If you already have doorbell wiring and you want the widest field of view available in a video doorbell without committing to a monthly subscription, the S4 is absolutely worth considering.
Anker has been building up some of the better security cameras and smart doorbells through its Eufy brand, which is now being pulled into the new unified Anker name. The latest of those is the new Anker Eufy Video Doorbell S4, which comes in at $299.99, and is a wired doorbell that offers a 180°×180° panoramic lens, a field of view that genuinely covers floor to ceiling and wall to wall in one frame. It replaces the dual-camera approach of the older eufy E340, and Anker calls it the “world’s first VR doorbell.”
The S4 is part of eufy’s broader Edge 5.0 Yard Protection System, a five-product lineup that connects through the HomeBase S380. At $299.99, this is a doorbell competing with the ~$230 Ring Battery Doorbell Pro and the upcoming $249.95 LG Video Doorbell Wired from Apple’s Home Collection, both of which ask for less money, though each comes with its own trade-offs. Eufy has built plenty of well-loved smart security cameras and doorbells in the past. Is the Video Doorbell S4 one of them? Or are its new features more of a gimmick than something that’s actually useful?
The Anker Eufy Video Doorbell S4 captures a wide view and supports local video recording, and while it doesn’t have the sleekest design, it’s still full-featured enough to be worth buying.
What we liked
- Wide view with one lens
- Local video storage
- Easy to use app
- Works with a range of smart home ecosystems
- Handy tracking features
What we did not
- Wired-only connection
- Design is a little plasticky
- A little pricey
Design and installation
The Eufy Video Doorbell S4 isn’t necessarily small, but it’s not ugly either. It’s a tall, narrow unit at 50.8 × 167 × 38.6 mm. It’s finished in a smooth black plastic exterior, but it doesn’t look overly cheap. That plastic is coupled with a large camera lens at the top of its face and the chime button with an LED ring around it at the bottom.
Installation requires existing 16 to 24 VAC doorbell wiring rated between 10VA and 40VA. There’s no battery-only option here, and the included 2,600mAh internal battery exists purely as a backup during power outages; you won’t be able to rely on it outside of that, and you can’t charge it without wiring the doorbell in. That’s a meaningful step back from the eufy E340, which offered battery-or-wired flexibility and gave renters or people in older homes without doorbell wiring a way in. If your door doesn’t have wires, the S4 simply isn’t for you.
Actually installing it is pretty straightforward. Like other video doorbells, you’ll simply remove your existing doorbell and attach its wires to the S4. Unlike some other video doorbells, you will have to bypass any mechanical chime that you have; the S4 doesn’t pass power through to a traditional one. The app setup is pretty easy too: open the app, select ‘add a new device,’ and follow the instructions. The full installation and setup process took me around 15 minutes, including removing my old doorbell.
The box includes a mounting bracket, a 15° mount adapter, extension cables, chime bypass jumpers, a detaching pin, and eufy’s Chime 2, a small plug-in indoor chime. The S4 is incompatible with existing mechanical and digital chimes, so the Chime 2 is the only way anyone inside the house hears a press.
Camera
Of course, the big reason to buy this video doorbell over another is the camera tech that it offers. The S4 shoots footage at 3072 × 3072 with HDR. The big advantage here is the large field-of-view. It has a field of view of 180° horizontal by 180° vertical, from a single lens. Other video doorbells that have offered similar fields of view have had to stitch together footage from multiple cameras.
So, what’s the advantage of this? Well, the big one is coverage. You’ll see everything from the doorstep right in front of the doorbell to a person’s face, even when they’re right near your door. And if you have a wide driveway, you should see all of it too. Basically, anything that’s not the wall the doorbell is mounted on will be visible.
That’s a lot more than what most competitors offer. The $249.99 Ring Battery Doorbell 4K Pro gives you 4K resolution but a 140° square field of view: sharper pixels, but a narrower window on the world. Most other video doorbells sit around 155° or less, and usually only on one axis. The S4’s approach trades raw resolution for coverage, and in a doorbell context, seeing more of your property is arguably more useful than resolving finer detail in a smaller frame, especially given the fact that the resolution here is still quite high.
The image quality itself was pretty good too. Resolution isn’t as high as some others, but it was still crisp enough to see even further-away details. And with HDR, footage wasn’t completely blown out by the sun in the shot, meaning that you could still see detail in the highlights and shadows.
There’s a slight catch – the footage is currently captured at 15 frames per second. Eufy says it will begin recording at 24 fps through a firmware update in the near future, which will be helpful given the fact that 15 fps is pretty low; however, we don’t yet know when that update will happen. That said, the framerate didn’t really bother me in day-to-day life -it’s still plenty for security purposes.
It performed pretty well in low lighting too. It captures decent color and detail, though faster-moving subjects were blurrier than in brighter lighting. That’s pretty normal, though, and closer subjects still retained enough detail to see whatever is happening outside your door. Additionally, the doorbell has two night vision modes -a color one that is supposed to brighten the environment, and an infrared one that records in black and white but captures sharper details. I stuck with the color one, which is the default, though in testing I found that faster-moving objects were sharper with the infrared mode enabled instead. It’s worth trying out both.
Performance and AI tracking
Eufy’s OmniTrack system is the S4’s real differentiator, and it works within that wide panoramic frame. When someone walks up your path, the auto-framing digitally crops and follows them, keeping the person centered as they approach, step onto the porch, and bend down to leave a package. It detects humans, general motion, packages, and faces. Expanded AI recognition, adding vehicles, pets, and more granular package categorization, requires pairing the doorbell with a HomeBase S380.
The detection hardware combines radar for longer-range sensing with dual PIR sensors near the door, and Eufy claims this combination helps filter minor disturbances such as insects or rain. You can set the detection zones to cover a 120° field out to roughly 8 meters. Rather than dragging rectangular zones over a flat image, I could “paint” alert areas onto the fisheye view, which is a smarter approach given the lens distortion.
It wasn’t flawless, though. OmniTrack generally worked quite well, though it sometimes took a few seconds to kick in; it doesn’t seem to track retroactively, and it didn’t always start tracking when a subject entered the frame from the edge of the video. However, as someone approached, it usually kicked in fine.
Distance-based alerts are quite well thought out. You can set the S4 to ignore a person walking past on the sidewalk but trigger an alert when someone is halfway up your walk. Package delivery and pickup alerts both work, though the pickup detection is arguably more useful: knowing when a package disappears from your porch matters more than knowing when one arrives, since your phone already got a delivery notification from the carrier. The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro offers its own package detection through Alexa Plus, but that’s tied to Amazon’s ecosystem and a Ring Protect subscription for full functionality.
Overall, the AI and tracking features worked quite well, especially given the fact that they were running locally, through a HomeBase I had. That said, of course, the HomeBase costs extra, so it may not be worth buying for you.
Software
The Eufy app is where VR Mode lives, and it’s worth separating the VR novelty from the underlying experience. When a visitor presses the doorbell, your phone receives a notification styled like an incoming video call. Answer it, and you get a full-screen, borderless panoramic feed with two-way audio. In VR Mode, you pan around the view by physically moving your phone (or a VR headset, if you happen to have one handy) to look in different directions within the 180°×180° frame.
The VR component is, frankly, a novelty. The real value is the wide-angle lens itself and the OmniTrack auto-framing, both of which work in a standard live view too.
As you would expect, VR Mode and OmniTrack are exclusive to the Eufy app. Third-party platforms only get a fixed live view.
Storage and subscriptions
The Eufy Video Doorbell S4 has some built-in storage, which is handy. You’ll get 4GB, which is a little low, but more importantly, there’s a microSD card slot that supports up to 1TB of local storage. You can also record locally by pairing the doorbell with a HomeBase, though you’ll still need external storage connected to that HomeBase to turn it on.
The selection of storage options and local features is one of the best things about both this doorbell and Eufy’s other cameras. That’s because it means you don’t have to subscribe to a cloud service. Ring’s wired doorbells generally need a Ring Protect plan (roughly $5 per month) to save and review video. The S4 stores locally, and detection features aren’t paywalled. Eufy does sell optional cloud backup for anyone who wants an off-site copy, $3.99 monthly or $39.99 annually for one device with 30 days of rolling history, but nothing you need to use the doorbell sits behind it. Over two or three years, $60 to $100 in annual subscription fees adds up, which makes the price somewhat more reasonable.
$299.99 is still steep for a doorbell, though. The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro lists at around $230, and the upcoming $249.95 LG Video Doorbell Wired from Apple’s Home Collection undercuts the S4 by $50. Eufy’s argument is that you’re paying upfront to avoid paying forever, and there’s truth in that, but it requires the buyer to do the long-term math rather than react to sticker price.
Connectivity and smart home
The Video Doorbell S4 connects over Wi-Fi. Eufy recommends at least 8 Mbps upload speed for 3K streaming, and 12 Mbps or more for a smoother experience. It works with Alexa and Google Assistant out of the box, but Apple HomeKit requires a HomeBase S380, adding $200 to the total cost if you don’t already own one (the S4 plus HomeBase S380 bundle runs $499.99 on eufy.com). If you’re in the Eufy ecosystem already, though, you might already have one. With HomeKit enabled, you will lose some of the more advanced viewing features, like the VR mode. Instead, you’ll get a static image, and the video resolution will be limited, though those limitations come from Apple’s side.
The S4 is also compatible with Eufy’s MindBase hub, an on-device AI hub Anker announced earlier this year, that promises natural-language search over recordings, Matter 1.5 control, Thread and Zigbee support, HomeKit Secure Video, and up to 48 TB of storage, all without a monthly fee. The MindBase hasn’t been released just yet, though.
Specifications
From the manufacturer
| Price | $299.99 |
| Video resolution | 3072 × 3072, HDR |
| Field of view | 180° × 180°, single lens |
| Frame rate | 15 fps (24 fps promised in a firmware update) |
| Night vision | Color and infrared modes |
| Motion detection | Radar plus dual PIR, zones up to 120° and about 8 m |
| Storage | 4GB built in, microSD up to 1TB, or HomeBase |
| Power | Wired only: 16 to 24 VAC, 10 to 40VA |
| Backup battery | 2,600mAh (power outages only) |
| Chime | Chime 2 plug-in included; existing chimes not supported |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi (8 Mbps upload recommended for 3K) |
| Smart home | Alexa, Google Assistant; HomeKit via HomeBase S380 |
| Dimensions | 50.8 × 167 × 38.6 mm |
| Cloud plan | Optional: $3.99/month or $39.99/year |
Verdict
The Eufy Video Doorbell S4’s strongest feature isn’t VR. It’s the 180°×180° panoramic lens that replaces the E340’s dual-camera setup with a single, wider view. Paired with OmniTrack auto-framing, distance-based alerts, and subscription-free local storage, it’s a genuinely capable doorbell that addresses real annoyances with the competition. You don’t need to pay monthly to review your footage, and the detection intelligence is good enough to tell a delivery driver from a passerby.
The wired-only requirement limits who can actually buy this doorbell, though, and $299.99 is a lot to spend on a doorbell, especially with the $249.95 LG Video Doorbell Wired arriving in December with Apple’s backing and dual 2.5K cameras.
If you already have doorbell wiring and you want the widest field of view available in a video doorbell without committing to a monthly subscription, the S4 is absolutely worth considering.
Who it is for
Buy it if
- You already have 16 to 24 VAC doorbell wiring
- You want to see your whole porch and driveway in one frame
- You’d rather pay once than pay a monthly subscription
Skip it if
- Your door has no doorbell wiring, or you need a battery-powered doorbell
- You want to keep your existing mechanical or digital chime
- You want the lowest price: the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro and LG Video Doorbell Wired cost less
Who tested it
What we could not test
- These are my observations from using the doorbell at home, not the results of a controlled laboratory test.
- The S4 currently records at 15 fps. Eufy’s promised 24 fps firmware update wasn’t available during testing, so it isn’t reflected here.
- The MindBase hub hasn’t been released yet, so the S4’s compatibility with it wasn’t tested.
- Expanded AI recognition and HomeKit support need a HomeBase S380, which costs extra.
Sources and further reading
- eufy Security 3K Wired Doorbell Cam S4, Amazon listing, price, resolution, field of view and features
Changelog
- Published.
Questions
Does the Eufy Video Doorbell S4 need a subscription?
No. It records locally to 4GB of built-in storage or a microSD card of up to 1TB, and its detection features aren’t paywalled. Optional cloud backup costs $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year for one device.
Can the Eufy Video Doorbell S4 run on battery power?
No. It needs existing 16 to 24 VAC doorbell wiring rated between 10VA and 40VA. Its 2,600mAh battery is only a backup during power outages.
Does the Eufy Video Doorbell S4 work with my existing chime?
No. It isn’t compatible with existing mechanical or digital chimes, so the included plug-in eufy Chime 2 is how you hear a press inside.
Does the Eufy Video Doorbell S4 work with Apple HomeKit?
Only with a HomeBase S380, and HomeKit gets a static image without VR Mode. It works with Alexa and Google Assistant out of the box.
What is the Eufy Video Doorbell S4’s field of view?
180° horizontal by 180° vertical from a single lens, recording at 3072 × 3072 with HDR.