EufyCam Delay in Recording Start

One serious concern for me is the apparent delay between motion detected and video record start. I have I relatively short driveway, and the recording captures people already walking up to my front door at the start. Due to placement to cover the drive itself I’m only capturing the sides of a person as they approach the door. if recording initiated 1-2 seconds earlier I’d have much more data. Fortunately for now all I’ve seen is the backs of delivery persons as they return to the street. I’ve adjusted the sensitivity settings to their highest value, but that’s not enough and it means that vehicles in the street can now trigger the cam.

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Ive had wireless battery powered cams since they came out, vuezone, arlo, eufy etc. They all suffer from this. Only cams that do not seem affected by this are the always on powered cams. My guess it is related to power saving (waking up when motion is detected). Best thing you can do is try to reposition camera to cover approach better or buy another cam to cover both areas. The thing with security cams is you can never have enough coverage and always want more.

I use my eufy cam to cover the driveway, and use a nest hello doorbell to cover deliveries. It catches package deliveries and because it is always on, you can scroll feed and see truck pull up in road, get out, walk up, drop package and walk back to truck and drive off

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We are working on minimizing this time, which we will be addressing in future software updates. Keep a keen eye out ( :

Has there been any update on this? My new Euphy doorbell can miss most of my walk up a 20’ approach side walk to the front door. Typically, it will get a sec, maybe 2 if I’m unnaturally slow, of my side passing into the house.

Running on Battery only. Will hardwire power improve the response time? Really would love to see a 3sec or so pre-event video on hardwire power.

Had plans to use Euphy for cams around the house but wanted to eval the doorbell first. I think all the features are great except the most important - it misses most of the video I want to see. Will consider this a $165 failed experiment, if there isn’t a work around.

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Any update on this? It has been 18 months since the issue was first raised. I just installed two cameras in my front yard. One camera captured a video starting with a UPS guy in the middle of my drive way walking to my front door with a box in his hands. Another camera only captured box on the ground after the UPS left my front porch. I setup the motion detection sensitivity to 95 on both cameras. I tested a few other scenarios. It seems that all the video recording started with significant delay from when the motion should be detected. Did I get defective cameras? What could be done to fix the issue?

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I’d like to see an improvement on this issue also. Just installed 3 and ordered 3 more. The delay is maddening. Outdoor motion sensors (water proof) that could trigger a selected camera or two would go a long way towards solving this problem. I bet it would sell like hotcakes.

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So where’s the update to improve upon this issue??? been well over a year already seems to still start recording really late. Also if the camera are kept plugged in at all time why can’t there be a 3second pre-record functionality available if the consumer chooses to go along with this choice, as it will certainly fix all the issues faced at the moement with late startups and recordings from the camera. Can there be an update with this feature in the near future with the Eufycam E as soon as possible as we’re practically suffering with unusable data coming in from the late start-ups and recordings of the cameras.

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I am too getting a bit annoyed at the delay, now trying to see if changing to All alerts will aid rather than Person alerts as this would need a bit of a delay to process.
Also on one camera I set an automation to trigger the other 2 nearby in hope it will catch movement sooner, works but still a delay thus the change to All alerts on that camera, almost using it as a motion detector. (might get some false alerts now thought, its all a balancing act)

A pre-recording of 3 seconds makes sense but I assume the cameras would need to be recording at all times and thus would drain the battery a lot faster or would require local storage on device to do this if not already.
I notice the delay more when people rush to front door and the recording is useless on 2/3 cameras and they seem to be well into the detection zone or even past it for one camera.
I assume criminals may know this and if they ran to front door to steal a parcel the camera might only catch their backs by time recording starts…hrmmm

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Glad I came across this old thread before my return period expired. As of 6/2020 this has not been addressed and is still a major issue.

Will be returning all my Eufy security gear.

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Hmm…this is a major let down. Approaching the doorbell the recording starts too late. Fix thuis please.

I can see that this thread began 2 years ago and I am seeing this problem with my battery powered door bell. Visitor comes in, drops items through the letter box (3-4 seconds) and turns around and the camera starts recording after the visitor turns around and starts to leave. Therefore there is no way it detects or captures the visitors face. This defeats the whole purpose of having installed a video door bell for security if it cannot do what it is supposed to do. Therefore I have two questions.

  1. What’s has been done in 2 years to fix this?
  2. What is going to be done to fix this and when will it be available?
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You are not alone. I have 3 Eufy 2c cameras installed. My experience sometimes the camera doesn’t even record the event. My son has hard time sleeping these days and every time he comes into our room in the middle of the night the camera some times sees the motion and records the event. Most of the time it records when he leaves our room. It’s been hit or mostly miss for me. Also, adding these cameras to the Apple Home eats away the battery life. Even before I paired it with the Apple Home, I was eating through the battery… I installed the cameras in end of February and I had to charged the batteries twice already.

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Still no fix, or even an official response. Disappointing, and makes it hard to recommend these cameras to others.

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I’ve had my cameras for about 3/4 months and I find the one outside is the problem one. It’s connected to power but it’s the one with the most delayed motion recorded and sometimes missed recordings. It is wasn’t for my Ring doorbell and my Eufy indoor camera that points to my front door I would miss a lot of motion in the front of my house. The delay is ridiculously slow. Like others have stated, I might get someone halfway up my driveway already after they have drove up, parked and started walking towards my door. And this is the 2K camera, the long one.

New to EufyCam. I’m glad to see this issue is not just with our cameras. Eufy needs to find a workaround!

I wonder if it is a hardware or software issue, some lighting motion detectors I use (also battery powered) seem to act pretty fast and switch on the lights ‘instantly’.
If the motion detector (hardware) in the camera is the problem, then I don’t have any hope for a fix.
If it’s just the trigger that let’s the software start the recording which is too slow, then maybe there can be a solution.

Anyway it would be nice to hear something from official side right here.

I have a less than perfect workaround: I bought a eufy motion sensor ($30) and mounted it outside the field of view of the eufy 2C that is trained on my porch. I then set up automation in the app to trigger the camera when the motion sensor detects something. Anyone that approaches my porch from the street activates the motion sensor which triggers the camera before the person enters the camera field of view. Now the camera records a full record of the approach to my porch.
Since the motion sensor is an indoor, unsealed design, I wrapped it in tape to waterproof it. Time will tell if this works and the sensor survives outdoors.

Following…I too find the lag time an issue.

One suggestion for multi-camera users is to use the Automation feature to trigger other cameras to start recording when one camera detects motion. For example, I have two cameras in the front of my house and two in back. When the back “East” camera detects motion and start recording, it triggers the back “West” camera to start recording too. This way, if the person/animal moves into the West camera’s zone, it is already recording due to the East camera trigger. This auto trigger is set up on both cameras. I have the two in front of the house (garage and front door) linked to auto trigger each other as well.

I also have set multiple zones on each camera and set sensitivity to High (7) and “All Motions.” Power Management has also be customized to keep the recording rolling longer.

To the Eufy Product Manager: I would sacrifice battery life for faster recording start time.

Geez oh petes… does anyone at Anker even read these threads?!? Same issue here… SUPER Annoying deficiency in the Doorbell Cam.

I was going to start a new post about this issue since I am a recently new eufy user, but lucky I did a quick search first. I have the wireless doorbell and a eufyCam2 Pro, and it is a little annoying that the delay issue is still not addressed :frowning_face: