BT Smart Home Cam 100 review

The camera has no built-in storage or memory card reader, but it’s possible to automatically record video clips to the cloud when motion is detected. However, this requires a premium subscription that costs £6.99 for 30 days. Videos are only stored for 14 days before they are deleted, too, so you’ll need to download them if you want to keep them. The camera comes with a 14-day trial of the premium service.

Without a premium subscription you are still able to use the live monitoring function as well as motion detection, but lose the ability to save videos to the cloud. You can also only get motion alerts through push notifications to the mobile app, whereas a premium subscription also allows for automated emails. You can set the camera to trigger on small, medium and large objects (dog, human and car-sized).

When using the app on an Android or iOS device, you can capture a still image from the live view or record video footage within the app. These save locally to your device but do at least mean you have a way of documenting activity even without a subscription to BT’s cloud storage service.

There’s about a five-minute delay between activity happening and it being saved in the cloud and becoming available to watch, which in part can be attributed to the camera’s need to upload the video to BT’s servers. A 90-second video amounts to around a 15MB file, and the camera’s motion detection will only trigger after it’s seen at least eight seconds of motion.

Image quality from the Smart Home Cam 100 was respectable, although we found its footage a little dark even during the daytime. There was a lack of detail in the shadows, but there was still enough clarity to pick out what we needed to see from the video. With only four infrared LEDs for its night vision, the Home Cam 100 struggled in the dark, with a very noisy image. The camera could detect shapes, but these degenerated into blocks of colour without any real discernible detail.

The BT Home Cam 100 is, overall, a basic network camera. Its cloud storage option is expensive, too, but without it the camera feels limited. Its night vision capabilities left a lot to be desired, too, so we would rather pay the extra for the more capable HomeMonitor HD which will pay for itself in the long run.