TP-Link Tapo D225 Video Intercom Camera Review

The Tapo D225 is something of a unicorn. The new flagship doorbell from TP-Link’s Tapo smart home brand, this dual-powered camera offers 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 the need for a hub and especially at this price. Plus, most companies charge you monthly for all those smart alerts.

Tapo can be battery operated or hardwired to your doorbell wiring (though it’s not a true wired doorbell). You need a microSD card for free recording and CVR, and your doorbell must be hardwired to record continuously. There’s a cloud storage option starting at $2.79 per month for 30 days of video history (cheaper than most competitors). The Tapo D225 launches today alongside the cheaper ($59.99) battery-only Tapo D210, which has no CVR or parcel detection.

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

Tapo D225 is a 2K video doorbell that, as mentioned, works both wired and wireless. By connecting it to your doorbell wiring you can enable continuous video recording, but this feature requires bypassing your existing doorbell (a plug-in doorbell is included). It also slowly charges the 10,000mAh battery, so if the power goes out, the chime will still work.

If you go with the battery only, Tapo says it can last up to eight months on a single charge, but you’ll need to remove the entire doorbell to recharge. CVR doesn’t work wirelessly. Instead, the doorbell can record clips locally to a microSD card or to the cloud.

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

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

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

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 on the camera for a person.

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

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

I tested the Tapo D225 alongside Tapo’s other new doorbell, the $59.99 D210. This one is battery-powered with a similar design but without the hard-wiring option (so no CVR). Its battery and field of view are smaller, and it has a 16:9 rectangular aspect ratio that shows less of my porch. The D210 offers free local recording with a microSD card and free alerts for people, pets, and vehicles, but 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, dropping off a package, ringing the doorbell, and walking away, while the D210 started recording the moment they were at the door. This more complete picture makes the D225 the better option for the extra $40.

While Tapo calls the Always On mode continuous recording, I’ve found it’s not 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 doesn’t have event recording enabled. The Tapo version does have a timeline, but when I scroll to a time when no events were detected, it skips to the most recent event.

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

The D225 doesn’t have the polished video and accurate alerts that pricier competitors like Ring, Nest, and Ecobee have, thanks to features like radar motion detection and more advanced artificial intelligence. 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 hardwire the Tapo, free local recording is still a nice feature. Other brands offer it, including Eufy, Blink, and Aqara, but their doorbells are 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 can’t use your current doorbell, it’s a good, budget-friendly option for keeping a constant eye on what’s happening at your door.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge