Netgear Arlo VMS3430 (4 Camera System)

Unreliable hard to cancel service – I canceled my subscription over a year ago. No recordings have be taken in that time. They automatically billed me again and now only offer a partial refund. When the cameras where in use they where spotty at best Show details

Buyer beware!! Zero customer service and two of the five cameras I purchased are faulty! – If I could give 0 stars I would! Worst customer service and two of the five cameras I purchased don’t work. Waste of money and too stressful to deal with their non existent customer service. I have purchased 5 cameras within one year and the 2 most recent do not work. I am still chasing up my RMA (return) one month later which was delivered to… Read more

their Sydney warehouse and I have proof! They are telling me it hasn’t arrived and they will contact me once they have answers. They are doing nothing about it. I am paying them a monthly subscription and they are giving me no answers! I wish I had done my research and never bought these terrible cameras. I wasted so much money for nothing!! It’s not nice because I had to work very hard to pay for these rubbish cameras. They are probably laughing right now - they don’t care about their customers! They just take your money and see ya later!

DO Not Buy this Product – DO NOT Buy these Camera''s, it took Arlo 4 months to get 1 Camera working out of 6 Camera's, continually email what they thought the fault was and still did NOT get the other 5 Camera's working. The Camera's would NOT connect to the Wi Fi for the first month and a half of emails and Faults. You cannot return these Faulty goods either, they stated they are not able to refund the goods. Show details

DO NOT Buy This Product – DO NOT Buy these Camera''s, it took Arlo 4 months to get 1 Camera working out of 6 Camera's, continually email what they thought the fault was and still did NOT get the other 5 Camera's working. The Camera's would NOT connect to the Wi Fi for the first month and a half of emails and Faults. You cannot return these Faulty goods either, they stated they are not able to refund the goods. Show details

Still Taking money from account – Cameras did not work with our internet strength. We returned them the first week. 5 months later they are still taking money out and wont stop. Phoning them doesnt work. Show details

Wasted my money – Always offline, too much work to keep going, very expensive. Looks good but very poor system, unreliable, and will let you down when you need it. Battery life not good

Where do i start – I purchased the arlo pro 4 from harvey norman on a rec. from people in local town. $1140. They no sooner kept going off line. To remedy this you have to take them down & do a reset. No help from arlo support online. I bought a mesh wifi system to boost coverage. No good. I contacted my ISP & upped internet speeds. No good. I reduced to only 1… Read more

camera online. No good. Still no help from arlo crap online support. I had ample internet speeds. DON'T BUY THESE. 1 star is too many

buy if you want to waste your money and time – Phone apps very slow response time. Video clip usually cut off before the specified time. In the dark the cameral is almost useless. The batteries are expensive and only run a very short time. In short this is useless.

Device appears offline. Tried all trouble shooting. Nothing works – Does not synch. Does not connect. Does no pair. Do not waste your money. There is no fix or this issue. Absolute rubbish and such a waste of money! Do yourself a favour and don't buy this product. There is also no actual tech support either. Save yourself the trouble  Show details

Terrible product – Do not waste your time. Custom service is horrendous, technical support even worse. They cant even offer a simple solution to activating your smart plans. overpriced and underdelivered. Trust me Show details

Absolute rubbish. Stay away – Stopped working after 2 weeks. Base station bricked itself. Been dealing with Arlo now for 8 months and still no replacement. Over 20 emails and same in phone calls. An absolute disgrace of a company. Should have bought Swann. Show details

Not reliable – What a scam! Sends notifications of wind blowing leaves but nil notifications when a car pulled up in driveway. Should come with 1 TB hard drive at this price. Absolute waste of money for very unreliable camera Show details

Again Worse customer service ever – I bought the 3 camera Arlo 2 system a week ago.. Set up in half an hour & finally thought we have a great system here . WRONG .. although the quality of the system is very good I found that batteries were running out in 48 hours .. This is because the camera is recording EVERYTHING it sees .... Called The Arlo support number & after 15… Read more

mins the operator couldnt even understand my email address .. I HUNG UP !!

Called the Arlo support in my area & to my horror was even worse .... after half an hour on hold the operator came back to me & said that i couldnt set an ACTIVE AREA on the BASIC plan & i HAD to upgrade to the premier pack for an EXTRA $12.95 a MONTH .....

I upgraded & this made my problems even worse .... IM SO SICK OF THESE CAMERAS I WILL BE RETURNING TO THE STORE & GETTING A REFUND ....

*** DO NOT BUY THESE SYSTEMS THE AFTER SALES & SUPPORT IS NON EXISISTANT .... NO WONDER NETGEAR SEPARATED FROM THEM ..... ABSOLUTE RUBBISH !!!

Pretty bad but has potential to be good – For anyone who's considering getting Arlo, do consider the pros and cons below first. I've had Arlo for about a year and 5 cameras on their Basic plans. Pros: Wireless setup that works as advertised although not in a great way. It's like an old car that still runs but it is noisy, jerky, and overall a terrible experience. It'll still do what… Read more

you need to do but it's not great by any measure.

Cons:

The app for your phone is horrendously slow, clunky, takes forever to load the settings page, refresh status, etc. It works pretty fast if you're trying to log in on a computer so it's not an internet speed thing. Considering how many false positives you'll get -> see below, it's absolutely frustrating how many times you need to log in to use this crappy app.

False positives; they intentionally cripple the "basic" free plan so you cannot use custom motion zones on battery and only on AC power. If you subscribe to their "smart plans", suddenly it can be done. Basically, if you put your camera out front, you'll get a hundred notifications a day for each car that passes by. Setting a custom motion zone solves this or if you're able to position your camera in a way that does not capture the street. Unfortunately, intentionally crippling features for the "basic" plan is not great. Also - they claim on their website that they can detect between moving trees and other actual motion - this is NOT true. I get notifications for stationery trees with swaying leaves all the time. Basically, just get used to dealing with false positives.

Motion detection does not work through glass - i.e. you cannot put this behind a window.

Two Way Communication and Lag - the video captured when viewing "live" is a good 1-2 minutes behind live video. Try having a two way conversation with this is like sending a message to the Mars Rover. by the time the app loads, and you want to have a two way conversation - the person is long gone.

Battery life can be great or terrible - depending on how many triggers and video recording gets done - anywhere from 1 month to 6 months.

The default mounts that come with the camera are horrendous to mount on a wall and to keep steady when trying to position. You almost need to buy new ones from ebay but they are inexpensive.

Web interface - their web login no longer works with Chrome, since Chrome 71 has now disabled flash entirely from the browser. This means you cannot use the web to stream a video. You can only replay historical videos captured.

Overall

There isn't many other solutions out on the market at the moment so Arlo can get away with doing false marketing claims. None of their features work as well as advertised but they do generally work terribly, in a slow, clunky, frustrating manner. It's just a matter of time before someone else does it better and cheaper. For the prices they're asking for, this isn't quite acceptable.

Again, think of it like a nasty car. Still gets you from A to B, but without the air conditioning, radio, bumpy ride, etc. It's one crap experience that does the bare minimum for a premium price.

I do think there's so much potential here, but Netgear has such a short-sighted view on this. They rather cripple the free version and try to force people onto a subscription fee despite overpaying outright for the system, they rather have a slow crappy app, not fix the reliance on flash which is being phased out.

Pure and simply trash – Arlo security cameras, battery power consumption is horrible. Cameras consistently do not record until either a vehicle has left and viewing angle makes description of said vehicle minimal usual color and if its a car or a truck. Cameras always have to ne reset, or they will not alert or record. Netgear website is a joke to navigate for… Read more

information. No owners manual only a simple start up instruction. Upon initial setup the company used my wifes cellphone as the controlling device, even after several attempts made to straighten situation out requiring several phone calls, and much wasted time. I would avoid any arlo product like the plague. The netgear company provide minimal contact information. Good luck trying to contact and receiving favorable results. They have my money, I have trash electronics, and an extremely foul taste in mouth when I think, see, or even hear of the name arlo.

Worst customer service I have ever encountered...outsourced to money grabbing thieves horrible exper – They don't really fix anything just try to sell you something you don't NEED. The hardware is awful but the software and SUPPORT are WORSE!!! I would never recommend this product to anyone.

Camera junk after update – Junk! One camera says replace battery. I did, no help. Called arlo no help! Just did update may 28 2018 just out of warranty. Don’t buy these cameras! Put new battery in charged overnight, try to synk no help.

New app update recked my cameras – Been using Arlo for 2 years now, recently had an app update now camera are useless. Customer service didn't want to know, Arlo Is a waste of money, for a few dollars more get a hard wired system. The money you save on batteries will justify the cost.

PSA - Do Not Buy! – CONS: Arlo security system will NOT offer peace of mind. Arlo cameras are in a state of constant disconnection and therefore do not record when they should. There seems to always be a connection issue between the camera and the base unit or the base unit and the internet or the base unit and Arlo database system or the phone app and the Arlo… Read more

database system.

Should the stars align and all these systems briefly connect, there are still delays in the live stream mode and the issue of short ranged and poor night detection.

Buying Arlo will give you a constant uncertainty of whether the system is even currently working.

PROS:

Cameras are portable.

Reasons to buy:

Portable,

Motion Detection hopeless at night – Camera will not detect at night from 1 metre....As a Carer this was the main reason I purchased Camera..Dont waste your money if you want a Camera for same reason..

Not to sure – I dont know if it my house or if it the product but it is always going offline. The router sits right next the arlo box and there is no way to fix rhe problem without getting the cameras down and aymc th again

A great little system for the money ($499 on Ebay) – I received the Arlo pack the day before leaving for holidays. It was a breeze to set up the base station and then set up an account and download the app to my phone. I didn't have time to install the cameras outside so I simply sat them on tables and benches inside but facing pertinent doors and windows. It was so comforting to be able to get on… Read more ·  5

and see what was happening at home while we were away. When we returned we took the time to install them outside, many just by using double sided Tarzan's Grip tape, but some we drove in a screw and hung the mount. Many of the reviews speak about the clarity of the pictures but I find it sufficient to be honest. The daytime pics are clear and sharp, the night time pics may not be as clear (still pretty good though) but at least we are alerted if someone comes near to the house. Thankfully all our alerts have been about ourselves or the dog so far. I had a problem with the batteries in one camera. They went completely flat within the first 2 weeks, whereas the other cameras still had more than 65% charge. I rang the Arlo customer service and after determining it was a fault with the batteries, they sent us a new batch at no extra charge. At the same time I got on to Ebay and bought a charger and four rechargeable batteries for around AU$100 (RCR123A by Tenergy, one of the few trusted suppliers of rechargeable batteries for the Arlo as some cheaper brands can overheat and destroy the cameras). The rechargeables are expensive (around AU$58 for four batteries) and as each camera requires 4 batteries I have been spreading the purchase to one set each month until all four cameras are running on rechargeables. Tenergy state they can be recharged up to 300 times each, which seems economical in the long run. I hope we get a good many years out of this current Arlo (I will come back and add to my review at the 1yr mark or if anything goes wrong in the meantime). We will happily replace it with the new and improved version of Arlo at that time.

Horrible product. Do not purchase! – System worked perfectly for about six months. Then, two of my cameras go dead in less than a week. There is something wrong with the cameras. Purchase a wired system.

Poor image quality – Easy to set up, but the image quality is way down. You zoom in and the faces pixelate heaps, number plates, cant read them either. They tried to blame my internet speed, but i believe that its the camera. I will be returning them.

Buyer Beware – This is the first wireless camera system I have purchased. The cameras are also battery powered which I thought would be nice. Completely wireless. Well, the video quality is fine. The connectivity and range seems to be fine. But there are two REALLY bad things about this system. The motion detection is AWFUL! Literally, I have tried every… Read more

camera angle and the motion detection is terrible. You have to be within a few feet of the camera for reliable motion detection. Very limited coverage. The second bad thing. I have 3 cameras. The first time I had to replace batteries i found out how expensive they are because of the special battery type. $60.00 usd for a SINGLE Camera. The batteries lasted maybe two or 3 months. That means, I'm going to have to spend $180 3 or 4 times a year just to keep them powered around the clock. I could nearly buy a brand new system every year for that cost. Shame on me I guess. But, I'm now saving the money I'm not spending on replacement batteries to buys something else... Maybe the wireless tech just isn't where it needs to be yet.