In this video, you can see the benefit of the visible LED as the bobcat shows up in color. The base station’s microSD slot can be used for local recording and viewing of motion clips, but Arlo expects to allow remote access to them later this year.
Unless you upgrade your service plan for another $2 per camera per month, only 1080p images are stored in the cloud or streamed. In our testing, it worked reasonably well, although it isn’t actually generating any new data that wasn’t in the original 4K image. New for the Ultra is a visible-light, motion-activated LED that can provide some color to nighttime images and might help scare off prowlers. The Ultra will also track whatever it sees moving in the frame and focus on it (basically it provides a 1080p window into the image portion of interest).
The 4K video is excellent, and the camera offers a useful 180-degree (diagonal) field of view, although it appears that after the bundled 1-year cloud subscription expires, you’ll need to renew it for $10/month to continue to get the full value. The Arlo Ultra features improved audio as well as upgraded 4K video The camera itself has been upgraded to 4K, although with a higher price to match.
Like the Arlo Pro 2, it has excellent battery life and can be hard-wired. As with previous generations of the Arlo, the camera is solidly built. If you want the benefits of a high-quality, cloud-centric camera that has a full feature set and isn’t owned by Google or Amazon, the Ultra delivers. Overall, though, the combination of features, build quality, battery life, image quality, and flexible deployment options make the new Arlo Ultra 4K camera our favorite for 2019.
Arlo Ultra 4K: Our Choice for a Cloud Camera
Ring’s Neighborhood feature is a powerful and effective way for communities to quickly share video of suspicious events, but some people find it kind of spooky and worry about how the videos might be used. Ring offers both battery and hard-wired versions but tops out at 1080p resolution. For example, you can get a 4K version (the Nest Cam IQ Outdoor) of Nest’s camera, but it needs to have wired power. If you want to go with Ring or Nest, there are some other tradeoffs. However, they’re not only tied to a cloud subscription, but using their cameras means they get a lot of data about you, and they haven’t always been good stewards of it. Tech giants Amazon (Ring) and Google (Nest) are pushing the feature envelope for home security cameras faster than anyone else, with lots of advanced detection, replay, and sharing capabilities. Security Cameras: Yet Another Battleground for Amazon and Google