Protect Your Packages this Holiday Season with a Free Video Doorbell

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Maria Diaz/ZDNET

ZDNET’s key takeaways

The Eufy Security Video Doorbell E340 is available now for $180. This doorbell features two cameras to give you complete visibility of the person at your door and any packages left on your porch, all with no monthly fees. Although the doorbell comes with 8GB of built-in local storage (enough for up to 60 days of event recordings), you do need to add a Eufy Security HomeBase to get the most out of it.

If you’re looking for a reliable video doorbell that can help protect your home and packages and comes with the bonus of local storage, let me introduce you to the Eufy Security Video Doorbell E340.

Also: Eufy’s new Floodlight Cam E340 is the hardest-working security camera I’ve tested

ZDNET RECOMMENDS Eufy Security Video Doorbell E340

This doorbell helps you keep track not only of who’s at your door, but what was delivered. It can alert you when a package is dropped off or picked up, play an alarm if a stranger approaches a package, and remind you if a package has not been brought inside before your bedtime.

Eufy Security just launched a new line of dual-camera security devices, which included this doorbell as one of the options. The new E340 video doorbell’s two cameras deliver real-time notifications to your mobile device when a person is detected and a package is delivered.

This doorbell camera will also send real-time notifications of motion to your mobile device, and it offers the option to use two-way talk to communicate with whoever is at the door from your mobile phone or use quick replies to automatically respond when they ring the doorbell.

The camera above the doorbell button records events in 2048 x 1536 resolution, to deliver 2K footage that is clear and gives you a detailed view of whoever is at the door. The doorbell itself has two motion-activated lights, one at the top and a second one below — where the other camera is — to light the way in the dark, alert visitors or would-be intruders that the camera has been activated, and to support the camera’s color night vision recording.

Maria Diaz/ZDNET

The biggest improvement I’ve seen after replacing my old Eufy Security video doorbell with this dual E340, aside from the package detection, is night vision recordings. The doorbell can correctly determine what motion is a person, animal, vehicle, or just the wind, with very few false alerts. For example, we put up pirate skeletons all over the porch for Halloween, and the doorbell only had issues mistaking one for a person a couple of times. Add the HomeBase 3 and the E340 dual doorbell can also confidently identify who’s at the door by name. This is powered by AI technology within the HomeBase 3 that allows users to name the faces the camera detects to let you know when “Maria” is detected at the front door instead of just “a person.”

Eufy’s Delivery Guard technology notifies you when packages are delivered and picked up and lets you set up zone restrictions to avoid false alerts. You can also set up the Eufy video doorbell E340 to trigger an alarm — which can be a siren or a voice response — when someone approaches a package at your door, with the option to activate it at custom times. I also have mine set to alert me each night of any uncollected packages at the front door, which reminds me to bring them in before bedtime.

On the left, both video doorbell cameras show a package was delivered. The activity history is on the right.

Maria Diaz/ZDNET

The doorbell’s local storage means you don’t have to pay cloud storage fees and can access your video recordings quickly and easily. With the addition of a HomeBase 3, you could expand that storage by 16GB and later add SSDs to expand that to 16TB, if that’s more your speed.

ZDNET’s buying advice

You can get the Eufy Security Video Doorbell E340 for $180 right now. It features 2K-resolution video recording, 8GB of local storage, color night vision with a clear viewing distance of up to 16ft, and, my personal favorite, no monthly fees. The video doorbell E340 is perfect for anyone who wants a doorbell camera to be on the alert when any visitors arrive and one to help protect their packages.

This doorbell has been really helpful at alerting us when a package arrives so we can bring it inside promptly. Most of our drivers don’t ring the doorbell during delivery, which we appreciate with three young kids and an excitable dog. Now I get an alert on my phone or smartwatch when “A package was delivered,” which is much better than finding a heavy package when I’m in a hurry out the door. This video doorbell isn’t helpful only for my situation, but also for anyone living in a place that is often targeted by porch pirates, as this can prevent packages from sitting out overnight and can deter strangers from approaching it.