Eufy Video Doorbell E340
design
There’s only really so much you can do with the design of a doorbell, without going purely for form over function it’s almost always going to end up as a dark rectangular box. It’ll be no surprise then that Eufy E340 Video Doorbell is a dark rectangular box. It’s quite a nice one though, longer and thinner than anything in the Ring range, the Eufy E340 ends up looking closer to a feature light than a doorbell and that’s to its credit.
Build quality is excellent across the board and feels suitably premium – more so than the 2nd Generation Ring Doorbell it replaced at my door. The front face is one continuous, smooth piece broken up only by the large recessed button. It gives the Eufy E340 Video Doorbell a really high end finish, it’s about the closest thing a doorbell can get to looking classy.
Lights built into the top and bottom of the Eufy Video Doorbell E340 are a nice touch and are surprisingly effective for such a small source. Not only do they throw enough light onto the wall to become an attractive feature but also helpfully illuminate visitors at night. I found the latter was not quite as effective as Eufy’s marketing photos would suggest, it’s not a replacement for a true security light, but it’s passable for an added extra on my doorbell and definitely helps the night vision.
Mounting the E340 Doorbell is simple enough for anyone with basic DIY skills but does require drilling into the wall – something to note for renters. I was able to reuse the existing holes and plugs from my Ring Doorbell installation so I went from boxed to set up in just a couple of minutes. The E340 clicks securely into its frame and is released via a pin hole at the top. Eufy included a pin specifically for this but a paper clip would do in a pinch as well. While I suppose less secure than Ring’s double star screw system that requires a more unique tool, the Eufy solution is less of a faff and easier to quickly click in and out for charging.
performance
That’s handy, because unfortunately in my testing I found you’ll need to be charging the Eufy Video Doorbell E340 a lot. Eufy claims up to six months of battery life for the E340 but my reality was around three to four weeks, that’s quite a difference. There are some mitigating factors here potentially, it’s peak winter in the UK so temperatures are low – something batteries famously hate – and my E340 is street facing and just a couple of steps from a busy footpath and road. But even with those concessions, three weeks on a full charge just isn’t enough. The Eufy E340 can be hardwired which is a rather drastic solution to the power problem, but in my installation with no nearby existing cables this would end up a costly operation.
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Eufy provides a number of different operating modes in the app to customise your experience and impact battery life. At first I tried the balanced mode which included some movement alerts but with this enabled I was seeing up to five percent battery loss a day. I defined a small area in front of my door as the only place to monitor but this appeared to have little effect and the Eufy E340 Video Doorbell still racked up over 8,000 tracked events in the first 3 weeks. Admittedly movement tracking isn’t particularly helpful in my terraced house situation, that feature is better served to users with driveways and areas you wouldn’t expect to see a passerby – but it’s a shame that the included ways around this don’t appear to do their job.
Those battery and movement tracking issues aside, the Eufy Video Doorbell E340 is a particularly strong performer and I was impressed at the benefits it carried over my previous Ring Doorbell.
The dual camera system is a clever solution to the limitations of avoiding fisheye lens distortion while also offering a great field of view around the front door. Rather than trying to stretch one view wider, the Eufy E340 offers both an outward and downward facing camera feed. They don’t quite perfectly stitch together but they do cover all of the areas I care about in front of my home. The 2K video resolution is sharp and clear with plenty of detail to make out faces even a few metres back from the door. I was also impressed by the quality of low and no light situations too, with both the IR and the colour night vision modes retaining great quality at all hours.
Network performance is excellent with faster connection times than I experienced with a Ring Doorbell. Responding to notifications the Eufy E340 was quick to load and the connection remained stable throughout. The Eufy E340 Doorbell also handles multiple consecutive connections better than Ring, ending and quickly rejoining live view would often fail on a Ring device (something I was told by their support was a limitation not a bug) however this issue doesn’t seem to affect the E340.
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I did find occasional issues with audio distortion if I spoke at the same time as my visitor or thanks to wind and loud noises like a car driving past. In general however the audio is clear each way though it could maybe do with a small volume boost at the doorbell end.
Particularly worthy of praise is Eufy’s rejection of the idea of additional costs and subscriptions to use all the features of the E340, it’s a refreshing change when the likes of Eero are gatekeeping basic router features behind a subscription. The 8GB of internal storage will be more than enough for almost every user though you can always expand this with the Eufy HomeBase which acts as a central hub across the Eufy Security ecosystem.
While the Eufy Video Doorbell E340 will play (somewhat) nice with Amazon Alexa and Google Home, a lack of Apple HomeKit support is a massive oversight. I successfully added the E340 to my Alexa skills which did work well for chiming across my various Echo devices however I was never able to successfully launch a live view on my Echo Show 5 which would insist the device was offline. Incidentally the same issue occurs with the Eufy Solocam S340 so it appears to be a wider issue than the E340 itself.
summed up
It may have a few flaws but on the whole the Eufy Video Doorbell E340 is excellent and in my testing provided a better overall experience than an equivalent Ring Doorbell. The positives far outweigh the negatives here and at £159/$179 the Eufy E340 is hard to beat.
Quality 2K video from a unique dual camera system, bundled with colour night vision and no need for extra subscriptions – the Eufy E340 is a superb choice for a first video doorbell and would likely prove an upgrade for those with an existing device.
