Wyze Cam Pan Review – Spin me right round baby

This Wyze Cam Pan review covers the 1080p security camera from Wyze, which I have to say, quite loudly, is an incredible security camera all loaded into an affordable package! ? Kapow!

Update – new person detection is now possible with the Wyze Cam Pan. It allows the camera to identify if a person is on the camera. This is a pretty cool feature which also includes the ability to search footage based on the identification via person recognition using AI. It’s not weird when it’s in your own home, right? 😉

If you already own a Wyze Cam Pan you can update the firmware and this feature is included at no cost. Bonus.

I always feel like I’ve made good decisions on my smart home and security hardware when you continue to get firmware updates for the life of the product.

Wyze Cam Pan Smart Assistant Integrations

The Wyze Cam Pan integrates with:

• Amazon Alexa
• Google Assistant

This means you can speak to your smart assistant and ask it to show you where ever the camera is. e.g. ‘Alexa, show me the lounge’ or ‘Hey Google, show my the front door’.

If you have an echo Show or Home unit with a screen then you will see the camera view live-streamed to the device.

Plus IFTTT

I think it’s also worth noting the Cam Pan has IFTTT integration. This options up lots of options. While this camera doesn’t directly connect into my abode security system, I can make it all work together in an acceptable and very workable solution.

Wyze Cam Pan Features

The Wyze Cam Pan has features to burn. This is where you start to wonder how they can sell the Cam Pan, or any of their cameras at this low price. It has the ability to rotate 110° per second. That looks something like this (not 100% accurate):

Your probably wondering, with a name like Cam Pan, how much this camera pans and cams. For starters the camera has a 360° horizontal view and a 93° vertical view.

The Wyze Cam Pan camera can show you a 360° view of a room in less than 3 seconds.

This means you can pan the camera, tilt the camera and zoom on the camera remotely. This allows a full 360° view all around with remote control access.

You can pinch zoom on the app to zoom in up to 8x on the camera. This is a significant zoom in considering the size of the average room you’ll have the camera in.

The way the scanning works is that it rotates, or swivels, between 4 customizable points or positions. At each point, it pauses and records for 10 seconds and then moves on to the next point. It cycles through these 4 points.

HD and SD recording options – if for whatever reason you don’t have the bandwidth or need for full 1080p HD you can step down the quality to SD quality.

Like the Ring Doorbell and many other home security cameras, you can do live view with the camera. With this feature, you can also choose clips to record and take still images & photos.

Motion tracking & detection allows you to set the camera to follow any motion it detects. If you don’t want this feature you can turn this off (It could get annoying if you have the camera in a room like a lounge to have the camera following you around).

As the camera records and cycles through its 4 set recording positions, or motion following setting, it also marks motion in the footage as it records. This means if you want to review and jump between footage on the camera as you review it you can move quickly between sections of footage that show movement.

It is possible to set notifications in the app for motion & movement also. So if you want to know when something moves in the camera’s view, you can get a notification to alert you. Similar to the Ring or arlo doorbell.

Another notification feature is to say ‘Only alert me if there is motion or sound detected between these hours of the day’. It’s little touches like this that make the Cam Pan so flexible and feature-rich, again, for less than a dinner out!

You can also customise the motion tracking and recording settings to record only if motion is detected in a certain area of the camera’s view.

The challenge with having an always-on recording camera is having hours and hours of footage to review. The motion tagging in the footage helps move through this quickly.

Similar to the new update to Amazon’s Alexa, the Wyze Cam Pan can use its built-in microphone to detect the typical frequencies of smoke alarms and CO monitors.

For recording, there is an SD card option that allows you to record to the local SD flash drive. I’m too lazy to bother with that feature and prefer to opt for the cloud storage option. This is managed securely on amazon’s AWS cloud storage network. The same one half the enterprise systems of the world use (NASA, Netflix, Slack etc).

By now you should be getting a positive vibe throughout this Wyze Cam Pan review. It’s really quite a powerhouse of features.

Standard Features

Standard features include:

• 2 Way Audio – speak and listen to and from the camera
• Night vision – when the lights go out (6 infrared LEDs)
• Motion alerts
• Sound Alerts
• 14 Day Free Cloud Storage – this is a rolling 14 days.
• Continuous recording (SD Card not included. Online storage only includes detected clips – free for up to 14 days)

Wyze Cam Pan connectivity

The Wyze, like most all of the Wyze cameras, uses the 2.4GHz WiFi frequency to operate. Important note: it does not work on a 5GHz bandwidth on your home network. So don’t buy this and expect to be able to free up the 2.4GHz and put it on the 5GHz.

Wyze Cam Pan app

The app is available from the Android store and Apple iTunes app store. You’re going to need this to work the camera and leverage all its great features.

Cam Pan Power

No batteries here people. This comes packaged with a 6-foot power cable/adaptor. 6 foot isn’t huge in terms of reach to remote areas but most everyone is going to have a power socket within 6 feet of placement of the camera position. Uses a micro USB cable 

If you decide to mount the camera to the wall or similar, which is completely possible, then consider the power supply when doing so, and before drilling holes in walls!

Indoor Only

The camera is designed for indoor use only.

Wyze Cam Pan Review Summary

Follow your pets while your out of the house, secure your house, watch your goldfish from your desk at work. The Wyze Cam Pan is an incredible value-for-money security camera. While it’s not perfect and may require the odd reboot from time to time, for the money, features and quality it’s an A+ buying choice.

If you need 100% uptime with military-grade quality and precision, you’re probably overthinking it, but perhaps an affordable camera like this isn’t for you. I have the Ring Doorbell 2 on my front door and even that, for a lot more money, has its own quirks and frustrations – like slow app loading speeds etc.

You don’t have to pay a fortune in online storage fees. The 14 days free is plenty in my opinion.

See more reviews on the Wyze Cam Pan

Wyze Cam Pan FAQ

This post was last updated on 2023-03-21 / Some images from Amazon Product API & some links may be affiliate links which may earn us a commission from purchases.