GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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The first Matter camera is here — sort of. Camera support came to the smart home standard last year, and Aqara’s Camera Hub G350 is the first to support it. The G350, which was announced at CES, launched this week and is a pan-and-tilt indoor security camera with up to 4K video resolution.
Today, the G350 only supports Matter on Samsung SmartThings, as none of the other platforms have added Matter 1.5 yet. I’ve only had the camera setup for a day, and it took several firmware updates before I could connect it as a Matter camera. So far, all it can do is stream a live feed, which is far less than what Samsung promises Matter cameras in SmartThings will do. But there’s plenty of potential here.
The G350 has impressive specs for an indoor camera. It boasts dual-lenses — a 4K wide-angle lens and a 2.5K telephoto lens — and up to 9x hybrid zoom. A compact pan-tilt mechanism provides 360-degree coverage with auto-tracking for people and pets, and a physical lens shutter activates when the camera is turned off.
Along with Matter, the Aqara G350 supports Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service and can connect to Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and other platforms via the cloud. You can also store footage locally on a microSD card, and RTSP support enables streaming video to platforms like Home Assistant and NVRs. Aqara offers its own cloud storage service, which is end-to-end encrypted.
The Aqara G350 works with Matter, but currently, only Samsung SmartThings supports Matter cameras.
While the G350 worked perfectly in the Aqara app, my Matter experience with it was less so. My first attempts to onboard the camera directly to SmartThings by scanning its Matter code failed, adding the device as a hub rather than a camera. (Like many of Aqara’s cameras, the G350 is also a smart home hub for Aqara’s Zigbee devices, plus it’s a Matter controller, bridge, and Thread Border Router.)
Instead, I added it to Aqara’s app. Here, it showed as a camera and eventually offered me several firmware updates, one of which brought Matter 1.5 support, finally allowing me to add it to SmartThings as a camera using Matter’s multi-admin feature. (You’ll need a SmartThings Matter Controller to connect to the platform.)
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