Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

The TP-Link Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 is a comprehensive upgrade over the D230S1 I reviewed earlier this year.

While it keeps its predecessor’s excellent, free AI features, it upgrades them with more configurable activity zones. It has a bigger battery, offering long stints between recharges, but it can also work with bell wire to provide 24/7 recording.

With a huge 180° diagonal field of view, it’s unlikely to miss anything happening outside your front door, and its 2K resolution is likely to capture all the detail you need. At this price, with no need for a subscription, it’s simply a bargain.

Introduction

TP-Link’s Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 is a smart doorbell that comes with a plug-in chime. It’s a bit different to the Tapo D230S1 doorbell we’ve already reviewed, in that it doesn’t need to be paired with a Tapo hub.

Instead, recordings are stored on a MicroSD card inserted into the doorbell itself, which connects directly to your Wi-Fi network. Another key difference is that this doorbell has both a huge battery and terminals to let you wire it, giving you more flexibility.

This is quite a highly specified doorbell. Its 2K video sensor is fitted with a wide lens letting it capture almost anything happening in front of it. It can film at night using infrared or visible illumination and link up with Alexa and Google Assistant for easy monitoring and control.

Perhaps most significantly, the Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 has onboard AI to distinguish between humans, animals, vehicles and packages. And all of that’s available without a subscription.

At the time of my review, there were no plans to launch the D225 in the UK. For that market, there’s the TP-Link D235, which is almost identical save for slightly higher resolution recording.

Design and Features

• Big and chunky
• Wired or battery powered
• Excellent app

If you want a particularly stylish doorbell you’ll have to look elsewhere. The Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 has a massive 10,000mAh battery onboard, so it’s unavoidably on the big side – at least it looks reasonably smart.

TP-Link says it can last for up to eight months on a single charge, but there are also connectors for doorbell wiring. With a permanent power supply, the D225 can be set to record 24/7.

This is an easy doorbell to install, and it’s flexible, too. You can screw it to the wall or porch, or use one of two supplied adhesives if you’d rather not drill holes.

It comes with a 15° horizontal shim – useful if you have to mount it side-on to the street – and a 5° vertical one that can help make sure you get coverage right down to ground level. I set it up facing directly out onto our drive, and had it fitted in just a few minutes.

At least, I did after I’d filled the battery. There’s no charger in the box, and the USB-C charge speed seemed to top out at 9 watts, which doesn’t make for particularly quick refills. TP-Link says the doorbell will take six hours to top up, but it arrived more than half-charged so it was ready quicker than that.

The Tapo app couldn’t detect my doorbell at first, which is unusual. After a bit of exploring I realised that my UK-based router was using channel 13, which isn’t available to US-specification products – worth bearing in mind if you’re considering importing one of these to Europe. After a simple Wi-Fi channel change everything worked perfectly.

At its most basic level, the Tapo D225 works like any other doorbell. You can plug the supplied chime in anywhere within your Wi-Fi range and it will sound whenever someone presses the bell – it’s incredibly loud at full volume. If you already have a Tapo H100 or H200 hub, you can add that as a second chime, too.

Of course, smart doorbells can do far more than that. You can configure this one to record and notify you when it detects movement, people, pets, cars or packages. If it’s wired up, it can record constantly, notifying you of events when they happen. If somebody presses the bell, you’ll get a notification via the app, and can use it to quickly see what’s going on and talk to a visitor. You don’t need to be at home – all these functions work wherever you’ve got Wi-Fi or cellular data.

You can choose to schedule event-based or (if the doorbell is wired) constant recording, for example turning it off during the day. You can’t set separate schedules for different triggers, though. Similarly, you can schedule notifications so, for example, they don’t disturb you at night or while you’re at work. But while you can toggle the notifications for different event types on and off, you can’t set different schedules for them.

The Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 records video on a MicroSD card, but you’ll need to provide your own, up to 512GB maximum. The card’s fitted in the doorbell itself, which does mean that you’ll lose your recordings if the bell is stolen. There’s a theft alarm feature, which sounds a siren if this happens. If you’re not prepared to risk losing evidence in this way, you could sign up for Tapo Care, which stores recordings in the cloud. 

I criticised Tapo’s D230S1 doorbell for its inflexible activity filtering, but there’s no such problem here. You can toggle motion, person, pet, vehicle and package detection on and off separately. By default the doorbell scans the entire image for activity, but you can create a global zone, for example restricting detection to your drive or porch, rather than the busy street beyond it. You can also set up a privacy zone, so you can avoid recording a neighbour’s property.

That’s a good starting point, but with this doorbell you can define separate activity zones and adjust the sensitivity of four of the five main detection types – package detection is always full-frame if it’s switched on. You might want to do this if, say, you have trees on your drive that would set off motion-based alerts in the wind, but you still want the doorbell’s person and vehicle recognition to cover that part of the view.

The Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 has built-in infrared and visible spotlights to ensure it gets footage at night. You can choose to use either; infrared gives you longer battery life, whereas visible spotlights allow colour filming. I preferred Doorbell Mode, which uses infrared unless the doorbell detects activity, at which point it switches to spotlights.

It’s worth mentioning that the spotlight isn’t bright enough to act as a deterrent – it’s only there to provide enough light for certain filming. In fact, it’s really just a white LED around the bell button and is barely noticeable if there’s any other source of light.

Performance

• Very good AI and filtering performance
• Good image quality
• Fast notifications

I haven’t had a lot of luck with smart doorbells facing out onto my busy urban street. With lots of people and passing traffic, I’ve experienced plenty of false alarms. This was particularly the case with the Tapo D230S1, which at the time of my review didn’t let users set activity zones for its AI detection – I had to turn it off completely.

The Tapo Video Doorbell Camera D225 was much, much better. It took only a few minutes for me to adjust the activity zones as I wanted them. With a bit more tweaking, I was able to dial out false alarms for people, movement, pets and packages – thereafter, the doorbell seemed completely reliable for these categories throughout my testing.

Oddly, it was still confused by vehicles. Although it correctly spotted them passing on my road, it was still picking them up even when I’d shrunk the activity zone and reduced the vehicle sensitivity to its lowest setting (see right-hand Android screenshot, above). At the same time, it never detected my car entering and leaving the driveway directly in front of it – possibly it was confused by the thick porch upright running down the middle of its view. I didn’t particularly need the feature, and was happy to turn it off.

This doorbell does have a huge field of view – it could cover almost the entire front of my porch. One advantage to this ultra wide-angle lens is that if, like me, you have an obstacle in the middle of the view, it blocks less of it.

I was generally happy with the video quality, which captured details well enough that you could identify people, and make out nearby licence plates, but it wasn’t perfect. During daylight, people calling at the door were a touch underexposed – there’s no option to brighten or darken the camera’s view. In the comparison below you can see the view from my north-facing porch in the afternoon (left) and early evening (right).

At night, my porch upright was less overexposed by infrared and visible spotlighting than with other cameras and doorbells I’ve tested. Visitors were beautifully captured, providing my porch light came on.

Infrared exposure was generally good (left), until visitors were close enough to ring the bell, at which point the background retreated into shadows (right).

I found this doorbell’s spotlight to be too weak to properly light the scene. At its default, mid-way brightness, visitors were simply too dark for crisp color footage (left). Turning it to its brightest setting helped (right), but not a great deal – the footage still wasn’t brilliantly resolved.

You can use notifications from this doorbell to trigger other devices in the Tapo range. That’s great if, for example, you want the smart bulbs in your porch light to come on for a minute when someone presses the doorbell at night. I set this up with the Tapo spotlights in my hallway, and it worked reliably.

At all times, I was impressed by notifications from the app, which seemed to happen almost instantly when the bell was pushed. The onboard AI seemed quick to recognise that a person was approaching, usually alerting me before they’d even had a chance to ring the bell. This seemed to work just as reliably at night as it did during the day.

Unfortunately, there could be a price to pay for all the onboard intelligence if you’re running this doorbell without wired power in a busy area. While TP-Link says the battery could last for up to eight months, its charge fell by 15% over five days in my setup, suggesting I’d get only slightly more than a month between charges. I’d expect to get far longer in a more rural area with fewer passersby, but in a city center I’d want to wire the D225 up.

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