Hands on with Aqara’s new Matter-compatible camera

The first Matter camera is here – sort of. Camera support became the standard for the smart home last year, and Aqara’s Camera Hub G350 is the first to support it. The G350, announced at CES, launched this week and is a pan-and-tilt indoor security camera with up to 4K video resolution.

Today, the G350 only supports Matter on Samsung SmartThings, as no other platforms have added Matter 1.5 yet. I’ve only had the camera set up for a day and it took several firmware updates before I could connect it as a Matter camera. So far, all it can do is broadcast a live feed, which is way less than what Samsung is promising the Matter cameras in SmartThings. But there is a lot of potential here.

The G350 has impressive specs for an indoor camera. It has two lenses – a 4K wide-angle lens and a 2.5K telephoto lens – and up to 9x hybrid zoom. A compact tilt and pan mechanism provides 360-degree coverage with automatic tracking of people and pets, and a physical lens shutter activates when the camera is turned off.

Besides Matter, the Aqara G350 supports Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video service and can connect to Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and other platforms via the cloud. You can also store footage locally on a microSD card, and RTSP support lets you stream video to platforms like Home Assistant and NVRs. Aqara offers its own cloud storage service, end-to-end encrypted.

While the G350 worked flawlessly in the Aqara app, my Matter experience was less so. My first attempts to integrate the camera directly into SmartThings by scanning its Matter code failed, adding the device as a hub rather than a camera. (Like many of Aqara’s cameras, the G350 is also a smart home hub for Aqara’s Zigbee devices, as well as a Matter controller, bridge, and Thread Border router.)

Instead, I added it to Aqara’s app. Here it presented itself as a camera and eventually offered me several firmware updates, one of which brought support for Matter 1.5, finally allowing me to add it to SmartThings as a camera using Matter’s multi-admin feature. (You will need a SmartThings Matter controller to connect to the platform.)

One of the promised benefits of Matter-supported cameras is the ability to manage all of your cameras through your primary smart home platform, without being limited by brand.

Today, if you have a mix of cameras – say a Ring doorbell, an Aqara indoor camera and a Eufy floodlight camera – you’ll need to use multiple apps to access all the features. And while you can stream live views from many different camera brands with a platform like Alexa, you can’t view recorded video or adjust settings like pan and tilt without accessing the manufacturer’s app. Matter supports all of these features and could bring you closer to using a single app to manage your smart home.

Integrating cameras into your smart home app also allows for more advanced automations, such as “when I unlock the door, I turn on the lights and turn off the camera.”

With Matter, security cameras can support live video and audio streaming, two-way talk, and local and remote access. The standard also allows pan-tilt-zoom controls for cameras, setting detection and privacy zones, as well as continuous and event-based recording with the ability to store images locally or in a cloud service (with the option of end-to-end encryption) – all within the smart home platform app.

According to Samsung, the SmartThings app should offer all of these features, although not all of them are available yet. I was only able to view a live stream, take a snapshot, and use two-way talk. Although I saw pan, tilt, and zoom controls, as well as a tab for video history, I couldn’t use them. According to the Matter Alpha blog, this is because the G350 doesn’t yet support pan and tilt controls in Matter, but they should be provided via a firmware update.

The live stream was clear and responsive, and it loaded instantly with no lag, with only a second or two of initial buffering. The two-way talk worked well and I could hear and be heard clearly. Matter is a local protocol, and you really see its benefits here.

A settings page presented options for motion-activated recording, adjusting camera resolution and volume, and creating presets to monitor different areas. However, only the volume and resolution buttons worked. I couldn’t enable recording or view recorded video in the History tab of the SmartThings app, even with a microSD card in the camera. The drop-down timeline simply said “no history.”

It’s not clear whether you’ll need a subscription to view images saved via SmartThings, or whether you’ll need to use Aqara’s service, starting at $4.99 per month / $49.99 per year, if you don’t use local storage. I’ve contacted Samsung to confirm and will update this article when I know more.

There was no option in the app to enable the smart alerts, such as facial recognition and package and vehicle alerts, offered by the G350. For those, you’ll still have to rely on Aqara’s app.

I’ve had a strange experience with Android compared to iOS. Only the live feed showed up in the SmartThings app on my Galaxy S22 Ultra, no controls. It also just showed a blank settings screen. But on my iPhone 17 Pro, the controls were visible, as was the settings page.

As mentioned, only SmartThings currently supports Matter cameras. It’s likely Apple will follow suit (at some point), and Home Assistant has said it’s working on support. But I don’t expect Google Home or Amazon Alexa to join us anytime soon, if ever. Neither has committed to providing support and both have their own camera ecosystems. So, simple setup and seamless management of security cameras in a single app may still be a long way off.

However, even though my first experience with the cameras in Matter was very basic, it showed promise. I can see a future (if everyone buys in) where support for Matter cameras is like Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video – but more open and interoperable.

The benefits of Apple’s implementation (cameras better integrated into your smart home, brand agnostic, secure and private) are features that all smart home users would be happy to see. Right now, all we have is the first camera that supports Matter, and most of its features don’t work yet. But it’s a start.

Photography by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge