Netatmo's Outdoor Security Camera Is Fully Weatherproof

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Netatmo's Presence outdoor security camera looks like a lamp, but hides a Wi-Fi security camera with night vision and microphone.

French smart-home-gadget maker Netatmo today (Nov. 2) debuted the Presence, an outdoor security camera that's meant to not look like a security camera.

Credit: Netatmo

(Image credit: Netatmo)

The Presence is a bit steeply priced at $300, especially compared to the $199 Nest Cam Outdoor and the recently announced $199 Canary Flex.

But unlike with those two, you won't need to pay for a cloud-storage subscription — the Presence stores video either on the customer's own Dropbox account or on an internal microSD card. (A 16GB class 10 card is included, and the Presence supports cards of up to 32GB capacity.)

MORE: Best Wireless Home Security Cameras

The Presence's camera has a 4-megapixel CMOS and a 100-degree field of view that delivers up to 1080p video resolution. Its 12-watt floodlight is dimmable, and its night vision is good up to 50 feet from the camera.

The lamp/camera is powered by the house wiring available in the outdoor light fixture, and the camera's electronic innards have been coated with the waterproof material HZO.

Customers can program the Presence and watch live or recorded video through the Netatmo mobile app on iOS (8 and up), Android (4.3 and later) and Apple's watchOS, or from a desktop browser. The Presence supports 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi on the 2.4GHz band, but won't connect to public networks.

Credit: Netatmo

(Image credit: Netatmo)

Like its older sibling, the Netatmo Welcome indoor security camera, the Presence supports IFTTT "recipes" to interact with other gadgets and software, and also works with Netatmo's "tags," battery-powered door and windows sensors.

But unlike the Welcome, the Presence's motion-detection can't recognize faces to distinguish one individual from another; instead, it simply tells whether a moving object is a person, animal or vehicle.

We're currently testing the Netatmo Presence and will have a full review shortly.

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Paul Wagenseil
Paul Wagenseil

Paul Wagenseil is a senior editor at Tom's Guide focused on security and privacy. He has also been a dishwasher, fry cook, long-haul driver, code monkey and video editor. He's been rooting around in the information-security space for more than 15 years at FoxNews.com, SecurityNewsDaily, TechNewsDaily and Tom's Guide, has presented talks at the ShmooCon, DerbyCon and BSides Las Vegas hacker conferences, shown up in random TV news spots and even moderated a panel discussion at the CEDIA home-technology conference. You can follow his rants on Twitter at @snd_wagenseil.