TP-Link Tapo C410 KIT Review

Verdict

The Tapo C410 KIT combines an outdoor security camera with a practical solar charging system. As a no-wires solution, it’s far easier to install than a camera that needs mains power, and with careful solar panel placement it should comfortably stay powered year-round.

Unfortunately, its video quality was a little lacking compared to the best, particularly in dim natural light. We also experienced patchy Wi-Fi performance during our tests. It’s a real shame because with better video quality this would be a great choice for a fit-and-forget security system.

Introduction

TP-Link’s Tapo C410 is a battery-powered security camera, designed for outdoor use. It’s also available as the C410 KIT reviewed here, which sees it bundled with a small solar panel, and a flexible mounting system to make sure you can get the best from them both. The camera records 15 frames per second at up to 2K resolution, and has both visible and infrared spotlighting for night recording.

At its £100 suggested retail price this isn’t the cheapest outdoor security camera, but at the time of my review it was discounted to £60, which is very competitive when you consider its features. The camera can recognise people, pets, vehicles and generic movement. Footage is stored on an MicroSD card, which you’ll need to supply, but while you can subscribe for cloud storage and enhanced functions, the standard features should cover you for most circumstances.

Design and installation

• Flexible mounting options
• Reasonably smart design
• Easy to install

The Tapo C410 camera is cylindrical, with a slightly smaller diameter than a tin of beans. On its front panel you’ll find a lens, along with two infrared lights and two small white spotlights. There’s also a microphone and speaker, enabling features like alarms, warning messages and two-way communication.

This camera has two metal mounting points, giving you the choice of connecting it either parallel or perpendicular to a wall, floor or ceiling when using its standard mount. This is fitted with a metal ball-joint, so you can move it to virtually any orientation, then tighten the locking ring to hold it in place.

In the camera’s rubberised rear panel you’ll also find thick bungs covering the MicroSD slot – which supports cards up to 512GB – and a USB power connection. With these closed the camera is IP65 rated, meaning it should withstand any normal weather conditions.

I’m reviewing the C410 KIT, which pairs the C410 with a solar panel and a double mount designed to hold both. You can orientate the camera and solar panel separately, helping you get the optimal amount of sun on the panel while the camera covers the area you want. If that’s just not feasible – for example because the camera needs to be under a shady porch – you can position the two components separately. There’s a 3.8-metre weatherproofed extension cable in the box, so they needn’t even be that close together.

TP-Link says that this camera can stay powered indefinitely with as little as 45 minutes of direct sunlight each day. That may sound like a tall order given that the included solar panel is dinky, and rated at only 2.5 watts – remember that it has to power the camera and keep its 6,400mAh battery charged up. When fully juiced, TP-Link says the battery will last up to 180 days.

With no power or networking to connect, this is one of the easiest surveillance cameras I’ve installed. If you’re using the mount for both camera and panel, you just need to drill three holes and screw it onto the wall – it’s much easier to do this before you actually connect the camera or click the solar panel into place. Alternatively, you can detach the camera mount and position it separately from the solar panel, in which case there are twice as many screws to fit.

While the physical setup was simple, I struggled to get this camera onto my network. Like other Tapo devices, you should simply power it up, check it’s in pairing mode, then add it as a new device through the app, but while the app could see the camera, the camera couldn’t detect any wireless networks, even when placed directly on my router. I was about to conclude I had a faulty sample when it suddenly started working, allowing me to connect and configure it.

With this done, I finished installing the camera outside. It’s important to fit one of the supplied bungs around its USB connection to keep water and dust out of the port, but the instructions for this are a little vague – it took me a couple of attempts before I was happy that the end result was properly waterproofed.

While most other surveillance cameras I’ve tested have coped admirably with the patchy Wi-Fi signal in my garden, the C410 seemed less comfortable. In the app, video playback defaulted to 360p instead of 2K, presumably due to a lack of bandwidth. I was able to change it manually, but at times I wasn’t able to access the camera’s live feed at either resolution. In addition, I couldn’t always view stored recordings.

Features

• Motion and AI-powered object detection with flexible settings
• On-camera storage
• White spotlights and infrared lighting

Many cameras force you into a subscription to unlock their best features, but commendably, Tapo has resisted this route. You can subscribe to Tapo Care, which gives you cloud storage, additional AI features and richer notifications, but the C410’s standard features are likely to cover almost everything else you could want.

I was particularly impressed with this camera’s standard AI and motion detection options. It supports straightforward motion detection; recording or notifying you if anything moves within its 125-degree field of view. Additionally there’s person, pet, and vehicle detection.

While I criticised the TP-Link D230S1 doorbell for its inflexible AI filters, here you can configure things exactly how you want. You can choose to set a single detection zone that applies to all movement and object types, but alternatively you can configure zones individually for each AI-driven alert. This is excellent if you’re pointing the camera towards a busy street, as it helps you filter out, say, trees that are moving in the breeze, but still scan the same area for cars and people. Additionally you can set the sensitivity for each AI alert, although you can’t do so for straightforward movement detection.

At first the legs of my garden chairs fooled the C410 into thinking I’d inherited an extra pet, and the camera would occasionally think that trousers swaying on my washing line were a person. Decreasing the pet sensitivity cured the first problem, while adjusting the human detection area got rid of the second. It’s slightly frustrating that each detection zone can be formed by only four points, limiting you to a four-sided shape. However you can add multiple zones for each category of object, allowing you to cater for more complex environments.

By default, this camera stores footage on an inserted MicroSD card, which isn’t supplied. That’s fine for most applications, but it does open the possibility that an unwelcome guest could steal the camera and cover their tracks. The C410 doesn’t offer ONVIF or RTSP streams that would let you record its output to a surveillance centre, so if you want to cover yourself for this risk you would need to subscribe to Tapo Care.

The C410 KIT offers both infrared and visible white lighting for use at night. By default, it activates the infrared and switches to black and white vision, giving a good compromise between video coverage and battery life. When it detects movement, it’ll turn the visible spotlights on and record in colour. Alternatively you can switch to Colour Mode, which keeps the spotlights lit so you get day-round colour video. You can also adjust the viewing distance, with shorter distances requiring less light and extending the battery life.

This camera’s final significant feature is support for privacy zones, allowing you to mark out areas of the frame that won’t be recorded or monitored. This is ideal if you’d otherwise be causing an invasion of privacy, for example by filming a neighbour’s property.

Video quality and performance

• Longevity via solar charging is a big plus
• Video resolution is sorely lacking
• Low light quality is impressive

I tested the C410 KIT during mostly clear, sunny skies. TP-Link recommends you fully charge it before installing it in the garden, but I wanted to test how quickly it would be topped up by the sun, so I pressed it into service on the 18% charge it arrived with. The results were quite impressive: within two cloudless days the camera had gone past 90% charge, reaching 100% after two further, partially cloudy days.

While these were near-optimal conditions for charging, they suggest that the C410 KIT would at least maintain its charge on lightly clouded days, or with just the occasional blast of full sunlight, provided its solar panel was facing upwards and south. I wasn’t able to test the camera over winter months, but here it would be particularly important to make sure the panel had an unobstructed view of the sun to make the most of shorter days and cloudier conditions.

With the camera showing 99% I removed its connection to the solar panel. After three weeks, covering an occasionally used garden, it had dropped to a 78% state of charge. This suggests that you could get around 15 weeks of use from a full charge even if the solar panel received no light at all. Certainly it’s enough to convince me that the C410 would remain powered year-round, so long as its solar panel was well positioned.

You can get higher resolution security footage than the C410’s 2,304 x 1,296 output, but unfortunately, that’s not this camera’s problem. When I first began testing, it seemed to struggle to resolve fine details of the view, producing far blockier footage than I’d expect from a 2K camera, even in broad daylight. In static parts of the frame, areas of strong contrast developed odd digital artefacts, suggesting the camera was digitally sharpening them. In moving areas video could become quite poor, looking as though it had been heavily compressed.

Tapo’s app isn’t rich in video quality settings, allowing you only to change the clip triggering and buffering parameters, and to choose between 360p, 2K and Auto settings. I checked that the camera was set to 2K, and brought it indoors to rule out any issues with the Wi-Fi signal, but colour footage, whether recorded or viewed in real time, remained comparatively disappointing.

You can see this in some of the following comparison shots. In each, the left screenshot is footage from the Tapo C410, while the right shot comes from a Tapo C320WS mounted just below it.

This surveillance camera appeared to perform wonders in low light. It was able to resolve an image long after sunset, before finally switching to infrared lighting in the deep dusk of the evening. However, examining low-light colour footage revealed even worse issues with blockiness, and so little detail that moving faces couldn’t always be clearly identified.

At least, once the infrared lights had switched on, the C410 produced more competitive black and white footage.

I shared my concerns and samples of my footage, with TP-Link, which produced a firmware update that markedly improved the video quality, particularly in daylight. Gone were the odd sharpening artefacts, and there was far less blockiness around moving objects. Still the C410 seemed a little behind other Tapo cameras for the sharpness and overall clarity of its recordings.

If you’re looking for a camera with bright, vibrant spotlights, you’ll find the C410 disappointing. Its visible lights certainly aren’t strong enough to double as garden lighting, although they may well be enough to help you avoid pratfalls in a dark passageway. They’re really only there to provide enough light for the camera to switch to colour mode, for which they’re more than ample.

The C410 had the comparatively easy task of monitoring my back garden, but all the same I found its AI to be accurate, and it was easy to tune out false alarms. I also noticed that notifications were essentially instant, which could be important if you need to react quickly to an event such as a break in, or a pet making a bid for freedom.

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