D-Link DCS-2670L Full HD Outdoor WiFi Camera Review

The D-Link DCS-2670L is a full HD outdoor wireless camera, that’s IP65 rating so it will be protected from the rain and even dust floating around the air. It retails for around £149, and can produce some really sharp images, but has some very glaring issues with the partner mydlink Lite app. But like with any of our reviews, let’s start from the beginning, the setup.

Setup was rather painless despite looking inside the box and almost giving up immediately. The hardest part I had was actually channeling the cables through the wall. Coming from the camera is one cable which then splits into two: one for power, and the other for Ethernet. It has an Ethernet port for wired connection to the network, although does work wirelessly too.

The camera sits on a small plastic plate, which needs to be mounted in a position of your choice. For me, it’s mounted upside-down on the roof of my garage giving a decent view of my house’s back door and garden. The camera features a full 360° mount, so once it was secured in place, all I needed to do was look at the live view inside the app and move it until I was happy with the angle.

Setup on the app side was the tricky part, and compared to other cameras we’ve reviewed like the EXVIZ Husky ended up becoming quite an annoyance. It took several, very painful attempts to get the camera to speak to my wireless network. There are two options for setting up a camera inside the app, being ‘local’ or ‘remote’. I had to choose remote, as I understand using the local camera feature is for cameras on the wired network.

The biggest problem I had was the app recognising any wireless networks in the area. None were showing up on the app which I found very strange and frustrating. After several attempts, I eventually managed to get networks to appear, but it was a lot of stop start. Also, power cuts at the home made the app forget the camera, which saw me having to set the camera up each time. Very annoying that the app can’t remember devices attached to the network.

Once setup however, I could access the camera pretty easily using the mydlink Lite app. I can see a live view, take stills or video recordings and set alert notifications for things like movement and sound detection. The camera can record footage in full HD, and for the most part, it looks pretty sharp. Faces can be pulled out pretty seamlessly. There’s even infrared for night time shots which again came out pretty sharp for the most part, although the position of my camera means that hot and cold air collide very quickly, causing fog on the lens. That’s my fault though.

For the most part, the sound and movement detection works, although sound is very sensitive, I was getting notifications constantly due to the little animals that run across the stones in my garden, or my cat, constantly setting off the camera. I turned it off and relied on motion only which I set to an 80% sensitivity. The default 30% is rather useless to be honest with you. There’s around a two second delay if you’re using live view which is pretty decent, but a problem is the fact that the app won’t send you a notification right away, which is a problem if you’re trying to put off burglars breaking into your home. There is two way VoIP so you can shout at whoever you see sneaking around your property, but unfortunately you probably won’t know they’re there until around 30 minutes after they’ve visited as the notification takes so long to come through.

The lens is a massive 180° giving it a huge wide angle look, perfect for protecting a large area. One HUGE thing missing from the app though is the ability to set timed notifications. Someone works at my home pretty much all day, so I don’t really need to activate the camera then. I would like to have the ability to set my camera’s detection settings to kick in from around 11pm until around 6am in the morning, but I can’t. A bit of a blow to the app.

What is nice however is the fact you don’t need to sign up to any kind of cloud subscription services. Everything is either saved to your mobile device or the microSD card which you can buy separately.

What’s frustrating is that the D-Link DCS-2670L Full HD Outdoor WiFi Camera is actually quite a stunning product with beautifully sharp images. The partner app though I would safely say needs a lot of work. I’m not the most experienced with outdoor smart CCTV products, but it’s safe to say that other cameras I have used, like the EZVIZ Husky are just so much more innovative with what their apps can do. If D-Link sorts their app out, then I can definitely recommend this to protect your home. Until then, there are much better cameras on the market.