Ezviz C3W Pro review: high-resolution home security

Want to make your home more secure? This Ezviz C3W Pro review is the right place to be. Smart home tech isn’t just about voice-activated lights and music on-demand, you can use smart devices to add an extra layer of security to your home while you're asleep or away.  

The best security cameras give you round the clock protection providing live images of your house, motion detection and a smartphone app to manage it all. It’ll certainly give you peace of mind, and will act as an intruder deterrent, but if you were to have a breach of security you’ll also want to be sure that your camera will provide accurate, reliable footage or photos. 

The Ezviz C3W Pro is a wired security camera designed to monitor the exterior of your home both in the day and at night. Let's get straight down to it, here's the full Ezviz C3W Pro review. 

Ezviz C3W Pro review: price and availability

You can buy the Ezviz C3W Pro from a number of retailers. It comes in a 2MP or 4MP version. You can pick up a 2MP camera for $69.99 / £99.99 / AU$173 - I reviewed the higher resolution camera which will set you back around £139.99 in the UK but isn’t available in the US or Australia. See the widgets on this page for more recent pricing. 

Ezviz C3W Pro review: features

A wall-mounted wired security camera with a 4MP lens, the Ezviz C3W Pro will provide you with protection both in the day and at night using the motion-activated Black and White Night Vision and the Colour Night Vision aided by the security light. You just need to link the camera to your smartphone or tablet and it will notify you when it detects a person in the frame. To prevent false alerts, it has AI Human Detection built-in so it won’t be set off unnecessarily. You can access live images and previously recorded alerts through the Ezviz app. 

You’ll also be able to hook up your Amazon Alexa or Google Hub, particularly useful if you want to use voice to ask your home hub to display the camera’s view. It’s not compatible with Apple’s HomeKit though.

Ezviz C3W Pro review: design and setup

The Ezviz C3W Pro is a white wall-mountable camera with a rounded base that allows you to tilt and swivel the camera 360 degrees once installed. It’s not a discreet camera, measuring 72 × 72 × 150mm and weighing around 395g. Once attached to your external walls its size will help to deter intruders. The cylindrical design is paired with two Wifi antennas on either side of the lens to provide reliable long-range transmission. That means you can place the camera away from your Wifi router and maintain the connection, you will need to check it works still before mounting it though. I found the camera didn’t struggle to connect so the antennas were doing their job right, however, it could be a little slow to load the live footage at times. The camera itself is IP67 weather resistant so will happily sit outside in the wind and rain without needing to be under cover although the power adaptor will need to be. 

Setting up the Ezviz C3W Pro was easy, you just need to download the Ezviz app on your iOS or Android device, create an account, plug in the camera, tap the + on the top right of the app and choose your device. Then, just follow the instructions given in the app. It hardly took any time at all to get the camera up and running. You then use the provided mounting template and screw kit to drill the camera into the wall. Bear in mind that as the camera is wired, you’ll need to be able to plug it in somewhere, or drill through the wall to plug it in inside. It comes with a 1.5m power adaptor to do so. Once installed, you won’t need to take it down again which is the problem with battery-powered cameras that need charging once in a while. You can then adjust the positioning of the camera as you wish. 

The Ezviz app is pretty easy to use. It displays your cameras on the first page, and when you click on one, it lists the actions you can take, like capture a snapshot or sound the alarm. On the Video History page, you can scroll back through recent days to see where motion was detected. If you are looking for something specific that makes it easy to quickly look through all the footage you have. Despite that, the app is basic and doesn’t give you as much control as you get with some of Ezviz's competitors. For instance, there's no way to arm the system when your phone leaves the house. 

On the underside of the camera, there’s a MicroSD card slot that can store up to 256GB of recordings locally. Or you can choose to pay for an encrypted cloud subscription for $5.99 / £4 a month to record the past 7 days on a single camera, after that, you’ll lose the footage. There’s a cheaper option to record the last 3 days and a more expensive option to keep 30 days. If you have more than one camera installed, the price goes up even more. The cloud-based option is significantly more expensive than Ring’s most basic plan which set you back $3 / £2.50 / AU$4 per month for 30 days of recordings, while Arlo’s storage plan costs $2.99 / £2.49 / AU$4.49 a month for a single camera.

Ezviz C3W Pro review: performance

Recording footage using a 4MP lens at 2560 × 1440p (2K resolution) with a maximum of 30fps, the Ezviz C3W Pro does a good job at picking up finer details and human faces. I had the camera set up for a number of weeks and was impressed at the image quality on bright days, dark days and at night. You can see some examples of the image quality in the gallery below. If you spot something in a video, it lets you zoom further in for a closer look too. 

The Black and White Night Vision claims to able to see 30m ahead. Although obviously not as detailed as coloured footage, it still manages to pick up enough detail to make out faces in the frame. If you would rather have coloured footage at night, the Ezviz C3W Pro will need the spotlight to be switched on (unlike Arlo’s security cameras which can produce coloured shots without one). It’s very bright so is able to fully illuminate the scene, and will also be handy to have in your driveway or up to the front door at night to help you see the way. The last low light mode is Smart Night which turns on the light for 90 seconds at so-called ‘suspicious movements’. 

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The camera has a viewing angle of 100 degrees horizontally and 121 degrees diagonally so managed to fit a lot into the frame. If you have a wide garden and want to make sure it's all in the frame, you may want to look for 135 degrees or more. 

To prevent false positives, where the camera gets triggered by something other than people, like animals or a bush blowing in the wind, the Ezviz C3W Pro has person detection which uses AI to find human shapes. Other cameras have more complex human face detection so considering the fact that it only detects shapes, I found it worked well. It was never set off by anything other than a person. There were times it triggered a little late or missed the person completely, which could be a problem if it were to miss something important. But overall the motion detection was effective and accurate.

A two-way speaker and microphone mean you can speak through the camera, to welcome or warn off visitors. Voices sounded loud enough to hear even if you live on a busier street, although there was sometimes a small amount of feedback. If you see a security breach you can enable Active Defense Mode which sounds a high-pitched alarm and flashes the strobe light to warn off intruders. You can also switch between the default alarm sounds or you can record three 10 second audio messages.

Ezviz C3W Pro review: verdict

For a reasonably priced smart security camera, the Ezviz C3W Pro 4MP has detailed, bright image quality and very capable night vision. This wired camera does have a few downsides like the expensive cloud storage and the basic smartphone app, plus to install it you’ll probably need to drill through walls. Despite that, this is an easy-to-use smart security camera with plenty of features to keep your home safe. 

Ezviz C3W Pro review: also consider 

Looking for a wireless security camera? It’ll be worth considering the Ring Stick Up Cam which can be fitted just about anywhere, inside or outside. You should also take a look at the EufyCam 2C, while this set of cameras is more expensive, it’s also completely subscription-free. 

•  Here are more of the best smart security devices you can buy to protect your home