The first Matter Camera is here – sort of. Camera support came as smart home standard last year and Aqara’s Camera Hub G350 is the first to support it. The G350, which was announced at CES, launched this week and is a pan-and-tilt indoor security camera with 4K video resolution.
Today, the G350 only supports Matter on Samsung SmartThings, as no other platforms have added Matter 1.5 yet. I only had the camera setup for a day, and I had to do several firmware updates before I could connect it as a Miter camera. As of now, it can only stream live feeds, which is far less than what Samsung promises for the Matter cameras in SmartThings. But there are a lot of possibilities here.
The G350 has impressive features for an indoor camera. It boasts dual-lens – a 4K wide-angle lens and a 2.5K telephoto lens – and up to 9x hybrid zoom. A compact pan-tilt mechanism provides 360-degree coverage with auto-tracking for people and pets, and a physical lens shutter activates when the camera is turned off.
Along with 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 enables video streaming to platforms like home assistants and NVRs. Aqara offers its own cloud storage service, which is end-to-end encrypted.
While the G350 worked perfectly in the Aqara app, my Mate experience with it wasn’t as good. My first attempt to onboard it directly to SmartThings by scanning the camera’s Matter code failed, causing the device to be paired as a hub instead of 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 Miter controller, bridge, and Thread border router.)
Instead, I added it to Aqara’s app. Here, it showed up as a camera and eventually offered me several firmware updates, one of which brought Matter 1.5 support, eventually allowing me to add it as a camera in SmartThings using Matter’s Multi-Admin feature. (You will need a SmartThings Matter controller to connect to the platform.)
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One of the promised benefits of Miter-supported cameras is the ability to manage all your cameras through your main smart home platform, without being limited by brand.
Today, if you have a mix of cameras — like a Ring doorbell, an Aqara indoor camera, and a Eufy floodlight camera — you have to use multiple apps to access all the features. And while you can stream live views from many different camera brands with platforms like Alexa, you can’t watch recorded video or adjust settings like pan and tilt without going to the manufacturer’s app. Matter supports all those features and can get you closer to using just one app to manage your smart home.
Integrating cameras into your smart home app also allows for more advanced automation, like “When I open the door, turn on the lights, and turn off the camera.”
With Matter, security cameras can support live video and audio streaming, two-way conversations, and local and remote access. It also allows continuous and event-based recording with pan-tilt-zoom controls for standard cameras, detection and privacy zone settings, and the ability to store footage locally or in a cloud service (with the option for end-to-end encryption) – all within the smart home platform app.
According to Samsung, the SmartThings app should offer all those features, although not all are available yet. I was only able to watch livestreams, take snapshots, and use two-way conversations. While I saw controls for pan, tilt, and zoom, and a tab for video history, I wasn’t able to use them. According to the Matter Alpha blog, this is because the G350 doesn’t support pan-tilt controls in Matter yet, but they should come via a firmware update.
The livestream was clear and responsive, and it loaded quickly with no lag, with only a second or two of initial buffering. Two-way conversation was good and I could hear and be heard clearly. The case is a local protocol, and you really see the benefits of that here.
A settings page featured options for motion-activated recording, adjusting the camera’s resolution and volume, and creating presets for monitoring different areas. However, only the volume and resolution buttons worked. I couldn’t turn on recording in the History tab of the SmartThings app or view any recorded video, even with the microSD card in the camera. The scrollable timeline simply said “No history.”
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It’s unclear whether you’ll need a subscription to view recorded footage through SmartThings, or if you don’t use local storage you’ll need to use Aqara’s service, starting at $4.99 per month / $49.99 annually. I’ve contacted Samsung to confirm and will update this article when we learn more.
There was no option to enable smart alerts in the app, such as facial recognition and package and vehicle alerts, which the G350 offers. For those, you’ll still have to rely on Aqara’s app.
I had a weird experience with Android vs iOS. SmartThings app on my Galaxy S22 Ultra only shows livestream, no controls. It also 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 that Apple will follow suit (at some point), and Home Assistant has said it’s working on support. But I’m not expecting Google Home or Amazon Alexa to come on board anytime soon – if ever. Neither has committed to support and both have their own camera ecosystems. Therefore, simple setup and seamless management of security cameras in a single app may still be a long way off.
However, while my first experience with the cameras in Matter was pretty basic, it shows promise. I can see a future (if everyone gets on board) where Matter Camera support will be like Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video – only more open and interoperable.
The benefits of Apple’s implementation – cameras being more integrated into your smart home, brand-agnostic, and secure and private – are features every smart home user will be happy to see. Right now, we have the first camera to support Matter, and most of its features don’t work yet. But this is a start.
Photography by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy/The Verge
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