Lorex Smart Indoor Cam Review

The Lorex Smart Indoor Camera costs under $50 and hits that sweet spot between useful features and affordability. Its video and audio quality aren’t award winning, but you can gauge what’s happening in a room. Plus, it comes with a 16 GB microSD card that makes local storage easier by leaps and bounds.

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The Lorex Smart Indoor Camera shoots and takes stills in 1080p. In clear daylight, video comes out nicely. When you turn on the camera’s recording feature, it captures stills like these onto the SD card. Those weren’t quite as clear.

The Smart Indoor Camera’s night vision landed in a similar category. The picture was sharp for objects up close, but the farther back you go, the murkier things get. We’d estimate this camera can see up to 10 feet in the dark.

Overall, the Lorex’s video quality felt like an old digital camera, and it’s not especially crisp or clear. This is the case for most 1080p cameras, though. And it was good enough to generally tell what was happening in the room.

You can record video from the Lorex app one of two ways—manually pressing “record” or selecting the “continuous recording” feature. The second option will save stills on the microSD card whenever the camera detects activity.

It also has the ability to record on a schedule or work with your location if you don’t want it recording while you’re at home.

But you’ll need the microSD card in at all times to see any recorded events in the app. Without it, this camera only livestreams footage to the app.

Like many of its peers, the Lorex Smart Indoor Camera has two-way audio that lets you listen in and talk through the camera. So we checked the camera’s speaker, microphone, and tried talking through the app.

While the mic and speaker came through clear, the app didn’t pick up much when talking through the microphone. So if you record a conversation from the app while speaking to someone, you might not catch both sides.

The Lorex Smart Indoor Camera uses local storage instead of cloud storage. This camera comes with a 16 GB microSD included, so you won’t have to rummage through your junk drawers to find one of your own. And it kicks the pants off of other local storage cameras with its support for up to 256 GB.

All of this matters for a couple of main reasons:

First off, 256 GB is huge—about as much storage as an iPad. And this allows for continuous recording, which keeps your stored and recorded footage offline—adding an extra layer of privacy and protecting your clips from prying eyes.

When the chip is in, this allows you to go into the app and see the past events it has recorded. Events usually refer to movement the camera detects like someone walking into the room or past the camera. Without that chip, you won’t get to see past events.

After recording for several days, we took a peek at what was on the chip itself and found stills from all the past events the camera notified us about.

The Lorex Smart Indoor Camera comes from a pretty underrated brand. This particular model didn’t blow us away, though.

The video quality from this Lorex camera only impressed us in bright light (like the middle of the day). Otherwise, the still images and video recorded in low light were underwhelming and blurry. Audio from this camera’s mic and speaker worked fine, but we found that speaking through the app never came out clearly.

Luckily, this isn’t the strongest of Lorex’s cameras. The brand boasts better cameras with up to 4K resolution that we’re aiming to test in the near future. But for its price, the 1080p works just fine.

Lorex also doesn’t have cloud storage, which can be a drawback if you prefer to go that route. But its local storage kicks serious butt.

With the potential of storing an iPad’s worth of video on a little chip like this, you can keep your camera rolling all day without paying the extra fees that come with cloud storage. This does mean you’ll have to offload footage the more that you record, but you’ll catch everything.

We found its app and the camera itself really intuitive. It has a simple user interface and blend of useful features that don’t feel like weird vestigial things you’ll never use.

Some other great features on this Lorex cam are its reliable video recording, sound alerts, scheduling, and extras like geofencing.

The Lorex Smart Indoor Camera fits in with a family of $40 simple cameras that work well for their price. If that’s all you’re looking for, this is a great option to go with.

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