Xiaomi Yi Cam – A Very Affordable IP Camera

I first stumbled on Xiaomi’s Yi Cam when I wrote a quick company profile a few months back. Being priced at just RMB149, it was a small cheap gadget that I had to get my hands on, especially when you looking around Sham Shui Po and see other Chinese branded IP cams being in the HK$300 range. I tried to order directly through Taobao, but all sellers either don’t have any in stock or just were not willing to ship outside of China, the reason I will explain later.

I picked mine up for HK$245, an understandable mark up as you cannot get the Yi Cam through official channels here in Hong Kong. Packaged inside a minimalist plain white box, it contained the Yi Cam, a micro-USB cable, a China 2-pin USB charger and brief leaflet for instructions.

On the back of the box, you can see the specs of the Yi Cam.

I can’t read Chinese but this is what I can gather:

• Records in 1280x720P with a lens that has a 111 degree viewing angle and an aperture of F2.0mm.
• Uses a microSD card for storage using the H.264 codec
• Uses WiFi standards of 802.11bgn supporting WEP/WPA/WPA2
• Requires a 5V/1A power supply, consuming 3.0W max power

Setting the Yi Cam up was far from simple. You will need to firstly download the Mi Home app which is available for both Android and iOS. When you start the app you need to log in with your Mi account, you can also at this point set a new account up, this is a very important point which I will explain further down. With no internal battery, the Yi Cam needs to be powered by the micro-USB cable, and as you first power it up a small yellow LED will flash at the front and it will speak to you in Mandarin Chinese, which scared the **** out of me as I was not expecting it. I know just very very basic Mandarin Chinese, and at this point it says ‘Welcome’.

You now have to go back to the Mi Home app and select adding a new Yi Cam device (you’ll also see a listing of all other Xiaomi interactive devices, and there’s lots of them). Making sure the yellow LED is flashing, you have to select the WiFi connection you will be using. You will notice that the app will inform you that the Yi Cam cannot use a 5Ghz WiFi connection, so I had to select the slower 2.4Ghz one. Then a QR code is generated on your smartphone which you have to point at the Yi Cam lens. The Yi Cam should at this point say something like ‘Connecting’ and all you need to do is wait a minute or so before you can start playing with it, by which time you will get a blue LED constantly on at the front of the camera.

Be warned, once it finished setting up, the smartphone app informed me that there was a firmware update for the Yi Cam, and I, misinformedly, click update. This is where all the important bits I mentioned previously is about. Once the Yi Cam has the latest firmware update it will say in English that this product can only be used in China, and then lock you out. Changing the location in you Mi account does not work, nor does switching off the location service on your smartphone. At this stage I had to Google this issue and on a forum somewhere a user kindly posted up how to downgrade the firmware on the Yi Cam, so do not update the firmware if you are using it outside of China!

Once everything is setup, via the use of the smartphone app you can access the camera at any time. Settings provide you with HD or regular definition, or you can set it to auto. A built in micro SD card slot allows you to record and lets you go back to a preferred time, and you can set the Yi Cam to auto activate on detection of any motion. At the time of writing this it was still day time so I have not been able to test out its night vision feature. With a 111 degree viewing angle, if that same image was shown in one go on your smartphone it will have warped edges, much like what you see a GoPro wide angle recording. To overcome this, you can actually tilt you smartphone and it will pan the image around. Sound by default is set to mute, but un-muting it you can hear what the Yi Cam picks up.

The above image of my messy flat and my dog, Mylo, taking another nap on the couch was taken using just regular resolution.

The app also allows the user to take a snapshot of the recording, and allows you share to MiLiao (I think this is a Mi chat platform), Wechat, Wechat Moments and Weibo, no Facebook or Instagram here. The best feature has to be the microphone function, pressing on the mic icon and speaking into your smartphone, the Yi Cam will broadcast what you say! Oh the fun I can have with my dog sleeping on the couch whilst I’m at work!!

Honestly, the Xiaomi Yi Cam is a great bang per buck IP camera, but as the new firmware will inform you, do not expect any support if you are using it outside of China. I don’t want to go into the political implications and regulations of why the Yi Cam cannot be used outside of China here, but I hope I’ve given you all sufficient information for you to digest.

If you are thinking of getting on, hold off for a bit as Xiaomi has only recently announce the Yi Cam 2, much to my disappointment as I just saw the announcement as I was writing this review. The newer version will record at a higher resolution of 1080p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cust5tVQG0