Over the last few weeks I’ve been keeping a close eye on things with the little white wireless Synology CC400W Security Camera, here’s how it played out…
Let’s get this out of the way up-front, as it can be off-putting for some. You can’t operate the CC400W ‘stand-alone’ and while it will take up to a 256gb MicroSD card for edge storage, that only lets you record directly to the memory card as a fail-over should your network decide to take a holiday! You’ll get roughly 6 days of footage on a 256gb MicroSD card, so, unless you’ve gone on holidays to the Bahamas, you should have plenty of time to sort your network issues – but no, the Synology CC400W isn’t really built as a stand alone security camera and works best with a Synology NAS running Surveillance Station or a Synology DVA, the deep learning network video recorded. (For this review I’m setup on a Synology DS920+ with a little extra grunt under the hood – 20gb of memory and a 1tb SSD Cache)
The Synology CC400W is an ‘Ai Powered’ camera with embedded smarts, the diminutive camera can detect and tell the difference between people and cars, though I have mine inside and have not tried counting cars with the CC400W yet (Update, I popped it in the window for some tests, see the results in the quick video below), I have tested its detection of people in daylight and low light, and it is very accurate, that’s not at any great distance, but it detects very quickly and hasn’t provided me with any false positive alerts. (The dog triggers it, too, but my dog is like a child, so that’s fine!) The camera can detect intrusions into a space when you setup intrusion detection, for example, I have mine covering the door of my server cupboard, I also store my camera gear and record collection in there (old vinyl, not paperwork) and snacks! So it’s great to have the added security and peace of mind knowing who accesses that space. You can set the CC400W to offer facial and licence plate recognition, but you need it to be paired with the Synology DVA for this to work and I’m afraid I don’t have one of those, sorry!
With detection of people and cars, you can also set things like crowd detection e.g. if people start to gather in a certain area, you might need to open a door or some other scenario. There’s also a loitering detection setting, you can set a time, for example, “if people hang around this door for more than 30 seconds, something’s up!” – Same with cars. Pretty handy stuff!
You can use ‘Instant Search’ and ‘Auto Tracking’ directly from the screen when you’re within the Surveillance Station itself. Auto tracking when people or cars move into view and then following them across the path of the camera, you can also do this within DS Cam (iPhone and Android) Instant Search is for easily searching back through footage (you can specify a date or date range) to find motion from people or cars or just any motion.
The specifications in brief
The CC400W has a 4mp 1/3″ image sensor and a 125 degree field of view from its roughly 2mm focal length f/2.0 lens (nice and fast!) The camera produces a crisp 2k (2560×1440) image, and captures video at 30 frames per second. Lots of numbers here, Simon! – Basically, the camera’s lens is wide enough to cover most rooms when placed in a corner, it has a nice fast aperture, which means it does quite well in low light, though it also has IR, which will essentially let you see about ten meters in the dark! While we’re talking numbers, I was happy to see that the camera operates dual-band wifi, 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz.
The camera has an ingress protection rating of IP65, which is a fancy way of saying it’s happy outside, it’s fine if it gets rained on (from any angle) but if you squirt it directly with a hose, it may die! It’s also dust-proof, so that’s handy as well! I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality when I unpacked the camera, it just feels sturdy – heavy in the hand despite its compact size.
You can see in the photo below the camera has a little slot on the front, that’s because you can 2-way talk through the camera, I’ve tried talking to my dog (it never talks back) and my 11yo only asked where my chocolate was hidden, so I can vouch for its effectiveness. In the black circle surrounding the lens on the front you have IR illuminators that help to light up your scene in the dark, and a small LED indicator below that to let you know different things about the camera, pairing mode etc
With only one small confusing question during setup (You’re asked to log in during the process, and it’s confusing as to who or to where you should be logging in – the NAS, your Synology account, etc… just needs a bit of a description in the user interface in my opinion) but yes, aside from the, the CC400W is a simple to install and operate with great 2K video performance. A few have complained that the power cable doesn’t disconnect from the camera, but it does disconnect from the power supply, so that allows you to fit it through narrow places when running in the power cable to your camera’s location. I also tested the camera on a 20,000 mAh USB battery pack, it last more than a day – so, I guess if you needed to place the camera somewhere random, you certainly could.
For anyone running Surveillance Station, this is a simple, sturdy option for managing your security camera needs.
