Sticker-Eye Wire-Free AI Smart Home Camera review: Wire free, subscription free, and hassle free

If you’ve ever threaded a couple yards of power cable from an outdoor security camera to an indoor electrical outlet, you’ll understand that the phrase “wire free” can induce giddiness. That’s largely why the Eyecloud’s 100-percent cordless Sticker-Eye was such a Kickstarter success. It’s also mount free (It attaches to surfaces magnetically. Sticker-Eye—get it?) and subscription free, essentially eliminating the biggest pain points associated with owning a home security camera.

None of that would matter much if it had the surveillance skills of a half-blind watchdog once you set it up. Happily, AI technology is Eyecloud’s specialty, and Sticker-Eye has some of the most accurate smart detection we’ve seen.

This review is part of TechHive’s coverage of the best home security cameras. Go there to read reviews of competing products.

Design

Thanks to its magnetic base, the cylindrical camera can be stuck anywhere you have a metal surface. If you don’t have one, a magnetic mount is provided that is easily affixed to wood or masonry with a couple of screws, and you can stick the camera to that. (A theft-proof mount is sold separately for $10.) Indoors, the camera will stand freely on any flat surface, or it can be installed on a wall or ceiling using the magnetic mount or an adhesive sticker if you don’t want to drill any holes.

The Sticker-Eye is powered by a built-in 6000mAh rechargeable battery that should run for up to two months on a charge. When it needs to be recharged, you just pull the camera down and plug it into an outlet. Curiously, Eyecloud supplies a USB-A to USB-C charging cable for this, but not an AC adapter. I had to scare one up from another device.

Eyecloud

The camera has a 130-degree field of view and captures 1080p video. The camera head can be manually tilted to get the optimum viewing angle. Sticker-eye always operates in standby mode, waking only when it detects motion. At that point, its built-in AI analyzes the moving object and, if it identifies it as human, the camera starts recording video and continues until the motions stops. A single video clips lasts from 5 to 30 seconds; if the motion event exceeds 30 seconds, the camera starts a new recording.

This type of AI analysis is typically performed in the cloud, thus requiring the camera owner to pony up for an ongoing subscription to enable it. Sticker-Eye can analyze objects itself, thanks to an embedded Intel chip, allowing all video clips to be stored on board. The camera comes in 8GB and 32GB models, each capable of storing thousands of surveillance clips.

Setup and performance

With Eyecloud having eliminated the most complex installation steps, the bulk of Sticker-Eye’s setup is connecting it to the app and to your Wi-Fi. The app prompts you through the process of logging in to your network and pairing the camera, so most of your effort is spent finding a place to put the Sticker-Eye.

Michael Ansaldo/IDG

Once you have the camera positioned to your liking, you’ll want to configure your alert settings. You access these by tapping the cog icon beneath the Sticker-Eye thumbnail on the devices screen. The Smart Alert options are motion detection, person detection, and facial recognition.

Person detection ignores the movement of trees, vehicles, and animals, so it promises the fewer false alerts than monitoring for general motion. You can also select a detection sensitivity—Sticker-Eye has a slightly hotter setting for indoor monitoring than outdoor—and opt to have the camera’s built-in siren go off when it detects an event.

When the camera recognizes a human, it bounds them in a green box for easy identification in the alert and video clip. You can make these alerts even more useful by activating Facial Detection and uploading photos of up to 20 familiar faces in the app. I added my whole family, and they were identified with 100-percent accuracy. You can choose to receive named notifications when these faces are detected if, for instance, you want to be notified when your children get home from school. Otherwise, you can block notifications of these people to reduce the number of alerts you get.

The video Sticker-Eye captured in my testing was sharp and bright with accurate colors. There was no fisheye distortion or washed-out areas from lamps and sunlight. The camera automatically switches to night-vision mode when it gets dark and provides plenty of illumination and contrast to see clearly in an otherwise unlit area.

Sticker-Eye is rated IP54 for outdoor use, which is significantly less than the IP65 rating most outdoor cameras carry. It means its protected from limited dust ingress and water splashing from any direction. I’d be hesitant to leave this camera outside in a heavy rainstorm. That’s worth considering if you’re in area that experiences very wet seasons.

The Sticker-Eye app

Sticker-Eye’s companion app is as no-nonsense as the camera itself. The live-stream pane is set against a clean white background with aa` toolbar for the camera’s controls along the bottom. Viewing the feed in full-screen mode, the toolbar disappears until you touch the screen.

Michael Ansaldo/IDG

A library of video clips can be accessed from the device screen. Each video is time stamped and labeled with its detection method (person, face, motion). All videos are stored on the camera, but you can download any one to your phone during playback. By default, the library displays all your videos, but you an filter them to see only those automatically recorded by events, manually recorded, or downloaded to your device.

Verdict

It’s rare that any security camera delivers such a friction-free experience, let alone a company’s first product. With Sticker-Eye, Eyecloud has succeeded in giving consumers what they want—an inexpensive camera that’s easy to install and operate, with AI features that actually do what they’re supposed to. I could quibble about the lack of configurable motion zones or Alexa and Google Assistant support, but those can, and likely will be, addressed in future iterations. As it is, Sticker-Eye is an uncommonly good camera worthy of consideration by anyone desiring a simple, reliable home security solution.