This is the cheapest floodlight security cam you can buy… but should you?

Budget smart home company Wyze announced its second generation wired floodlight camera this week, and it brings some significant upgrades over the first gen. These include bumping up the video resolution to 2K HD from 1080p, increasing the camera’s field of view to 160 degrees, and delivering up to 2800 lumens of light with the two floodlights, plus the option for using them as ambient lighting and not just security lighting.

The Wyze Cam Floodlight V2 is available to buy now for $83.99 plus shipping ($10 less than the V1 is currently listed for but the same price it launched at). But a launch special of $53.99 plus shipping makes it one of the cheapest floodlight cameras you can buy. Blink has a wired floodlight camera for $100, but it’s only 1080p video and you need its sync module for local storage. Ring, Reolink, and Lorex all have good floodlight cameras with the same or better video quality and local storage options, but they are well over twice the price of Wyze and Blink.

But should you buy it? Wyze has had some serious security incidents recently that have caused a number of review sites to pull their recommendations for its camera products.

The previous generation of the Wyze Cam Floodlight, the V1, is the only Wyze product The Verge recommends in our buying guides (it’s our current pick for the best budget floodlight camera), and we haven’t pulled our recommendation for two reasons. First, it’s a dedicated outdoor camera (it needs to be wired to an exterior junction box, and it would blind you if you tried to use it inside), and exterior security cameras raise fewer privacy concerns than indoor ones. Second, it can record locally to a microSD card (up to 256GB) with the option of enabling 24/7 continuous video recording. This footage can be viewed in the app and Wyze tells us it remains entirely local, with noimages stored or routed via its cloud. We are in the process of updating this guide and will be testing this new model.

Wyze spokesperson Kyle Christensen also told us that the company is working on additional security efforts and more effective customer outreach for when a breach does occur. Wyze is not unique in being a smart home company to have a security breach, but its failure to tell customers about it in a timely manner is a concern, one which caused The Verge’s Sean Hollister to ditch his Wyze cameras completely.

We are waiting to hear back from Wyze on exactly what these efforts are. In the meantime, I would urge caution with Wyze cameras if you don’t plan on using local storage.

If you do stick with the local option, the new offering is compelling. In addition to 2K resolution, it offers full-color night vision, two-way talk, and a 105db siren. A 270-degree PIR-powered motion detection will trigger the lights before the camera’s 160-degree field of view is triggered, helping make sure you see all the action.

It’s a shame the new model doesn’t have the feature of the V1 where you could hook up a battery-powered Wyze cam to the floodlight camera to keep it powered and get more visibility around corners. But it was kind of a janky solution and the V2 has a cleaner, more integrated look. If you need a wider view, cameras with 360-degree pan and tilt features (like the Eufy Floodlight Cam Pro 2 or Eufy’s battery-powered 360 Solo) are probably a better option.

As with all Wyze cameras, the new floodlight camera works with Amazon Alexa and Google Home for voice control and smart home integration. If you do decide to opt for Wyze’s cloud storage service (from $1.67 a month), in addition to 14 days of video storage you also get alerts for people, pets, and vehicles and the option to turn on a Vision AI feature that can tailor how the floodlights react to different events. This lets you set the lights to activate only when the camera detects a person or vehicle, not a pet, for example.

This feature is also offered on Wyze’s other floodlight camera, the $150 Wyze Cam Floodlight Pro, which has an even higher resolution (2.5K), a wider field of view (180 degrees), and three floodlights instead of two, plus the option of 5GHz Wi-Fi connectivity instead of just 2.4GHz on the non-pro models. But for under $60, the value the new Wyze Cam Floodlight V2 offers is hard to beat.