Choosing
Wireless cameras are easier to install and harder to live with; wired ones are the reverse. The decision is usually made on installation effort and should be made on what happens during a power cut, a broadband failure and a February of intermittent Wi-Fi.
The comparison is usually framed as convenience against quality. It is really about failure modes.
Intermittently. Signal at a gable end drops for minutes, the camera reconnects, and the recording has holes in it. Nothing announces this — the app shows a healthy camera — and it is discovered when the footage that mattered is missing.
Rarely, and visibly. A cable is either connected or not. A recorder either has a drive or does not.
A camera with both. Several mains-powered cameras here accept an Ethernet cable as well as Wi-Fi, and using the cable removes the whole class of problem while keeping the camera itself simple.
Keep recording when the internet is down. A wired recorder is on your own cable with your own drive, and a broadband outage or a pulled router changes nothing about what it records.
2K 4MP · F1.6 Starlight · 360° pan · IP66 · Wi-Fi or Ethernet
The model TP-Link points its own budget buyers towards. A 2560 × 1440 sensor behind an F1.6 lens gives colour at night without a spotlight, and unlike most cameras in this price band it can be wired to Ethernet instead of trusting Wi-Fi.
Best for: An outdoor position where Wi-Fi is unreliable and a network cable can be run, or where colour at night matters more than an unlit image.
≈ £46 / 43 €
Not total failure — intermittent failure. Wi-Fi at the far end of a house drops for minutes at a time, and the result is a camera that appears to work with gaps in its recording. That is worse than a camera that visibly stops, because nobody notices.
If the cable can be run, almost always. One Ethernet cable carries power and video, the recorder keeps working when the broadband is down, and there is nothing to charge. The cabling is a weekend; the reliability lasts a decade.
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