Eufy S340 Solocam review: Double security

The Eufy S340 is a beast of an outdoor security camera, boasting two lenses, 360-degree coverage, and on-device recording. 

It also comes with a solar panel in the box, which can keep the camera’s battery running for months on end.

Whether you’re after a security camera to give you peace of mind about your home’s security, or want a device to keep an eye on your pets while you’re at work, the S340 Solocam will do the job well.

Eufy S340 Solocam review: Design

At first glance, the S340 seems like a fairly bulky camera unit. The large, circular lens system sits below a white body, and the combined unit has some serious heft to it. It’s about 12 cm tall, about 8 cm wide and deep and weighs just under 1.2 kg. 

When you consider that this security camera boasts two lenses with a 3x optical zoom function, 360-degree pan and tilt and 8 GB of onboard storage, the size, and bulk suddenly seems very reasonable.

Installing the camera is fairly straightforward. The included bracket lets you mount the camera on a wall or upside down from your eaves in a fairly straightforward manner. 

The only real challenge I faced was finding a location that gave me the coverage I wanted, with the ability to connect to the included solar panel.

While the pictures on the box show the solar panel directly connected to the top of the camera unit, installing it under the eaves meant using a cable to connect the solar panel. 

Specs and software

Eufy has doubled down on dual lens home security products. The S350 indoor camera uses the twin lenses to make it look like a friendly robot, and the E340 dual cam solo video doorbell uses the second lens to look for packages left below the camera.

With the S340 Solocam, You get a 3K resolution on the main camera with a 135-degree field of view and 2K resolution on the telephoto lens. The camera offers up to 8x hybrid digital zoom or 3x optical zoom, and the app will show both lenses concurrently.

It offers Eufy’s AI motion tracking, so it will automatically follow a human subject detected in its field of view. 

There’s 8 GB of internal storage on board, which is enough for about 4 hours of footage. If you need more, you can integrate it with the HomeBase S380, which delivers additional features like facial recognition and an extra 16 TB of storage. I didn’t get to test the Homebase integration for this review, however.

The internal storage means that you don’t need to fork out for a subscription to keep your recordings. So long as there’s storage on the device, you can access what is recorded. 

The downside of this is that the camera doesn’t offer 24/7 coverage, or NAS backups. It will only record what you manually tell it to, or when it detects motion.

The S350 also supports night vision, both in black and white, and in colour thanks to the on-board light. 

Eufy S340 Solocam review: Performance

The video quality is great. The combination of a 3K and a 2K zoom camera gives you plenty of detail in your security footage, with decent colour reproduction as well. 

The night vision is also nice and clear. I particularly like the colour night vision setting, which switches on an LED light to illuminate the area and record in colour. It does put a reasonable dent in the S340’s battery life, though.

Controlling the camera from the app is fairly easy. You can pan and tilt the camera around 360 degrees easily, and zooming to 3x is quick too. You can choose to watch both lenses at the same time, or focus on one.

But, just like with the S350 indoor cam, I found some features difficult to find in the app. Controlling notifications was a bit of a challenge, as was cycling through the preset positions to monitor that I’d set up in the app.

I also wanted to recognise the fact the Solocam offers a speaker and two-way audio connection. After returning from a weekend away and failing to disarm the Solocam, I was surprised when the alarm started wailing at me when I walked into my backyard.

It probably wasn’t loud enough to scare the crap out of me, but it would certainly be enough to encourage me to move on if I had been snooping around with nefarious intent.

Battery performance

A quick shout out to the bundled solar panel with the S350 Solocam. This inclusion means that you effectively don’t have to worry about the camera’s battery life at all.

Eufy claims that two hours of sunlight a day will keep the camera running forever. 

Over the month or so I’d been testing the camera, the camera’s battery dropped from 100% to about 80%, but there were several terrible days with storms and rain in there.

Even without the solar panel, Eufy says the camera will last about 3 months. That’s probably enough to make it worthwhile, but given the camera needs to be installed at a height where changing or charging the battery becomes a hassle, the solar panel is pretty essential.

Eufy S340 Solocam review: Verdict

I’m increasingly convinced that home security is about setting up an ecosystem of products that connect to provide a holistic approach to security.

Eufy’s products aim to deliver that. Through its Security app, you can get a view of your entire home’s security based on the different products you have installed.

The Solocam S340 gives you high-quality footage with 360 degree coverage. Intelligent software means it will track human intruders, and send notifications or set off alarms, depending on the security mode you’ve chosen.

I would love for the app to be refined a bit to make it easier to control the various elements of the camera and ecosystem, though. 

Buy the Eufy S340 Solocam online

Eufy S340 Solocam

The Eufy S340 Solocam uses twin lenses, 8GB of onboard storage and a dedicated solar panel to keep your home secure all day, every day.

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