V380 Pro 4G solar camera review – Remote viewing

Home security is a must for many South Africans but setting up surveillance on a larger property can be a bugger. The V380 Pro — there’s no ‘brand’ name beyond V380 — is a solid option for keeping an eye on the outer perimeter without having to involve chaps with drills and wires and screwdrivers who charge by the hour.

Instead, you can stick the V380 Pro on a pole or a handy recess yourself. It’s recommended to power the unit via the mains, but it’s designed to run off the small solar panel that comes in the box. It’s decently low-power when the sun is out, while an internal battery provides the power needed to work at night.

Eye in a box

Everything users could need is included in the box. A 4G-capable SIM card is needed for remote access outside of WiFi range (one is included), and you get a 64GB microSD card for local storage (it will support up to 128GB). The latter isn’t essential. The V380 Pro offers cloud storage packages that upload events to a remote computer for later perusal — handy if someone manages to steal the camera itself.

In the package are the antennae-mounted camera unit, the screws you’ll need to mount it and the included solar panel, the cabling for hooking it up to mains power (it’s about as long as a cellphone charge cable, calm down), and a template for ensuring that you’re drilling holes in the correct places. These bits make installation pretty trivial if you’re able to hold a power drill the right way around on the second attempt. After that, it’s screwdrivers and plug-and-play all the way.

Okay, fine, you’ll also have to insert a couple of cards and navigate the app setup. As long as you follow instructions — and we mean all of them — you’ll be connected in no time.

Lightbulb moment

The V380 Pro is sheathed in what we persist in thinking of as networking appliance plastic. The main body holding the rotating gimbal, light, lens, and sensors is Router White, textured about the same as any internet device you’ve seen. V380 has provided an IP65 rating. It’ll handle rainy weather, but will explode if you install it underwater. Or if your mounting platform tips over into a puddle.

The main sensor area is a black plastic that connects to a couple of soft-touch motors that will rotate easily enough by hand during setup. The overall effect is of an old-style light, something you might have seen from the late to the mid-20th century. Odds are you’ve seen them in 2025, but they’re packing sodium-vapour or tungsten filaments instead of LEDs and other smart tech.

The camera sensor is a mere 3MP, which doesn’t sound like much in an age of 200MP phone cameras. You’ll pay upwards of R20k for that smartphone. Do you really want to do that for a surveillance camera? What are you hiding?

Don’t skip the rotation

The V380 Pro boasts full 360° rotation on the horizontal and 270° on the vertical (like dogs, the V380 Pro can’t look up). From an elevated vantage, it’ll give you full coverage of a set area. Motion detection will grab and focus on a human being from up to ten metres away, while an internal speaker lets you a) yell at trespassers over your phone or b) activate an internal warning and, eventually, a siren to scare them off.

The included app is competent enough to get the job done, letting you complete setup (again, do what they tell you to) and then access the camera remotely. You might have to fiddle with the network settings to suit your situation, but the result is near-real-time details from the device.

The camera can be manually panned, a process that delays enough to tell you how low-end (and low-power) the computing hardware is. It’s far simpler to pick your default surveillance angle and then turn on motion detection than it is to peer over the fence at what the neighbours are doing. 10x digital zoom will get you closer to what’s going on, but image quality from the 3MP sensor drops. As you’d expect. Still, throw in night vision and an LED light (manually or automatically activated), and you’ve got a decent feature set from the V380 Pro. Let’s see the insurance company deny your claim now.

V380 Pro 4G camera verdict

Dropping R2,000 on the V380 Pro, a price that includes 6GB of data and the SIM card you’ll need for that remote connection, isn’t outlandish. The security camera market resembles the printer one in that you almost never buy one because you want one. That makes them a tough sell at any time, but this critter is simple enough for the ham-fisted to install and set up, with enough features to let you side-step cloud services and the like if you want to. You’re taking a risk, since stealing the camera means stealing the footage in that case, but opting for the full-service option lets you keep footage on hand even if the light-fingered prove able to climb a three-metre gum pole. For viewing the outskirts of your property (or livestock) from the comfort of your home (or holiday destination), without running infrastructure underground, the V380 Pro will weather most elements.