Yale Smart Video Doorbell Review

Introduction

If you’ve already got Yale smart home products like the Conexis L2 lock, the Yale Smart Video Doorbell sounds like a great addition. It offers 1080p HD video, integration with Yale’s own security products, and support for both Google Home and Alexa. I’m testing the stand-alone version, but for about £30 extra you can get this doorbell with a digital chime.

This is a big doorbell, but its curved edges soften it up somewhat. It comes with a range of mounting options, and can either be powered through wires, or from its large onboard battery. There’s just a limited amount of onboard storage though, and no microSD slot – if you want to keep recordings for more than a few days, you’ll need to subscribe.

Design and features

• Wired or battery powered
• Very limited storage
• Landscape orientation and narrow view

The Yale Smart Video Doorbell’s large 6,500mAh battery means it’s bigger than many competing bells – though not quite as chunky as TP-Link’s Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D235. With a black fascia, its camera and passive infrared detector aren’t particularly conspicuous, while the bell button itself is marked out with a logo and a white circle that lights up green when movement is detected.

Like other smart doorbells, the Smart Video Doorbell fits into a mounting plate. Yale supplies it with a 15° wedge which you can use if you need to fine-tune its horizontal aim. In many cases you’ll want to screw it in place, but there’s also a double-sided sticker, which can be a great time-saver for simple installations – and may be essential in cases where you can’t drill.

This doorbell has a claimed 4-6 month battery life, but you can also use it with bell wiring and a standard bell chime – it’s compatible with 8-24 volt transformers. It supports up to six of Yale’s digital chimes, which could be useful for bigger properties or those with garden rooms.

The Yale Smart Video Doorbell is controlled by the Yale Home app. It’s generally easy to use and understand, helping you get the most from the doorbell, particularly if you also have other Yale security devices. You can connect up to Google Home or Amazon Alexa to see and interact with callers on a smart speaker. I particularly liked the Activity timeline, which provides an overview of all the events in your ecosystem.

With no chime in my setup, I was dependent on prompt notifications to let me know when callers were at the door. You can choose whether to get a message or video call, which is a nice touch. I found that the app always alerted me almost the instant that somebody pressed the bell button.

While many doorbells store recordings in the cloud, or locally via a Micro SD card, the Yale Smart Video Doorbell has just a small amount of onboard storage. Yale says this lets you view recordings from the last 2-4 days. If you need more you’ll have to subscribe to a Yale Home Camera Plan, which costs £3.50 per month. This unlocks 30 days’ of cloud storage, along with vehicle, package and pet detection – without it the doorbell can identify only humans, or generic motion.

This doorbell has a more significant difference from the norm. Many bells use a portrait or square orientation to reveal the full height of callers, but the Yale Smart Video Doorbell’s sensor is arranged in a conventional landscape format. When combined with a comparatively narrow 154-degree field of view, this is likely to mean you can’t see callers’ legs, or any packages or luggage they’ve placed on the ground. This doorbell’s 1080p resolution is also low by modern standards.

Performance

• Unimpressive video
• Limited storage
• Fair AI performance

If you’re looking for a doorbell with excellent video quality, I’m afraid this isn’t it. The Yale Smart Video Doorbell doesn’t have an especially high resolution sensor, and without HDR it doesn’t really make the most of what it has. In my north-facing porch, callers were typically underexposed in daylight hours, such as here in the late morning.

The problem persisted into the afternoon.

As the light failed into the early evening, video became increasingly blocky as the camera struggled to resolve details.

I tried tweaking the camera exposure up a notch in the app. While this did brighten the video overall, it still left callers’ faces underexposed.

This camera was incredibly reluctant to switch to infrared, providing colour footage until shortly before full night on my streetlit road. While this inevitably led to even blockier footage, ironically it resulted in better exposure of callers, thanks to leaked light from my hallway.

In the late evening and at night, this doorbell did at last switch to black and white footage, illuminated by its built in infrared light. Video still remained somewhat blocky, though, and in the evening (left) it didn’t do a great job of exposing very dark areas like the back of my car. This improved with full night footage (right), which was fine.

There’s a more fundamental problem, however. While the Yale Smart Video Doorbell has a reasonable horizontal field of view, its landscape orientation meant that callers to my door were cut off slightly below the waist. I couldn’t see luggage or packages, and wouldn’t even have known if someone had rung the bell then crouched down by my front wall – admittedly an unlikely scenario.

I experienced a couple of connectivity problems with this doorbell, where videos were unavailable to download. I also typically received a couple of notifications a day to tell me it had lost and regained its connection to the network. You can turn these off, but it wasn’t especially confidence inspiring.

While Yale says that the onboard storage is good for 2-4 days’ use, I found it wasn’t always enough for a day of my family’s comings and goings. I filmed myself ringing the bell in the evening, then experienced connectivity problems that prevented me downloading the footage. A couple of days later, it had gone. When I examined the timeline on a typical weekday, I found that footage of me leaving for the morning’s school run had often been overwritten by the time I returned.

You can’t upgrade this doorbell’s onboard storage, so in practice there’s a good chance you’d need a subscription just to give yourself enough time to review and save its recordings. That’s a shame, because you needn’t subscribe to access its human recognition, which is probably the most helpful AI alert to have.

I found this doorbell’s alerts to be reliable, if a little prone to false alarms when my car wasn’t on the drive – tweaking the sensitivity down a notch seemed to fix that problem. You can also exclude areas of the frame from motion detection, however this applies to all detection types: you can’t create one zone for human detection and another for simple motion detection.

This doorbell also supports privacy zones, created using a similar block-based interface, which ‘squashed’ the image vertically on my phone. It’s fairly simple to use, although not as exacting as competing systems that use draggable vertices to let you mark out a shape.

The Yale Smart Video Doorbell does offer excellent battery life. It generally lost about one percent of its charge per day while I was testing it, suggesting I’d get at least three months’ use between recharges. That’s about the best I’ve seen on my front door, and on a quieter road I’d expect a little more.

Should you buy it?