Nest’s new home camera is an interesting toy

I’ve never understood the fascination with connected home cameras, such as Canary, the Nest Cam, and others. They’ve always been a gimmick in my experience, not reliable enough for a proper security system, not practical enough to be a baby monitor. But a lot of people really like them, so I spent the last week with the new Nest Cam IQ to see if it could change my opinion.

The $299 Nest Cam IQ’s big pitch is intelligence. It has a higher resolution camera than prior Nest Cam models, but it doesn’t use that to output a larger video feed. Instead, it combines that high resolution with smart people tracking to automatically zoom in on a subject when it sees a person in the frame and still maintain good image quality. It can “see” friendly...

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