IMILAB is not a brand you may be familiar with; The Chinese manufacturer got its start in 2014, and in recent years it has started offering its smart home products outside of China.
The brand has a handful of indoor and outdoor security cameras, and their latest product is a wireless video doorbell that sets its sights straight on the Nest Doorbell. Dubbed the Smart Video Doorbell, the smart video doorbell has a 4MP unit and records at a resolution of up to 2.5K. It has a 150-degree field of view, and the 5200mAh battery is expected to last for six months on a full charge – just like the Nest Doorbell.
There are few areas where the IMILAB doorbell does a better job than Google. For one thing, the package includes a standard chime, so you don’t have to use an extra Nest device to get alerts when someone rings your doorbell. The second differentiation is local storage; There is an SD card slot, and you can store snapshots locally.
I’ve used IMILAB’s video doorbell for a little over two weeks now, and there’s a lot to like. The installation itself was very simple, and the doorbell consists of two parts: the doorbell itself that sticks to the outside, and the gate that acts as a chime.
Before installing the doorbell, you will need to set it up using the IMILAB app. This is fairly straightforward, and it only took me a few minutes to do it. After that, all that remains is to open the doorbell outside and plug the gate into the wall socket.
As for everyday use, the IMILAB doorbell captures the essentials. It delivers alerts instantly to the phone, and the quality of the sensor itself is great. The fisheye lens does a good job covering the area just outside the door, and it’s easy to set up areas and activate motion detection. Even if you miss an alert, you can look at the event log to see the recorded footage.
Best of all, the doorbell itself has IP66 water resistance – so it withstands harsh weather just fine. It also has a built in microphone so you can talk through the doorbell, which is a particularly useful feature for me because I get a lot of packets. Not sure if the doorbell will last six months on a single charge, but based on my use it should be good for at least four months.
The only problem with the doorbell is that it is limited to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, so you’ll need to broadcast an independent SSID over 2.4GHz to set up and use the device. IMILAB has its own cloud storage service that allows you to store snapshots in the cloud (it uses AWS), but I used local storage.
All things considered, IMILAB video doorbell is a great choice if you want a wireless video doorbell with good picture quality and local storage. The doorbell will retail for $139, but since it’s still publicly funded, you can get it for $99.