How to Eliminate False Motion Alerts on a Samsung SmartCam Camera

A basic feature of virtually any home security camera is the ability to detect motion then do something with it.  The Samsung SmartCam home security camera line uses the same interface and set of features for almost all of their cameras.  Motion is detected and then an alert is sent via a smartphone or email to the recipients.  This works great in principle until you start receiving false motion alerts.

False motion alerts drive me crazy.  In the beginning, I pick up the phone every time I receive a motion alert to see what’s going on.  Turns out the alert occurred because the leaves on the tree moved or, even worse, because the lights went on.  Eventually, I started to ignore the alerts and then turned them off altogether.  That’s kind of defeating the purpose of a home security camera.  I could have just saved my money and not purchased all of these Samsung SmartCam home security cameras.

So I learned how to minimize (and in some cases eliminate) false motion alerts.  I’ll talk about how to do that in this article.

First I’ll review the best way to get motion right.  That’s by utilizing motion zones.  The photo that accompanies this article is the pool in the back of my house using my Samsung SmartCam SNH-E6413BN Camera.  See those palm trees?  A slight wind was all that was needed to trigger a motion event.  I tried to make the motion less sensitive within the SmartCam app but it didn’t make a difference.  Using the motion zones, I was able to find the perfect spot for only detecting real motion.  The red box is on the entry door of my pool cage.  There aren’t any palm trees within that box, just the door.  When someone enters that red zone, the motion event is triggered.  Motion anywhere outside that box is ignored.

Using this feature, my false motion alerts were completely eliminated for this camera.  The wind could blow the leaves to it’s heart’s delight and it doesn’t matter.  I have the motion sensor minimized to the lowest setting and it only picks up a human walking through the door.  Every Wednesday, the motion goes off in the morning when the pool guy stops by to clean the pool.  It goes off every time he is at the house and that means that Samsung’s motion zones work exactly how it was designed.  It’s supposed to eliminate motion from zones that you don’t want to monitor.  Like palm leaves.

Another issue that continues to be a challenge is sensitivity to light, or lack of.  My motion events kept getting triggered when the lights would go on or off.  The more current SmartCam models have a feature called Advanced Motion Detection.  It’s intended to make the cameras sensitive to only real motion events such as someone walking past the camera or within the motion zone.  I think this feature still needs some fine tuning.  I have a Samsung SNH-V6414BN SmartCam in my living room.  It went off every time the lights went off or on.  I tried to move the motion sensitivity setting all the way down and it made no difference.  I turned off all the advanced features including WDR, LDC and night vision.  No difference.

The way I minimized the false alerts was by using was by using the alarm schedule.  If you are using the mobile app, you may be unaware this feature even exists.  You need to log into the SmartCam web site.  Once you are there, get into settings and open a tab called “schedule” can be seen.  Simply click on the boxes that you want to receive alerts and then hit the “Apply” button.  In my case, I checked off the times when I knew lights wouldn’t be turned on.  Solved the problem, but I’m not feeling great about it since there aren’t any motion alerts coming my way during evening hours.

How about those motion sensitivity settings?  I find them to be of little value.  Adjusting the sensitivity makes a small difference, that’s it.  Ideally, these settings should have solved both the issues with false motion alerts.  It didn’t.  I did find the motion sensitivity to be marginally useful int he first scenario with my pool, but no value on the indoor lighting situation.

Hopefully this tutorial helped those needing assistance with false motion alerts on a Samsung SmartCam Security Camera.

Mike

All of these articles are written by someone (me) that figured out how to do this stuff the hard way.  I have owned and tested dozens of cameras.  Manufacturer support varies.  There are a few good companies that provide timely answers when you have questions.  There are several that sell you the camera and seem to have little interest in post sales support (which leads me to finding out stuff the hard way).

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