SwitchBot Pan/Tilt Cam Plus 3K review: 4th-gen, but little better

Price When Reviewed

$69.99

Best Prices Today: SwitchBot Pan/Tilt Cam Plus 3K

SwitchBot makes a wide range of smart home equipment, and while some of it is solid, even if it’s on the quirky side, its latest security camera—the Pan/Tilt Cam Plus 3K—needs to go back to the drawing board, despite being the fourth iteration of the product.

There’s nothing remarkable about the camera’s familiar design: It’s a squat cylindrical device with a rounded top measuring about 4 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. White in color with a black lens component in its center, it’s powered by a USB-C connection on its backside. A cable and A/C adapter are both included. The unit can sit on a tabletop or be mounted on a ceiling, upside-down; the hardware for that is included.

Specifications

The specs on paper look great. The camera can swivel 360 degrees horizontally (though it can’t spin around endlessly, it has a hard stop on the backside in each direction) and 115 degrees vertically. A 100.6-degree diagonal field of view minimizes distortion. The big upgrade with this version over the three pan/tilt cameras SwitchBot has previously released is resolution: With 2592 x 1620 pixels of resolution, it’s got the greatest level of detail of any camera the company has put out to date.

Christopher Null/Foundry

Christopher Null/Foundry

Christopher Null/Foundry

Two-way audio (with a siren) and both color and black-and-white/infrared night vision are standard. Recordings can be stored on SwitchBot’s cloud service or on an internal microSD card (capacities up to 256GB are supported, but none is included).

Like most SwitchBot gear, the camera does not require a SwitchBot hub for basic operations—unless you want to configure multi-device scenes and automations. (I tested it with the latest SwitchBot Hub 2.) Either way, you’ll connect the hub directly to a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network during setup. The setup process took me a few tries to complete successfully—involving inserting a pin into a hole on the back to reset, scanning a QR code on my phone’s screen, and providing my Wi-Fi credentials—but it went fast enough that a couple of do-overs didn’t really slow things down.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best home security cameras.

Day-to-day use

This camera is just fine at its most basic level of usage: Watching live video and using the app to move the camera lens. And unlike my experiences with the original SwitchBot Pan/Tilt Cam, I had no trouble using my own microSD card to capture, store, and play back recordings on demand. Video looks better than ever at full resolution (this can be dialed down to standard definition if you want to conserve storage space), and on-demand pan/tilt functions complete without much complaint.

Motion sensitivity (with optional human detection) is appropriate at its three configurable levels, and infrared-captured night vision clips look clear at a range of at least 20 feet. Even clips captured under low-light color night vision were attractive and bright enough, though I had to manually turn off infrared night vision to get the color mode to kick in; that isn’t something I’d ever recommend, because it really only works at dusk, not in complete darkness.

Christopher Null/Foundry

Christopher Null/Foundry

Christopher Null/Foundry

Unlike prior versions of the app, clips no longer seem to have a set limit, and there’s no significant cooldown time between recordings. Finally, Alexa and Google Home smart displays are still supported if you want to get a quick look at what’s on camera from a third-party device (again, a hub is required for this).

Unfortunately, while the camera handles the basics well enough, many of the camera’s and the app’s other features just aren’t working right—despite SwitchBot having had years to work out the kinks. To start, the camera’s rotation often falls out of alignment during routine use. This causes the camera to think it can turn no further, even though there’s another 90 degrees of rotation available. SwitchBot says this can be an issue if you physically rotate the camera by hand instead of using the app, but I encountered the problem even without doing this.

Other features just feel half-baked. Patrol Mode is supposed to automatically have the camera move through 360 degrees at a set time, but when the time arrives, the camera only does a handful of rotations, then stops back where it started. It’s simply not much of a patrol, as there’s no way to configure the length of the patrol. Instead, you must set up multiple patrols by configuring multiple schedules, but you can only set a maximum of five. To top it off, there’s also a bug that prevents you from setting up any schedules in the 12:00 p.m.. hour; the system invariably reverts all 12:00 p.m. times 12:00 a.m.

That’s just one example. Preset positions set in one part of the app are different from presets defined in another part of the app, and the presets used for automations aren’t saved with a thumbnail, so you must remember precisely what Preset Point 1 refers to. Clips storage is haphazard: Sometimes new clips are on the top of the chronological list, sometimes they are on the bottom.

SwitchBot

SwitchBot

SwitchBot

But perhaps my biggest complaint is that the motion-tracking feature—where the camera pans to follow movement in real-time—is easily defeated by simply walking out of the frame. Even if I was moving slowly, the SwitchBot almost always lost where I’d gone to. The app can also be ploddingly slow to work with.

At least one aspect of the app is particularly baffling. To download a video, you must find the clip you want, play the clip within the app, then “record” the parts of the clip that you want to save. In other words, you must record the recording before you can export it. If you forget to hit play on your original recording, you can even find yourself recording a video of a still image. It’s an aggressively archaic way to export clips, especially considering this is a one-tap operation in most competing ecosystems, and frankly it is just much too difficult to use here.

Should you buy the SwitchBot Pan Tilt Cam Plus 3K?

SwitchBot has fortunately reduced the price on its cloud storage service considerably, alleviating one of my prior major complaints. Now $4/month or $35/year for one camera, it’s about half the price it was back in 2022. SwitchBot offers two- and three-camera plans for $7/$70 and $11/$105 respectively, but these don’t represent much of a savings, especially if you’re paying annually. All plans provide 30 days of clip storage, but otherwise there’s no real value-add vs. using your own card, except as a potential stopgap against physical theft of the device.

The $70 camera doesn’t sound all that expensive—it’s a little cheaper than the recently reviewed $80 Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam (which doesn’t have patrol or movement-tracking features at all), but there are plenty of competitors on the market at about half that price—the $35 Eufy Security Indoor Cam (model C220), for example—that are considerably easier to use and don’t have so many bugs. T

he SwitchBot Pan/Tilt Cam Plus 3K arguably isn’t the worst PTZ camera on the market, but you can easily do a lot better.