SwitchBot has announced the release of the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K, an impressively-specced exterior security camera with Wi-Fi, Home Assistant support, and AI recognition. But, curiously, it doesn’t offer compatibility with Matter, despite the latest iteration of the standard introducing camera support.
Instead, it is designed to work with the SwitchBot AI Hub, which extends the camera’s recognition and alert features.
What the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K does
With one of these exterior cameras mounted on a wall or beneath a ledge, you can expect 360° horizontal rotation and 90° vertical rotation, with images collected through a 110° wide-angle lens.
Motion tracking triggers and records events on the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K, and these are enhanced with VLM-powered (Vision-Language-Model) AI Insight. AI Event Alert interprets and alerts you via phone notifications to any movement that meets criteria, and the system can recognize people, vehicles, and animals.
The camera features a 5MP sensor and F1.6 aperture, with 3K resolution (a 16:9 ratio with less data requirement than a 4K camera). It features 4x infrared LEDs and 4x white LEDs to capture details in daylight, low light, and at nighttime, too, and it can operate at up to -20°C temperatures and has IP66 weather resistance.
Connectivity is via Wi-Fi and Ethernet, with local storage of up to 512GB microSD supported. The SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K has cloud backup, too, as part of an AI Guard subscription.
SwitchBot camera has Home Assistant support, but no Matter
It’s intriguing that despite the security cam support in Matter 1.5, the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K does not offer Matter support. Instead, you’ve got the option of integration with Alexa, with Google Home, or with Home Assistant. This seems to be down to the fact that the camera streams in the RTSP (Real-Time Streaming Protocol) format, which also means that footage can be streamed to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) or NVR (Network Video Recorder).
Matter, on the other hand, uses WebRTC for video streaming. So, will the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K support Matter later on? I asked, and was told by a SwitchBot representative that Matter support is planned for future SwitchBot cameras.
This isn’t entirely unexpected. Matter 1.5 is relatively new, camera support will inevitably have some hiccups, and SwitchBot has built a reputation on hardware that works out of the box, with little set up required. See our review of the SwitchBot Standing Circulator Fan (coincidentally, another SwitchBot product without Matter) for more on that. However, using RTSP means that you can bypass proprietary cloud services like AI Guard, and pipe video directly into your NVR or NAS. At this stage, this is probably preferable to Matter camera support.
Matter support aside, the camera does have a particularly intriguing integration. It’s designed to work with the SwitchBot AI Hub for expanded AI and facial recognition. This doesn’t replace the AI Insight, but expands it. With the AI Hub, you can also integrate with other SwitchBot security devices (video doorbell, other cameras, etc.) giving you a wider home security system.
Where you can find the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K camera
While the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K is a strong prospect on its own, we think you’ll get the most out of it by pairing it with the AI Hub. This smart home security camera has a MSRP of USD 79.99 / CAD 89.99 / GBP 89.99, and is available now.
You can order it directly through SwitchBot, which at the time of writing is offering a 25% discount on the SwitchBot Outdoor Pan/Tilt Cam 3K. Alternatively, you’ll find it on Amazon.
