Eufy Video Doorbell 2K (battery-powered) review: The king of the chimes

If you’ve decided to give your old-fashioned ding-dong doorbell the heave-ho there’s plenty of choice around these days. Among our current picks are the Nest Hello and the Ring Video Doorbell 3 but there’s a new bell in town and it’s the best of the lot.

The Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered) is now, firmly, our favourite smart doorbell thanks to its ease of setup and installation, intuitive operation and lack of ongoing costs. It isn’t the cheapest around but it is the best.

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Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered): What do you get for your money?

Video doorbells usually come with lots of fiddly bits and pieces and the Eufy is no exception. There’s the doorbell unit itself – a fairly nondescript rectangular block with the camera at the top and the bell button at the bottom – a quick-release fitting plate, a wedge to angle the camera towards your visitors, some screws, jumper cables plus the Eufy HomeBase.

The latter is a small box that plugs into your home Wi-Fi router via Ethernet cable. It connects the doorbell to your home network (and from there to the internet for remote operation). It also acts as your doorbell chime and has 16GB of internal storage where it stores motion-triggered video clips.

This means that, unlike big-name video doorbells from Ring and Nest, the Eufy Video doorbell doesn’t force you to pay for an online subscription to store recorded clips, so it’s completely free to run. That’s a real bonus, as doorbell subscriptions typically cost around £25 per year and to maintain.

Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered): Is it easy to set up?

The doorbell unit itself is battery powered, which means it’s a doddle to set up. It doesn’t need to be connected to existing, mains-powered cables, so getting started is as simple as screwing the mounting plate to the wall or door frame, then clipping in the doorbell.

After you’ve done this, you need to plug in the Eufy HomeBase and connect it to your Wi-Fi router using the supplied Ethernet cable (it can also be connected to your home network via Wi-Fi). Next, you install the Eufy Security App on your phone, sign up for a Eufy account and follow the onscreen instructions to pair the HomeBase with the doorbell unit. It’s a mercifully simple procedure.

The downside of having a battery-powered doorbell is that you will have to recharge it via the microUSB port from time to time. Eufy claims the battery will last up to six months between charges, though, so you shouldn’t need to do this very often.

If that still sounds like too much hassle, you can connect the Eufy to existing doorbell wiring. The doorbell won’t ring your chime and this does increase the complexity of installation but it ensures the doorbell will never need to be recharged.

Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered): How well does it perform?

Image quality from the camera is excellent. Resolution is a crisp 2K (2,560 x 1,920), which is higher than the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and the Nest Hello, and HDR processing ensures that even on bright days you can see visitors’ faces clearly. The camera also has night vision recording, which is enabled automatically when the light dims.

There’s no face recognition, which is the feature that raises the Nest Hello above the rest but, as is becoming common these days, it is possible to reduce the frequency of false-positive recordings and notifications by turning on human detection. With this feature enabled, the camera will only save video clips to storage that have people in the frame.

It’s also possible to define activity zones to prevent people walking past the end of your drive or garden path from setting off notifications, and to tweak the sensitivity of motion detection as a whole. I found the doorbell’s default settings worked very well, however, only triggering recordings when visitors approached the front door.

As with all smart doorbells, you can use the Eufy app to talk to anyone who rings the bell when you’re out and about. I found this worked well enough but there was quite a long delay between me speaking and it coming through at the other end.

Alternatively, you can choose from a series of canned responses, which will play through the doorbell’s speaker if you’d rather not speak to the person at the door. There are three of these to choose from initially – “Excuse me, can I help you?”, “Please leave it at the door”, and “We will be right there” – and you can even add your own. I’d suggest, just for fun: “Please leave the premises, citizen – you have 20 seconds to comply.”

Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered): Is there anything we don’t like about it?

The Eufy Video Doorbell’s one major weakness is that the volume of the chime in the HomeBase box isn’t all that loud, so if you’re upstairs and the HomeBase is downstairs you may struggle to hear it.

The good news is that, as it’s a smart doorbell, it will ring on your phone (and any other device you install the app on) and it can also be set up to ring any Amazon Echo speakers you may have set up around the house. Plus, if you have a screen-based Echo Show or Google Home device you can ask it to display the live stream from the camera on screen. Alas, if you’re a Google Home-only household, you won’t be able to get it to ring those devices.

If that sounds like too much messing around, it’s worth bearing in mind that, if you buy a Ring doorbell instead, you’ll need to either wire it up to an existing chime or purchase an extra plugin wireless Chime unit at a cost of £49, as no chime is included in the box.

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Eufy Video Doorbell (battery-powered): Should I buy one?

If you’re in the market for a smart doorbell, that alone should convince you to put the Eufy above the Ring on your shopping list. But there are plenty of other reasons that it’s a great smart doorbell.

It’s easy to install yourself, image quality is excellent and it works very effectively without the need to add a costly cloud subscription. It would be the perfect doorbell if it worked with your existing mains chime, and had facial recognition.

However, the Eufy Video Doorbell’s simplicity, effectiveness and low cost over time makes it the best option for most people. It’s our new favourite video doorbell.