Eufy 340 T8214 Video Doorbell Has Its Good Points

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Summary

The Eufy 340 T8214 Video Doorbell is well-made and easy to install, though it lacks a vinyl siding adapter and has a confusing user interface. While the hardware is praised, the software is criticized for its poor design and missing features.

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So good and yet so not

REVIEW

I have no problem with the Eufy 340 T8214 hardware. It seems well made, and it does the job I want it to do. It was also relatively easy to install, though I do have a small gripe in that area.

Let’s get the vinyl siding gripe out of the way first. The Eufy camera is designed for a flat surface, not vinyl siding. Probably around 25% of homes use vinyl siding, and it doesn’t all have the same vertical spacing, so it’s reasonable that Eufy doesn’t include any sort of adapter for that type of mounting.

What’s a little less reasonable is that they don’t sell one. What’s really annoying is that there are two Eufy 340 cameras, this one I bought and an older model. My purchase was the Eufy 340 T8214, although nothing on the product page told me that.

The two products have different physical dimensions. If you need an adapter for vinyl siding, you need to know which camera you have.

I bought the wrong one. It wasn’t expensive, and I was able to return it, so no great loss, but it wasn’t easy to find the right one. I did finally locate it:

Okay, that problem was solved. My next concern was that I knew that the chime wiring on my existing button doorbell was very short. I was happy to open the Eufy box and find that they thoughtfully include extenders with clips and wire nuts, so thank you for that. They also include an angled adapter for tilting the unit toward your door. I used that as well.

There are no subscriptions needed for the Eufy. It uses a rechargeable battery pack, but my existing chime wiring keeps that charged. It records locally and stores 8GB of photos. There’s an optional Eufy “HomeBase” that adds up to 16TB of storage if you foresee a lot of visitors. It’s 2K HD with color night vision and detects humans and packages. Alerts are sent to both me and my wife, and we both can view what the cameras (upper and lower for packages) see and have seen.

So what’s not to like? It’s not HomeKit compatible, which is a little dumb nowadays as making it Matter capable would solve that with Apple and most everywhere else. But then…

The software. Omigod, the software!

I don’t think I have ever seen any UI so badly designed as this unless I wrote it myself. It’s awful. It’s confusing, it’s missing features, it’s almost unbelievable how bad this is.

And yet, when I asked ChatGPT for help, it cheerily told me exactly where to find the features I was looking for. As the features are not there, I wondered if ChatGPT had scraped from descriptions of Android versions and assumed iOS was the same. ChatGPT agreed that might be true, but also told me that Android users complain about delays and errors loading live and recorded footage that iOS users don’t experience.

So maybe Eufy just needs better programmers?

​Eufy Doorbell at Amazon.com​

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