Arlo Ultra 2 Spotlight Camera | 2 Camera Security System | Wire-Free, 4K Video & HDR | Color Night Vision, 2-Way Audio, 6-Month Battery Life | Compatible with Alexa | VMS5240-200NAS, White

system works great ,Great picture quality and very sensitive, they dont like the cold ,cold weather but when it warms up they come back on,,,GREAT

TLDR: Setup and configuration is a real pain. iOS app is clunky and confusing to use. Arlo support is egregiously poor. Cameras work well with some limitations once you get past the installation issues.I purchased both an Arlo Ultra 2 two camera set and an Arlo Pro 4 three camera set. Both camera sets connect via the Arlo base station (VMB5000) that came with the Ultra 2 set rather than using the Pro 4 option to connect direct to my house WiFi. This is a combined review for the two sets.You should keep in mind as you read this review that I am a computer programmer with 50 years experience and extremely well versed in dealing with complicated technical issues. The Arlo cameras are among the most frustrating gear I have ever set up. I think a non-technical person would have given up long ago.The good news is that once I got the cameras set up properly they did a reasonable job of fulfilling their intended purpose of showing me videos from around my property. The daytime video is quite good. Nighttime video can be dark and blurry (even if I switch to black and white mode). I am wary of what will happen when the three month trial of Arlo's web based services runs out. I am trusting that my cameras will continue to work locally without problems when the trial period is up.Pairing the cameras to the base station was very difficult - they simply refused to pair despite multiple tries. I finally tracked that down to a probable Wi-Fi conflict with my existing house Wi-Fi. Since there is no way to modify the Wi-Fi channel that the Arlo uses it was necessary to change the Wi-Fi channel in my house provided by my network access point. I had to imagine this as a possibility and then check it with a WiFi diagnostic program on a laptop. Arlo does not document what WiFi channels are used or give you any control over channels.Also regarding WiFi, you should plan on some physical separation between your house WiFi access point and the Arlo base station. I got poor connections to cameras (probable WiFi interference again) before I relocated the base station away from my access point.The Ultra 2 camera set was shipped with one only one wall mounting bracket in the box instead of the promised two on the outside of the box. The camera is useless without a wall mounting bracket. Amazon was kind enough to issue me a gift certificate to purchase a second wall mount. The wall mount provided with the Ultra 2 is greatly inferior to that which comes with the Pro 4 camera. With the wall mount from the Ultra 2 camera, it is fairly easy to steal the camera. The wall mounts from the Pro 4 camera provide better theft protection. I would advise using better mounts for the Ultra 2 (which require a special tool to disconnect the camera). This is the good mount:https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B086WPRYBY?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_detailsThe cameras must be installed with an app on your cell phone. I used an iPhone. Don't know what someone would do if they don't have a cell phone. The cell phone app is clunky and confusing to use. The menu structure of the iOS app is very arcane, and important settings are randomly strewn throughout the app and are difficult to find. Finding the setting to reduce audio sensitivity was critical because wind noise triggered constant audio alerts at the default setting. Even after lowering the audio sensitivity there were too many alerts and I had to shut them off. It took me a long time to find the setting to shut off the blue LED on the camera, which lights when the battery is fully charged. I looked for days for the setting for smart animal detection before I found it with the help of the Arlo forum.The app tries to automatically detect people, animals, and cars. Particularly in the case of a car or a fast moving cat, the detected object is mostly gone from view before the camera starts recording.All of the internal settings on the base station are locked down and cannot be changed. Unlike most Internet of Things controllers there is no way to access an internal base station webpage to view or change any settings. Such a settings page would have been quite useful when setting up the cameras. The base station responds to pings, but that seems to be it. Because one has no access to the base station settings, one cannot view or change the WiFi password thus eliminating the possibility of setting up a WiFi extender to help cameras stay in range of the base station. This means that Arlo gets to sell you a second base station if you have WiFi range issues. Also, be aware that since the internal base station settings can't be accessed, you MUST have a working DHCP server in your network.I am able to view the camera's feed on my computer with a standard browser pointed at my.arlo.com. Be forewarned that this does not work with all browsers due to the video encoding used by Arlo. I had the best luck with Microsoft Edge. I am trying to get it to work with Firefox (my preferred browser) via an extension that allows opening the video in VLC Media Player, but so far haven't been able to get that to work. I am concerned whether the capability to view videos on the web will disappear when the trial period is up. That would be a loss.Battery life could be a problem. On first installation, one of the batteries ran down after one day. The other batteries seem better, but I doubt they will last the advertised length of 3-6 months.Charging the batteries was a problem. I used the separate external charger provided with the Pro 4 series to initially charge all batteries. That worked fine. But it was difficult to get the batteries to charge when the batteries are installed in a camera in the mounting housing using the supplied charging cable and power adapter. I purchased long cables to plug the cameras into wall sockets and solar panels to charge the cameras that aren't near wall sockets so that the camera batteries can be charged without removing them from where they are mounted. But the batteries would not charge in the housings. A kind soul on the Arlo forum solved this issue for me. It is necessary to grip the camera with both hands and press quite hard with both thumbs on the camera to the side of the lens to lock the camera into place so the charging contacts make sufficient contact. The cameras are now charging nicely, plugged into either the wall or a solar charger.I tried to install a memory card in the VMB5000 base station that came with the Ultra 2 set. I stupidly put the card in backwards and it got jammed in there. Cost me $40 at a camera shop to get it extracted. Don't make this mistake! Once I reinstalled the memory card correctly, the base station recognized it but would not format it. I was only able to format the memory card by using the Arlo website (my.arlo.com) instead of the local iOS app. After formatting the card, I went through all of the steps to enable local recording. I spent over an hour on chat with Arlo trying to determine if videos were actually saved locally. Chat informed me that to view local videos one selects Feed in the Arlo app. When I selected Feed I still saw all of the cloud videos from the last several days. There is no indication in Feed about whether one is viewing a cloud video or a local video. This is a serious User interface omission. The only indication that I may be recording locally is that the base station settings tell me that some of the space on the memory card has been used. But I don't know if Feed is showing me videos from local storage or from the cloud. I want to know this before my trial period with Arlo is over and cloud storage disappears. Chat was unable to help me on this. Numerous contacts with Arlo support on this issue have been useless, failing even to get me a consistent (but wrong) answer. I am thoroughly fed up with Arlo support. If you are the kind of customer who will need a lot of support, Arlo is not for you.Update 2/25/23: Regarding viewing videos in Firefox, I was never able to get this work. But I did find a neat Firefox add-on called Open in MS-Edge. When taken by a link to a video in Firefox, one click on the add-on button opens the video in MS Edge where it works fine. Neat solution!Update 4/19/23: After months of back and forth with Arlo tech support, there is still no resolution to being able to view locally stored recordings. Arlo tech support continues to be the worst I have ever encountered. Downgrading to one star.

CVR not available on local SD card, only in the cloud, through a subscription. This is critical in a monitoring system, so two stars less. The battery in my case has lasted about 1 month, this varies according to the amount of movements detected and the desired image quality, it is not a critical point in my opinion. The motion detector is also not good. There is considerable delay between motion detection and the start of recording. Often it is not possible to see the movement that activated the recording.Update: After testing the product for 1 year... Batteries last 1 to 2 weeks. Motion recording always delayed. Sometimes the recording event has already ended and it is not possible to see what activated the recording. Another important point, it is not possible to access the SD card recordings in a web browser, only through the manufacturer's app. I do not recommend this product.

Out 6 systems I’ve owned this is the best

As a consumer product, this is not an install and forget product. I have 6 cameras and a full 4K subscription. My cameras are configured with 4k and reasonable settings. The battery won’t last more than a month so plan on a powered system. Every day I need to verify that each camera can be played. A couple of times a week I need to reboot the base system to get the camera to reconnect. The cameras are all within 50ft of the base unit. I’ve also had one one camera refuse to charge when it gets near freezing. I swapped batteries and tried to self help. That unit won’t charge at all now. Regrettably when I finally contacted support they didn’t want to review any diagnostics to see the problems started way before the end of the warranty period. Maybe they can’t but as a software architect I doubt that ability wasn’t built into the system. Either way, they won’t help. So for all those reasons I simply can’t believe there aren’t better solutions available and probably for less money. Certainly better value solutions have to exist.