-the-fly—but nothing that quite measures up. The problem: If someone breaks in and steals your camera, they steal the stored video of them stealing it. Samsung tried a DVR option with its previous camera by partnering with a third-party, but it didn't measure up to Dropcam's. So, to be honest, better no cloud-recording implementation than a mediocre one.

Conclusions
The SmartCam HD Pro is an improvement all around from the previous iteration. Adding storage and better optics is a huge step forward, and the setup was about as instantaneous as it gets, all at a great price. But ultimately, it's just a surveillance camera, albeit a very good one. If that were enough anymore, the SmartCam HD Pro would be a top pick, and indeed is worth seeking out if your major need is real-time viewing with some occasional stored footage. The HD Pro lacks the extras that make the Dropcam Pro and Piper our favorite choices for versatile home-surveillance cameras. And if you need a dedicated solution for monitoring your newborn, our favorite is the Withings Smart Baby Monitor.

Best Home Security Camera Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Samsung SmartCam HD Pro - Samsung SmartCam HD Pro

Samsung SmartCam HD Pro Review

3.5 Good

Samsung continues to improve its SmartCam line in just about every way—but not quite enough to overtake the design and features of the competition.

Get It Now
Best Deal£545

Buy It Now

£545

About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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