Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 review - The Ambient

The Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 takes us back to the old days when EufyCams were considered a budget option, long before features like BionicMind AI took the brand to the top table. But Eufy still knows how to offer plenty of features for a small price-tag and the solar-powered S120, with its 2K visuals and color night vision, may well be the perfect first smart security camera for you, or indeed a worthy addition to your Eufy line-up.

Anker Innovations’ smart home brand Eufy is making quite a name for itself in the smart security market, with its high-end, cutting-edge security cameras taking on more established names at the top table of home monitoring.

However, the Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 that I’ve been testing for the past few weeks is a call-back to the days when Eufy was considered a budget brand.

A sub $100/£100 smart security camera, the Solar Wall Light Cam S120 does without a number of the bells and whistles we’ve seen introduced on the likes of the Eufy SoloCam S340 and the EufyCam S330.

What it does share with those (much) more-expensive stablemates is that it can, in theory at least, be powered by its own built in solar panel.

Read on for my full Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 review to find out why it’s a decent Eufy starter-cam or a capable addition to your growing EufyCam arsenal.

The Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 is quite a unique looking smart security camera, there’s not really much out there that matches its cheese-wedge form factor.

Pulling it out of the box and the first thing I noticed is that it’s very plasticky and bulky and a far cry from the slick designs we’ve been accustomed to recently with Eufy.

Let’s be honest, it’s pretty ugly but I’d also argue that it’s a camera that could quite easily be hidden up high on a wall or a fence and be left to get on with its duties.

Measuring ‎17 x 6 x 12.4cm and weighing less than 300g, it’s bulky but not overly heavy, so you should have no worries mounting it with the back plate and screws that come in the box (there’s no adhesive option).

Installation was super simple and took less than 5 minutes.

Obviously, the emphasis for power with the S120 rests on the sun, but there is also a USB-C on the back for you to give it a ‘proper’ charge, or indeed add an additional solar panel to the mix – there is a waterproof adapter in the box for doing just this.

The top edge is a solar panel and it’s obviously quite small.

Despite this Eufy states that you should get a full day’s use from just 2 hours of charge – but I’ll talk more about that further down.

Obviously with that built in solar panel being up top, you’ll want to mount it on a wall that doesn’t have an overhang, so don’t mount it under a drain or extended roof.

Once you’ve done the physical part of the installation, the next step is pairing the camera to the Eufy Security app.

This is done using the usual QR code double-scan Eufy method, whereby you scan a code on the camera using your phone’s camera to get things started and then use the camera’s lens itself to scan a code on your phone’s display.

Once it’s all synced up you get the option to choose between using the camera as a standalone cam, or adding it to a Eufy HomeBase; more on that in a bit.

You also choose, during setup, whether to set the camera for optimal battery life, optimal surveillance or conditions you set yourself. Essentially you are choosing between different clip lengths and intervals between triggers, which obviously all has an affect on that all-important battery life.

The S120 has 8GB of integrated storage for keeping your clips local, which means no subscription fees.

It doesn’t have a microSD card slot so, if you do want more local storage, you’ll have to use a Eufy HomeBase; but be aware that this compatibility is still “coming soon” rather than official at the time of writing.

The S120, compared to other recent EufyCam devices, is quite basic out of the box with things like facial recognition and AI smarts nowhere to be seen.

For $99 / £99, that’s fair enough, but the good news is, if you’re already a EufyCam user with a HomeBase 3 then pairing the S120 upgrades the detection algorithms to include facial recognition, with the camera marking clips with recognised faces and also lets you use Eufy’s new cross-cam tracking feature too.

Sort of. Official compatibility has still yet to be confirmed and while I was able to get the S120 ‘synced’ with a HomeBase 3, I couldn’t access additional local storage or any extra features at the time of testing.

So, for the purposes of this review, I’m going to stick to what you do get out of the box.

The S120 is a motion activated camera, where a PIR sensors provide 120° of customizable detection to trigger the camera to start recording.

Given that you’re using solar power and you don’t really want to waste the battery, you may want to tweak recording length and quality in the Eufy Security app, where you can also fine-tune the motion sensitivity settings and create two different activity zones.

These features alone can significantly reduce the number of notifications generated by the app and help with battery life.

You can set streaming and recording quality independently of each other; just leave on Auto for streaming and it’ll do the best it can when you want to peak in on a live overview of what the camera is seeing.

All clips are stored in the Eufy Security app, which still feels very Chinese. Whereas the Eufy Clean app is super stripped back and simple to use, the Eufy Security app is still full of nonsense – ads, weird settings menus, contests and strange editorial features, such as “Virtual Home”, “Referral” and my favorite, “Hall of Co-Creators”.

You can also donate your clips to earn credits to help train Eufy’s A. Erm, no thanks, you’re alright.

For the camera itself and accessing your clips, thankfully thing are less bloated.

The user interface is straightforward, presenting a list of thumbnails organized by date. You can apply filters to easily navigate to a specific date or time and any clip can be viewed or downloaded to your phone’s storage for safekeeping.

You can simply tap on the thumbnail to access the live view and observe real-time events. You also have the option to engage in two-way communication with anyone visible in the camera’s feed thanks to the EufyCam two-way talk feature

Additional features on the S120 are that it can be set to home or away mode, as part of a Eufy security system and, with a 105dB siren on board, can even be used as a standalone smart alarm; for example you could have the floodlight flash and the alarm activate if motion is detected at a certain time or when away mode is active..

It’s a shame that there’s no IFTTT integration to control the mode based on another device, say setting Away mode when your smart alarm is turned on.

Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support are available, so you can live stream a feed to a compatible smart display, such as the Amazon Echo Hub.

The light can also be activated using voice commands to Alexa or Google Assistant and be used as part of routines and automations.

The Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 offers full 2K HD visuals, at 2304×1296, but the crispness of its more-expensive 4K brethren such as the S330 and S340 is massively lacking.

That’s not to say the images captured are bad but you get what you pay for and for basic monitoring the S120 more than does the job, with the sensor holding up well in the bright conditions of our testing area.

At night time, the color night vision kicks in as a result of the floodlight activating when motion is detected, although you can choose to go for a black and white only version to save battery too.

You’ll see that it takes a second or so to kick in but the colors are pretty vibrant, albeit a little blurred for movement.

That light offers 4,000K of white range with a 300 Lumens brightness and should be activated if anyone, or anything moves within a 25ft range of the camera’s built in PIR sensor.

Eufy states that two hours of solar charging will be enough to get the S120 through the day but a lot of that is down to where the camera is positioned as, don’t forget, recording events are triggered by motion detection.

In a garden, with normal use – around 10-15 events per day – we encountered around 50 to 100 mAh of use daily, with our solar charge (in a sunny Florida garden, around 3-4 hours of direct sunlight) getting us around 60-75 mAh of charge.

All of this can be monitored using the Power Manager tool in the Eufy Security app.

You ate going to need, therefore, to top up the battery via the mains every now and again, especially in winter. A four hour mains charge will get you back up to full power.

The S120 is IP65 weather resistant so you can leave it outside all year round.

The Eufy Solar Wall Light Cam S120 is a perfectly fine sub-$100 smart security camera that offers 2K HD video, color night vision, security features galore and an easy installation.

We’ve become used to Eufy blowing us away with cutting edge features on its smart security cams, but the S120 keeps things simple and is a great option for someone looking for a no-nonsense, feature-rich, easy-to-use smart security camera.

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Smart security cameras usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products that – supposedly – all work in harmony. Therefore, it’s impossible to use a security camera for a week and deliver a verdict.

Because we’re testing smart home kit all day, everyday, we know what matters and how a particular camera compares to alternatives that you might also be considering.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never paid directly to review a device.

Read our guide on our review process for smart security cameras to learn more.