11 hours ago
TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit review: Crisp video and everlasting power
Video: 3840 x 2160, 15fpsField of view: 105 degreesSensor: 8MPNight vision: Infrared and color night visionWireless: 2.4 GHz/5 GHz Wi-Fi 4Weather Resistance: IP65Power: 10,000mAh battery, integrated solar panelWorks with: Google Home, Alexa
While the best home security cameras are certainly getting better, 4K cameras can still be a little pricey. TP-Link, however, is helping bring down the price, with the new TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit, which essentially combines the Tapo VistaCam 360 with a solar panel for continuous power.
When you combine it all, you get a 4K security camera that costs less with the solar panel than many cameras do alone. But does TP-Link cut too many corners to get there? I used the TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit for a few weeks to find out.
The TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit is available right now from Amazon for $169.99. It only comes in one colorway – white. If you don't need the solar panel, you can get the camera itself in the form of the TP-Link Tapo C560WS for $99, but I wasn't able to find a place to actually buy it.
The TP-Link Tapo C660 kit doesn't necessarily break any boundaries in terms of design, but it also looks perfectly fine. All of the components have a white plastic body, with the front of the camera and solar panel coming in black. The solar panel and camera attach to a base plate that you'll screw into a wall or other surface for mounting the hardware.
Like other 360-degree cameras with a solar panel, it's certainly not small or overly subtle, but it's not super bulky either. It's noticeable once installed, but for most that won't be a big deal.
On the bottom of the camera can be found a rubber door that hides a microSD card slot for local storage, a reset button, and a power button. The system is also IP65-rated, meaning that it should be able to withstand all but the most extreme of weather conditions.
Installing the camera and solar panel is a relatively simple affair when following the instructions in the box. You'll start by mounting the base plate to wherever you want everything to be installed. Then you'll slot the camera onto the base and screw the solar panel into its mount. Then simply plug the solar panel into the camera's USB-C port, which is located on the bottom.
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It's worth thinking about the location you want to mount the camera before you mount the baseplate though. Don't assume that just because you can pan and tilt the camera that it will be easy to get a good view of the entire space you want to monitor. TP-Link recommends mounting it at least 8 feet in the air. Indeed, at lower heights its view was a little limited, and I was unable to tilt it higher to get a better look at my backyard. The camera can't tilt up, so its view when pointed horizontally is as high as you can see with it – it's designed to look down from high up, not the other way around.
To set the camera up in the Tapo app, you'll need to make sure you first follow the instructions that come in the box. I did not do this and only followed the instructions in the app, which didn't tell me to press the power button to turn the camera on. Some cameras automatically switch on when you plug in a power source, and given the fact that the LED light blinked a few times when I plugged the solar panel in, I thought that the camera was on just fine.
On the contrary, after some troubleshooting, I found that I hadn't actually switched the camera on at all, and upon reading the instructions in the box, I realized that a tiny, barely labelled button under the rubber door was a power button that had to be pressed. Even though the instructions say to press the power button, I still think the app should walk through the full process, including pressing the power button too.
The app notes that users shouldn't point the camera at 'swaying trees,' 'vehicles and pedestrians' and 'street lamps and sunlight,' which all seems a little ridiculous. I personally wouldn't worry too much – it's difficult to avoid trees when you're installing an outdoor camera. If you find that you get lots of notifications related to the trees, you can set up motion zones to avoid it.
After actually turning the camera on, the app easily found it and added it to my account. You'll get a few setup options at the beginning, like selecting motion sensitivity based on your movement within your space. The entire installation and setup process only took me around 15 or 20 minutes, which isn't bad.
The VistaCam 360 that comes in the TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit offers a 4K resolution with a 105-degree field-of-view. True to the high resolution, footage looked great. It was generally crisp and detailed, and allowed me to easily see finer details like pieces of mulch in my backyard. That may not be all that helpful – but the good detail translates to being able to capture things like number plates, faces, and other larger text, from further away. It also means that if you want to zoom in (the camera supports up to 18x digital zoom), you'll get a more detailed view than you would on a lower-resolution image.
The color reproduction was solid too. Colors certainly weren't as vibrant as what you might get from a smartphone or better camera, but for the purpose of security cameras, image quality was more than vibrant enough. The camera doesn't support HDR, so you might find you run into some issues if you have dark shadows right next to bright sunlight, but I didn't run into any issues like that in my testing and with my positioning.
The low light-performance was pretty good too. The camera supports color night vision with a built-in spotlight, but you can also opt to use its infrared sensor instead. In both cases, it detected motion reasonably quickly, however in both cases I also found that it didn't necessarily capture ultra-crisp images. Image quality was still perfectly fine, and it was easy to make out what was happening, but it wasn't quite as crisp as the Reolink Altas PT Ultra, another 4K camera with color night vision support.
Still, that's certainly not to say that it was low-quality. Footage looked good, in both well-lit and poorly-lit environments. Audio wasn't bad either. I was able to have a conversation through two-way audio, and I could hear the other person perfectly fine in both cases. It gets loud enough for its purpose.
The motion-tracking on offer by the camera worked well. It was pretty responsive, and tracked me moving at fast-walking speeds. I definitely could outrun it, but that's not uncommon. The camera returns to position after tracking motion too, which is surprisingly something that not all do — it's one of our chief complaints with the Eufy C220, for instance.
The TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit works through TP-Link's own Tapo app, but it also integrates with Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Through those connections, you'll be able to see live footage and access some controls with voice. Unfortunately, there's no Apple Home support, and without camera support in the Matter spec, no way to add the camera to other ecosystems without complicated workarounds.
Thankfully, the Tapo app works quite well. On the main screen of the app, you'll see tiles showing your Tapo devices, and you can then tap on one to access a live feed and settings. Unfortunately, you can't have camera snapshots in the main screen, so to see anything through the camera, you'll need to tap into it. Other tabs in the app include dedicated tabs for Camera, Vacuums, and a 'Smart' tab that suggests automations.
From the camera's settings, you can jump straight into two-way audio, turn the built-in spotlight on and off, and pan or tilt the camera. One neat feature is that you can set up so-called 'Viewpoints,' or positions for the camera that you can then quickly access without having to manually pan and tilt each time. You can then use those views in automations – so you could have the camera automatically point at a gate to your backyard at night, and at your plants during the day. There's also a patrol mode that has the camera move between your set positions, however the app warns that this may impact the lifespan of the motor.
Features like Viewpoints are handy additions for pan/tilt cameras, but not all features are really set up for cameras that can move. You can set up motion detection zones, but when you move the camera view, those detection zones move with it – meaning they're set to detect motion in places that might not make sense. Perhaps a way around this would be to have the camera stitch footage together for the purpose of setting up motion zones. Regardless, the way it works now doesn't really make much sense for a camera that's designed to move.
That said, the detection features are generally robust. You can set up different detection types (motion, person, pet, and vehicle) for different detection zones, and the camera is able to track motion automatically.
One of the best things about this camera in particular is the fact that it supports local storage – so if you don't want to subscribe to a cloud plan, you don't have to. There's a microSD card slot built right into the bottom of the camera, and you can insert cards up to 512GB – which TP-Link says is enough for around 16 complete days of recording. Additionally, you can password-protect the microSD card in the Tapo app, which is handy.
If you prefer, of course, you can still subscribe to a plan. The Tapo Care plan costs around $3.49 per month, per device, however at the time of this writing you could get a 10-device subscription for $11.99 per month (discounted from $34.99 per month). If you pay yearly, you'll get a bit of a discount (16% at the time of this writing). That equates to $34.99 per year for a single device, or up to $119.99 per year for up to 10 devices.
The subscription includes 30 days of encrypted video storage for events, rich notifications, video summaries, and so on. These are all common features for cloud plans, and it's common to not get access to them without one.
The TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit is a good option for those who want 360-degree pan/tilt support and a 4K resolution. However, it has some seriously tough competition, even in this price range, from the likes of the Reolink Altas PT Ultra. The Reolink camera also has a 4K resolution, supports actual continuous recording with a solar panel, and has a slightly wider field-of-view. On top of that, it has slightly more versatile positioning, and still works with Alexa and Google Home.
For most users, the Reolink model is probably the slightly better option. That said, the TP-Link Tapo C660 Kit is still a solid security camera with a versatile app and helpful features, and if you already have Tapo devices and want to use them all in the same app, you're certainly not getting a sub-par product by buying the C660 Kit.
