Tapo’s new flagship doorbell camera does more for less

The Tapo D225 is something of a unicorn. The newest flagship doorbell from TP-Link’s smart home brand Tapo, this dual-powered camera has free 24/7 local recording and free smart alerts for people, packages, and pets — all for under $100. Free continuous video recording (CVR) is almost unheard of, especially without requiring a hub, and especially at this price. Plus, most companies make you pay monthly for all those smart alerts.

The Tapo can work on battery or be hardwired to your doorbell wiring (although it’s not a true wired doorbell). You need a microSD card for free recording and CVR, and the doorbell must be wired to record continuously. There is the option of cloud storage starting at $2.79 per month for 30 days of video history (cheaper than most of the competition). The Tapo D225 launches today alongside the more budget, battery-only Tapo D210 ($59.99), which doesn’t have CVR or package detection.

That continuous recording feature, which Tapo calls Always On Mode, is the D225’s best feature. It gets around the back-of-the-head problem that afflicts most doorbells that don’t use wires for continuous power. They take a few seconds to wake up when they detect motion, so sometimes all you see is the back of the person’s head as they walk away. 

The Tapo D225 is a 2K-capable video doorbell that, as mentioned, works both with and without wires. Hooking it up to your doorbell wiring lets you enable continuous video recording, but that feature requires you to bypass your existing chime (a plug-in chime is included). It also trickle-charges the 10,000mAh battery, so if your power goes out the buzzer will continue to work.

If you go battery-only, Tapo says it can last up to eight months on a single charge, but you will have to remove the whole doorbell to recharge it. CVR doesn’t work in wireless mode. Instead, the doorbell can record clips locally to a microSD card or the cloud.

I’ve been testing the D225 for about a week and have been impressed with its daytime video quality, wide 180-degree field of view, and square head-to-toe aspect ratio that shows my entire porch without too much of a fish-eye effect.

Night vision is also good, and you can turn on an LED spotlight for color night vision (although this resulted in slightly more distortion). I was disappointed there was no HDR imaging — some faces were in shadow on my covered front porch and the background is a bit overexposed — but overall, it has clear, bright images and a good zoom.

The Tapo sends speedy alerts for motion events and can be set to ring your phone as if you are getting a phone call when someone presses the doorbell. A couple of other brands offer this useful feature, including Arlo, and it makes it harder to miss someone at your door. The two-way talk on the Tapo is clear and easy to use.

The smart alerts for people, vehicles, pets, and packages were largely accurate in testing. I did get a few false alerts — including some scary ones in the middle of the night when the D225 kept mistaking a gecko crawling over the camera for a person. 

I was impressed with the Tapo app, which has a nice UI and is easy to navigate. It pulls up live and recorded video quickly and has a ton of useful customization features to tailor the doorbells to your needs.

These include quick replies, a privacy mode that turns the camera off, and the ability to schedule notifications, set detection zones, and specify what type of alerts you want to get from each one (so, only notify me if you see people in this zone and packages in this zone). Tapo has an extensive smart home ecosystem, so you can connect your doorbell to automations that control Tapo devices like smart lights, robot vacuum cleaners, and more.

I tested the Tapo D225 alongside Tapo’s other new doorbell: the $59.99 D210. This is battery-powered with a similar design but no wiring option (so no CVR). Its battery and field of view are smaller, and it has a rectangular 16:9 aspect ratio that shows less of my porch. The D210 does offer free local recording with a microSD card and free alerts for people, pets, and vehicles, but there’s no package detection. While it has fewer features, testing them side by side helped me evaluate the D225’s Always On mode.

When wired in Always On mode, the D225 showed me the entire sequence of someone approaching the door, putting a package down, pressing the doorbell, and leaving, whereas the D210 started recording the moment they were at the door. This more complete picture makes the D225 the better option for $40 more.

While Tapo calls Always On mode continuous recording, I found it wasn’t as useful as the 24/7 recording Nest offers on its wired doorbell. With Nest, I can scroll through a timeline of the day and see everything that happened, even if it didn’t trigger an event recording. The Tapo version has a timeline, but when I scroll to a time where there was no detected event, it jumps me forward to the most recent event. 

This could be fixed with a firmware update (I was testing on a beta app), but as of now, it’s not “true” continuous recording. However, it’s free (Nest charges $15 a month), and it’s still better than the wake-on-motion recording of most battery doorbells.

The D225 lacks the more refined video and precise alerts that more expensive competitors such as Ring, Nest, and Ecobee have, thanks to features like radar motion detection and more advanced AI. There’s also no facial recognition, something Nest, Eufy, and doorbells that support HomeKit Secure Video offer.

But free CVR is a great feature, even if it’s not perfect. Lorex and Reolink offer it on their wired doorbells, but you need one of their NVR systems. If you can’t wire the Tapo, free local recording is still a good feature. More brands offer this — including Eufy, Blink, and Aqara — but their doorbells are either more expensive or you need additional hardware. Few also offer all the same free smart alerts. 

Overall, the Tapo D225 is an impressive doorbell for the price, with useful features that don’t require a subscription or extra hardware. If you don’t mind its size and that you can’t really use your existing chime, it’s a good, inexpensive option for keeping a continuous eye on what’s happening at your door. 

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge