[REVIEW] Imilab EC3 is a rotating camera with WiFi support and excellent image quality

In our editorial office, we tested the Imilab EC3 outdoor camera. It offers 3 MPx resolution, remote horizontal rotation, intelligent person detection, and WiFi support. Is it better than the wireless camera Imilab EC2, which we already tested?

Thanks to AI integration, Imilab offers home security products such as security cameras. Today, this brand also has smartwatch KW66 in its lineup.

Where to buy the Imilab EC3 camera?

We purchased the Imilab EC3 security camera from our partner Banggood. At the time we placed the order, it was available in a Czech warehouse, from where it was shipped to us and delivered express—very quickly. On the third day after ordering, we had the camera at home. Thanks to the European warehouse, we didn’t pay any extra charges like customs duty or VAT, and the camera was delivered straight to our doorstep by the courier.

Currently, the mentioned seller only has it in stock in the Chinese warehouse, but on the Imilab store on AliExpress, the camera is available in a Belgian warehouse with duty-free shipping and a very attractive price. You can also use a 5,06 € Store coupon.

Basic parameters at a glance

It’s a security camera that doesn’t come with a built-in battery, so it needs to be powered from the mains. When it comes to the connection to the router, the camera supports 2.4 GHz WiFi, but it also has a cable with an RJ-45 port. In this case, you can choose whether to connect it by cable or wirelessly. Imilab EC3 is the European version of the camera, which is sold in China under the name Imilab EN2.

Since it’s an outdoor camera, it’s well protected against water and weather conditions thanks to IP66 certification. It can work at temperatures from -20 to 60 °C, which is absolutely sufficient for all seasons in our climate.

As for video, the maximum supported resolution is Full HD, meaning 1920 x 1080 px. The camera’s lens has an excellent f/1.6 aperture and a viewing angle of 110°. Even if it may not seem like it at first glance, the camera is rotating. While it can only rotate in the horizontal direction within a range of 180°, it will help you cover a larger area.

The manufacturer states it offers motion detection and person detection resolution from other movements. Videos are automatically saved to the cloud or to a memory card. The maximum supported capacity of the memory card is 256 GB. There’s no shortage of a microphone and a speaker for two-way audio. How did this camera do in our test? Is it better than the Imilab EC2, which we last tested? Keep reading and you’ll find out.

Package contents and build quality

The camera comes in a white box with dimensions 24.40 x 12.20 x 11.40 cm. Inside, everything is neatly packed in smaller boxes. One box contains the charging cable with an adapter. The cable is 5 m long, which earns the camera our first plus point. The second, flat box hides the user manual, a small screwdriver, screws with wall plugs, a sticker with holes for precise drilling, and the camera joint.

Under it, the actual camera sits in a white housing, along with its base that’s mounted to a wall or any other surface where you want to install the camera. From the camera, a short cable comes out and splits into two at the end. One cable ends with a connector for electrical power, and the other is used to connect the internet cable.

The cables are rigid, but also flexible enough. Since the camera also has WiFi, the box was missing an RJ45 port cover, which will be unused in many cases, because we assume most customers will use the WiFi connection instead.

The camera lens is covered with a transparent protective film. At the bottom, you’ll find a speaker and a memory card slot, which are hidden under a small cover. Two WiFi antennas let you adjust their tilt.

As we’re used to with Xiaomi portfolio products, the packaging is very precise and the camera is well protected in the box against damage during shipping. Build quality is good; we have no complaints about it.

Camera mounting

The installation is a bit more complicated than with the Imilab EC2 camera we tested last time, but it’s still easy and anyone can handle it. For the base that attaches to the wall or any object where you want to place the camera, you need to drill 4 holes. You can do it without any problem using the included template in the form of a sticker, where the holes are marked.

From the top part of the base, you need to unscrew the white oval cover, into which you insert the metal arm with a ball end to adjust the camera’s tilt. The other end of the metal arm is screwed onto the camera using a small screw. As we mentioned above, the package includes screws and a small screwdriver.

A 5 m long cable runs from the camera for connecting to the power mains. We placed the camera on our garden cottage, right on the window sill, where we had already prepared a wooden stand for the camera. For the cable, we drilled a small hole into the frame of the plastic window, and to be safe we taped the end of the internet cable with insulating tape, since no cover for this port is included in the box. Even though it’s probably sealed in some way, the contacts are exposed and over time could get dirty due to bad weather.

In the end, we only adjusted the camera’s vertical tilt using the joint and tightened the cover around it so the camera wouldn’t move. We do need to note that with the camera, it’s still possible to move it slightly in the joint even after fully screwing the white cover around the joint. After setting the vertical tilt, we kept securing the joint, but the camera would still shift slightly downward under its own weight by about a millimeter. If you need to set the camera’s vertical position precisely, get ready for strong nerves.

First power-on and adding to the app

The Imilab EC3 camera uses the Xiaomi Home (Mi Home) app. Adding it is very simple. Just select the Imilab EC3 camera from the list of devices in the app or scan the QR code found in the manual or on a label you’ll find on the camera cable. Another option is to let the app search for cameras, which can recognize devices nearby. We used this method because as soon as we clicked to add a device, the app found the camera automatically.

In the next step, you choose the WiFi network the camera will connect to and enter the access password. Then the camera connects to the app on your phone and, via a voice prompt, announces a numeric code that you need to enter in the app. The voice is very clear, so you can handle it even with weaker English.

In the final step, you select the room where you want to add the camera in the app and the camera name under which you’ll see it. We added it to the Garden room, where we already have an Imilab EC2 camera, and we set the camera name to the model name.

Right after pairing, we were offered a firmware update for the camera. It took a few minutes, but no action was required from our side.

App and its options

Once you open the camera from the home screen in the Xiaomi Home app, you’ll get a live stream and the current data transmission. You can switch it to full-screen mode. Under the live preview, there are buttons for rotating in the horizontal direction. The rotation is very smooth and responds immediately to commands from the app.

The live stream offers several options, such as switching to sleep, choosing the stream quality (auto, low, and HD), turning the sound on/off, starting an alarm, taking a photo, or recording a video. Manually created photos or videos are then saved to the album.

There’s also an alarm function that lets you turn on a manual 10-second sound alarm. The volume could be a bit higher, but it’s not weak—the alarm can be heard from up to a 100-meter distance. It can also be used for automation, where the alarm can trigger automatically after motion is detected.

At the bottom, the interface offers several items. The main one is the phone icon in the center, which is used for voice transmission. You’ll also find monitoring, playback, the album, and shortcuts for quick access to some settings.

Monitoring hides all videos recorded based on motion detection. You can filter them by the day they were recorded, or by whether it was human movement or any movement in the camera’s field of view.

If continuous recording is enabled in the settings, you’ll find the video under playback. The videos are split by days, and within each day you get a timeline that lets you scrub through the video. You can also play the video in fast-forward, up to a maximum of 16x. Continuous recording is available only if there’s a memory card installed in the camera. Otherwise, only short videos are recorded after motion is detected, and they’re saved to the cloud.

Recording quality and notifications

The video quality was a pleasant surprise for us, because considering the purchase price, it’s truly at a high level. The camera has a sufficiently wide field of view and also allows for a slight zoom-in. We’ve also included a sample video recorded during the day.

As for notifications, the phone always shows the time when motion was detected. The image quality in notification videos is worse, and we didn’t find any option in the settings to change the quality. That’s probably because they’re saved to the cloud. Since we had a memory card in the camera, where continuous footage was stored, the lower quality of the notification videos didn’t bother us.

Monitoring can be completely turned off. When it’s enabled, several settings are available. The first one is choosing the time when monitoring should be on. Options include the whole day, daytime monitoring, nighttime, and you can also set custom time ranges.

The app also allows you to adjust the sensitivity of alerts. There’s high and low sensitivity. With high sensitivity, you get a really large number of notifications for every little movement—just because the wind is blowing or something briefly passes in front of the camera. Low sensitivity should only notify you about bigger movements, but even with this option we were still getting plenty of unnecessary motion alerts when nothing was happening.

You can also set an interval between individual notifications in the range of 3 – 30 minutes. If there is continuous movement within the camera’s field of view, it’s better to set a higher interval so that notifications are reduced to the minimum amount.

The last 2 options are kind of strange. The first enables notifications when motion is detected; the second option specifies notifications only for those that include human movement. But if you don’t tick the first option, the second one is automatically hidden, which makes no sense. We would rather have an option where you only receive notifications if there’s human movement in front of the camera.

Video saving, cloud, and memory card

Videos from notifications are saved only to the cloud in lower quality. In the current version, you can’t affect this option in any way.

Continuous recording is saved to a memory card. We used a card with a capacity of 64 GB and it filled up after 8 days. You can check the storage status in the settings. Here, we occasionally got an error message in the app saying that there is no memory card in the camera, even though it was there. After restarting the app, the same thing happened again, until some time later when the storage status finally showed up. If the app shows this error, no recording is available in the Playback item.

When the memory card fills up, the oldest recordings start getting overwritten. Videos are placed on the card in clearly organized folders, whose names always include the date and the time when they were recorded. For example, all videos captured on 24.1.2021 and in the 17-th hour are stored in the folder named 2021012417, and videos from the 18-th hour will have the 2021012418 folder. Each video is 1 minutes long, so each folder contains 60 videos (60 x 1 minutes).

Motion detection recognition samples and tests

As we already mentioned, the manufacturer states that the camera uses artificial intelligence, which allows it to distinguish whether it detected movement by people or just normal movement of leaves, trees, or animals. Based on our experience, it doesn’t work very well though. We were getting too many person-detection notifications even though there was nobody in the video. Even at low sensitivity, we still received quite a few unnecessary movement alerts.

We tested motion detection first by walking along the fence at the top part of the frame. Many cameras only start recording movement somewhere around the middle of the image, or when a person is already very close to the camera. The fence is approximately 30 m away from the camera as the crow flies. In this image, we marked the route we followed:

In the video, you can see when the camera captured our movement and started recording:

For the second test, we went through the gate onto the property and came all the way right under the camera—as close as possible. We wanted to know when the camera would detect movement, and therefore what we would see in the movement notification. Again, we showed our route in a photo.

In the video, you can watch the footage from the motion notification. The camera recorded only a 2-second video, but it captured us right at the gate, and the rest is available in the recording.

In the final attempt, we wanted to see whether the camera would capture us on video if we pass only along the corner of its field of view. We also marked the route on a photo:

The camera recorded our movement, even though not immediately, but the person is visible in the video.

We repeated the test once more using the same route—this time just quickly running through. We received the notification, but we can’t be seen in the short video. Overall, we’re satisfied mainly because the camera can detect movement even at a fairly long distance. The Imilab EC3 does not allow you to set the notification video length, but it determines the duration automatically based on the scene. Sometimes the video is only 2 seconds, other times it’s almost 20 seconds.

Night vision and audio transmission quality

Night vision turns on automatically or manually, depending on the settings. Image quality is at a good level—significantly better compared to the Imilab EC2 camera. Since we placed the camera in the garden near the forest, where there is no street lighting, the camera was in complete darkness, yet visibility in the videos was still very good even at longer distances. The problem is with moving people—they appear slightly translucent, especially at greater distances.

For a better idea, check out the following short recording.

The quality of two-way audio transmission is good—much better than the Imilab EC2 camera. The audio from the camera is clear, without interruptions, but there is a noticeable slight delay, which is most likely caused by the weaker internet connection we have in the garden. We’d welcome the option to adjust the volume to a higher level, since the sound isn’t very loud. As for the audio in the videos captured by the camera’s microphone, it’s very good. Sounds are clearly audible in the videos.

More settings

Let’s go through at least some of the settings that are available in the app. In the camera settings, you can turn the warning/indicator LED on or off, or enable a notification that appears if you’re connected via mobile data. You’ll also find a sleep mode setting that can be enabled during specific times, or the option to create a WiFi hotspot. However, this is only available if the camera is connected to the router via cable.

Next, you’ll find the image settings. You can enable or disable the display of the date and time in the video, and also turn image distortion on/off caused by the wide-angle lens. There’s also the option to rotate the image, and to turn on/off the mode for improving dynamic range, which uses software to enhance underexposed and overexposed areas.

In the settings, you can change the camera name, its location in the Xiaomi Home app, share the device with another user, check for updates, or set up automation if you have multiple smart devices available. Access to the camera can also be protected with a password.

Final verdict

The Imilab EC3 security camera is a great choice for monitoring outdoor areas. It offers good image quality even at night, movement notifications, and two-way audio transmission.

If the manufacturer improved the resolution of people versus normal movement in front of the camera via a firmware update, it would be a perfect security camera. In its current state, the only thing that bothered us was far too frequent notifications where there was no real movement that would actually be interesting for us.

Given the price, though, we can only recommend the camera.