Eufy’s Video Doorbell Dual Keeps One Eye on Your Packages

A video doorbell can be a great help, and we’ve reviewed a bunch of them. They can let you know when a delivery has arrived, but they can’t always ensure that your package will still be there when you get home. Eufy’s dual video doorbell solves this problem by adding a second camera, so you can get a clear look at visitors and monitor anything sitting on the doorstep. 

The split-screen view ensures comprehensive porch coverage and will relieve anyone who has package anxiety. It’s also refreshing to find a camera with on-device AI and local storage, so you never have to upload videos to the cloud.

Porch Protection

The growth of online shopping has sparked more deliveries than ever. But that just means that more packages are left on porches, easy pickings for opportunistic thieves. It’s tough to quantify how big a problem porch pirates are, because it varies from area to area, and the crime often goes unreported. But a Finder survey estimates that around 14 percent of Americans have fallen victim to package theft in the past year, the value of which is estimated at $5.4 billion.

The Eufy Video Doorbell Dual promises to reduce the risk of porch pirates making off with your latest Amazon purchases with a secondary downward-facing camera that covers your porch. Many video doorbells promise to identify package delivery but fail to show the spot where people typically leave them. Even the ones that do, like the Logitech Circle View, have a slight fish-eye effect and a blind spot directly below. The Dual offers the most comprehensive view of my front porch yet.

I can see at a glance if there’s a package or my cat waiting to get in (an unexpected bonus) with a split-screen view in the app. The Dual also boasts built-in package detection to alert you when packages are delivered or picked up, and it sends you reminders when packages have not been taken inside. It even challenges people loitering on your porch.

The Delivery Guard set of features has been hit-and-miss for me. I get a lot of deliveries, and most of them have sparked a “Package delivered” message. The “Package picked up” alerts have been a little less reliable. It also misidentified a brick, my cat (in loaf position), and a painted stone my daughter placed on the porch as packages, and it failed to register two packages I left out for pickup.

I like the reminder feature, where you can set a time for the camera to check your porch and tell you to bring in any uncollected packages, but the loitering and package-guarding features were not well designed. Loitering detection allows you to set a range and time, so anyone hanging around triggers a notification or an automatic voice response that says something like “Excuse me, can I help you?” (You can set custom responses too.) Package guarding triggers the voice response when someone approaches a package on your porch.

This feature confused delivery people, and it got triggered every time I chatted with a visitor at the door or the kids were waiting for us to drive them somewhere. I turned both features off.

Nails the Basics

Eufy’s previous 2K Doorbell made our list of the best video doorbells by offering high-quality footage, accurate human detection, and a local storage option, which means there’s no need for a subscription. The Dual has all of that. The video is detailed, and the camera copes well with mixed lighting thanks to HDR support, which is a must for my south-facing porch.

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