Another comment on recording time: Tonight I walked out to the mailbox - about 60 feet. When I opened the back door, my back door camera, which points straight down the driveway, picked that up and stayed recording nearly until I reached the mailbox and then shut off, which is what I would expect. My front door camera, which is perpendicular to the driveway, picked me up when I cleared the house corner and recorded for 13 seconds until I reached the mailbox, which is hidden from it by a bush, so it apparently cut off the recording at that point. That was also expected. However, 7 seconds later, I returned up the driveway, and the front camera did not record anything when I retraced my steps, while the back camera did not record anything as I approached it until I took the first step on my back porch (14 feet from the camera).
I see 2 issues here:
What is the recovery time between ‘events’, where the camera chopped off the first motion before the entire time that I had set, but didn’t start recording again when it should have detected me walking the same route 7 seconds later.
Is there any way to set the camera to detect motion for somebody walking directly toward it (even though it’s 10 feet above ground) until they make some movement perpendicular to that axis? When I was testing the camera, I found that I could walk the entire 60 feet at a normal pace, even weaving a few feet back and forth, right up to the camera, and even wave my hand right in front of it, turn around and walk away, and it still didn’t detect any motion. This is unacceptable for a ‘security’ camera. Surely some combination of the PIR sensors and the pixel-shifting used in the doorbells could do a better job of detecting motion than the cameras currently do.