The Eufy N140 Pet Camera Is a Great Gift for Pet Parents
If you want to keep an eye on your pets and furniture while you’re away, the Eufy Pro N140 offers exceptional video quality, coverage and interactivity. The only thing you really need to consider before purchasing is how your pet will react to the interactivity.
Eufy is a company with an impeccable reputation for home security: clips are stored locally, reducing privacy concerns since nothing is transferred to the cloud. This also means you’ll never need a subscription, and the quality of their cameras is second to none. They have two pet cameras: the slightly smaller D605 (currently on sale on Amazon for $129.99) and the model I use, the N140 ($209.99, but now $145.99 with discount code on the Eufy website). The N140 offers a little more range thanks to its 360-degree rotation capability, while the D605 offers a little more control over one of the coolest features—the ability to throw treats at your pet.
Privacy against pets
The first thing to recognize is that a pet camera is designed specifically to monitor your pets. Even though you get amazingly good video quality, you’re not going to hide this device around your house to use it as a security camera; this block is large enough to have its own zip code. Having a pet camera comes with privacy concerns: While Eufy does a great job of distinguishing me from my dog using artificial intelligence, it’s only a matter of time before it catches me running around the living room in my underwear. However, the clips don’t go to the cloud, and you can schedule the camera to turn on and off.
Much of Eufy’s pet experience is shared. Clips of your pet are easy to share on major platforms, and you can even invite others to give your dog a treat, although I can’t imagine personally inviting anyone else into your living room. Each day, you’re given a video summary with music of all your dog’s activities, condensed to the minute, which is admittedly quite adorable and clearly worth sharing.
Your pet’s comfort with the camera may affect its functionality.
The benefit of a pet camera, or why you put up with the privacy issues, is that you can actually see what your pet is doing, talk to it, and even reward it with treats if Euphie isn’t scared. which one is living crap – which, based on a quick poll of dog owners, seemed to be an ongoing question less about the brand and more about the nature of the animals. With a non-human voice telling them to sit and then having a treat thrown at them out of nowhere to warm up a bit, Euphie offers some tips on how to get your pet acclimated to the camera. However, if you’ve never used the treat dispenser or the intercom feature, the camera itself is as quiet as a mouse and your pet is unlikely to notice the surveillance. However, that would be a shame because a treat machine is a lot of fun for people. Load Eufy with dry kibbles or small dry treats, and through the app you can pull out a digital slingshot that makes a sound and then launches a treat from about eight feet away.
Modern and well designed, if a bit heavy
As I noted earlier, this is a camera you’re unlikely to hide, but you don’t want to either – it’s modern and unobtrusive, in shades of gray molded plastic. The weight is due to the container for storing treats. After several weeks of use, it never clogged, which is unusual. It reliably spits out one, two, or three treats in roughly the same spot, and the device is dishwasher safe, so you can clean it up easily. It required virtually no setup: you download the Eufy Pet app, it found the camera itself and helped me connect to Wi-Fi within three minutes. Eufy currently has a variety of applications for pet cameras, security cameras, and home appliances. This means that if you have Eufy security cameras, the pet camera is completely disconnected from that system. While Euphie assures me they will move to a single app sometime next year, there are no plans to integrate pet cameras into the home security space.
Video quality
It’s a camera first and foremost, and the Eufy has a great one. With a wide-angle lens that captures every angle of the entire room, there are no blind spots. If your pet is in the room, Euphie will see it; it uses artificial intelligence to recognize and track your pet. Moreover, the app allows you to point the camera left or right, and the entire camera rotates 360 degrees if you place it in the middle of the room. You can zoom in on the 2K high definition image up to 2.5x, which is detailed enough to read the box label. The camera doesn’t move quickly – you’re controlling it via Wi-Fi, so there’s a slight delay, so placing the camera along a wall where it won’t need to be rotated as much might be smart. Even night vision is excellent.
Tracking your pet
While I’m sure some people use cameras to track their cats, ferrets, or birds, this camera is primarily aimed at dogs. You can set alerts when your dog barks, and you can choose the level of sensitivity. However, my particularly barking dog wouldn’t turn on the Eufy when the TV was on. Unlike, say, my Google Mini, the Eufy can’t differentiate a trigger, like a bark, from another noise. It also gives you activity alerts, and like I said, most of the time the AI was pretty accurate at catching the dog and not me in those alerts. The key is to configure your settings so you don’t receive constant alerts. All of these alerts are combined into a diary that you are notified about every day, and it allows you to view your pet’s activity and uses AI filters so you can see trends in that activity.
The lack of automation is a real disadvantage.
After weeks of trying to remember to turn the camera on when I left the house and turn it off when I got home, I really wanted to be able to automate the on and off button with a trigger so that the camera would only turn on when I wasn’t home. I suspect this is a common problem. You can use a door sensor instead of a voice trigger, but the Eufy pet doesn’t offer that integration—or any integration, as far as I can tell. So there’s no support for Google Home or HomeKit, and it only works to a very limited extent with Alexa.
Bottom line: excellent utility for its price
For under $200, it’s a great tool if you’re concerned about being able to check on your pet, whether or not you use the bells and whistles (after three weeks, I was still discovering new utilities and cute features). Having such a wide viewing range, coupled with the ability to zoom in day or night and possibly prevent your pet from damaging your belongings or getting hurt, is well worth the money. One vet visit or sofa repair will make $200 seem like nothing.