Easy to Use, 4K, and Solar-Powered

Whether you’re looking to capture a picture of a porch pirate, someone playing ding-dong ditch, or just keep an eye on your place while you’re away, the Baseus Security S2 Outdoor camera is a great all-around option, especially if you need something that can last forever without a charge or plugging in.

Price and Availability

The Baseus Security S2 Outdoor camera is normally priced at $160 on Amazon, or $200 on the manufacturer’s website. It is available in white. The camera sometimes goes on sale for as low as $100.

There are also a few discounts available if you opt to buy more than one, ranging from 10% off for two to 20% off for four.

Easy Setup and Great Battery Life

When you take the camera out of the box, you’ll be greeted by a few screws, a small mounting bracket, and the camera itself.

Assembly is as simple as you could ask for. Screw the bracket to a post, wall, or whatever you want, tighten the nut, then screw on the camera. You’re done.

My only complaint is that the screws are exceptionally soft, and will strip out if you’re going into a hard material or don’t have exactly the right bit size.

The software side of things is pretty easy too. You download the app, which is available for both iPhones and Android devices, then hold the Sync button on the camera itself. Once the blue light starts blinking and the camera beeps, the app will walk you through connecting the device to your network.

You do need to supply your own microSD card to capture anything the camera picks up. Unfortunately, you have to use FAT32 to format the microSD card. I’d like to see support for exFAT.

In practice, that creates some issues. Windows won’t let you format a USB storage device larger than 32GB without digging into the command line tools. Given that persistent, nagging limitation, I opted to use Rufus instead, which was much faster and easier than fiddling with the disk partition tool via the command line.

The standout feature about this camera—if you didn’t expect it—is the small solar panel on the top of the camera. Baseus says the panel can add about 900mAh to the battery each day, and it’ll even track the sun to maintain an optimal angle to maximize the energy it collects.

I ran the camera continuously for more than three weeks. In that time, the solar panel was facing almost directly south. On a busy day, where I was fiddling with it continuously for a few hours, the battery dropped all the way down to 94%.

However, it quickly rebounded, and during the rest of the time I used it, I never saw it drop below 98%. In direct sunlight, the solar panel is enough to keep it topped off indefinitely.

Painless Settings and Configuration

The camera has the usual range of settings available, including:

• Varied Motion Sensitivity
• People Detection
• Pet Detection
• Vehicle Detection
• Alarms
• Streaming and Capture Settings

The five different motion detection settings worked more or less as you might expect.

The two lower settings really only responded to people. Neither animals (even large ones like deer) nor a tree blowing in the wind set them off. The highest sensitivity setting would sometimes be triggered by animals or a tree moving.

I left it on the most sensitive setting for the duration of my test to see how frequent captures would affect battery life. I also toggled the Pet Detection setting on in the hopes of capturing a few videos of animals.

Despite being triggered multiple times every day by the tree moving, the solar panel kept the battery topped off without an issue.

Good (Not Great) Camera Quality

During the day, the camera works really well. Things over 100 feet away were clear and easily recognizable.

The visible spectrum sensor is more sensitive than I expected. There are two ways for the camera to take pictures at night: via an IR camera with an IR lightsource, or using a small LED light and the regular visible spectrum camera.

The IR option works as you’d expect and illuminates things up to about 30 feet away. The visible spectrum camera and its LED light have about the same range, but I was extremely surprised to find that the camera was sensitive enough to capture Venus and Jupiter rising in the east in the morning.

There was a strange fogging problem that occurred very consistently overnight. I wasn’t able to figure out a way to prevent it, and it did significantly impact the camera’s nighttime performance.

Condensation formed in the top left side of the frame and spread gradually throughout the evening. Everything after that became a bit of a hazy mess and tended to make deer (and other animals) crossing my yard resemble obscure cryptids more than regular woodland animals.

It didn’t always happen, though, and I was able to capture a raccoon running around my yard for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he discovered something he liked and decided to comb the entire yard to make sure there wasn’t more of it somewhere.

Should You Buy the Baseus Security S2 Outdoor Camera?

If you’re in the market for a versatile outdoor camera, and you can put it in a place that actually takes advantage of the solar panel, the Baseus Security S2 Outdoor Camera is a pretty good option, especially since you can often get it for about $100 on sale.