WYZE V3 isn't worth much when outside

I have two WYZE V3 cameras. The one for outside is very disappointing. I found out very early on that the “Night Vision Mode” is pretty useless because all it does is cause one to sift through hours of bug videos in the morning. So the night vision mode is turned off. So much for that capability being of any use.

Daytime use is just as useless. I’ve already pared the detection area down to about a third of the available area by eliminating areas that might have anything that might move in the wind, and played with the sensitivity settings. However shadows from clouds still cause the camera to record so I’m still having to sift though hours of nothing. Setting the sensitivity to 1 or 100 doesn’t seem to eliminate the problem!

What does seem to work is limiting the alerts to only when people and vehicles are detected. If you can do that why can’t you do that for recording as well??

The bugs are actually attracted to the IR lights in the face. One remedy to lower the number of motion activations because of bugs would be to install an IR flood lamp away from the cam but illuminating the target field of view. Then, turn the Night Vision On and the IR lamps Off. The bugs would be attracted away from the cam and because the IR source is not illuminating the space between the cam face and the bug, they would show very little light pixelation change.

You can. You have 2 options

  1. Use the funnel filter in the Events Tab to set Motion to Off. This will then only show you the Smart AI events you have checked on the cams you have checked. Only AI events will show in the Events tab.

2. Just like you turned off Motion Only Notifications, turn off Detects Motion in the Event Recording but leave your Smart AI Event Recording on. Then, only AI event recordings will be saved to the Events tab.

You will still get bug vids that tag as people and pets though. Just not as many.

EDIT: Thanks for the nudge @Omgitstony! I tried the second one on a couple cams and it didn’t work so good.

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If you are referencing the cloud event storage when you say “recording”, you still need the videos that the camera detects as “motion” to be uploaded to the cloud. The AI analyses the video once it is uploaded to the cloud then tags it with recognized objects then notifies you based on those tags and your notification settings. you can use the “#1” that @SlabSlayer mentioned to only show the tagged videos, and hide the motion only ones.

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Are you confusing night vision with the starlight sensor? If you want no bugs and color night vision then turn off the night vision setting so it will use the starlight sensor.

The “starlight sensor” is the image sensor within the camera, it is used wither the camera is in the traditional night vision mode or when night vision mode is disabled (color at night or color at low light mode). It improves the camera picture in all low light situations.

I have 16 outdoor V3’s and when setup properly they work okay.
Cam Plus will eliminate ALL the bugs events in notifications and filtering of events log.

Np. Yea, “detects motion” needs to be enabled or there will be no cloud events to be analyzed/tagged/viewed.

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:+1: One would think that, with that toggler off, the Smart AI toggles would also turn off and be disabled since they are directly dependant on it being on… But alas, no. They stay green and able to be toggled uselessly.

Then again, one would also think that being able to turn off thousands of cloud motion only storage events in favor of only AI event storage would be financially beneficial to the Wyze AWS bill, as was an issue in the past. But who am I to introduce logic. Silly me :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:.

The app is so not intuitive.

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The bare events must be uploaded to be AI evaluated. After which they remain on your account in case they were misinterpreted.

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Yeah, I understand that event video must be uploaded to be evaluated. Which is why I mistakenly thought the event video still would be uploaded given the Smart AI toggles remain fully engaged and able to be manipulated even with the detects motion toggle off. I mistakenly deduced that these two functions were not interdependent since their toggle controls are also not interdependent. My logic was misled by yet another poorly designed App UI oversight. If the Detects Motion toggles off, the Smart AI should be fully disabled. It shouldn’t remain active.

However, if I choose to use an “off” toggle to not save motion only events, that’s my choice and they get dumped immediately and have no cloud storage footprint. I brought this feature up when the CPL AWS storage cost rollout was being discussed because, again, I thought that is what the toggles we’re indicating would actually happen (:point_up:).

Imagine the storage savings if it only stored the videos I actually want to see: The Smart AI, and I told it to dump the thousands upon thousands of motion only videos.

Or, is it that Wyze also does not trust their own AI accuracy and needs to have those videos because it WILL miss something?

Neither do I - I turned it all off months ago and rely on “all other motion” events.

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