TP-Link Tapo D210 review: An affordable video doorbell at a great price

The TP-Link Tapo D210 is essentially a “lite” version of our new favourite video doorbell, the Tapo D235, and it comes with many of that doorbell’s core features, at half the cost.

At £50, it’s just about the smallest amount of cash you can spend on a connected video doorbell, and it’s aside from the Blink Video Doorbell (usually around £40), but the Tapo improves on the Blink’s build quality, video and audio quality.

Check price at Currys

TP-Link Tapo D210 review: What do you get for the money?

The Tapo D210 bundle isn’t quite as comprehensive as the Tapo D235. While you don’t get a downward-facing bracket you still get a lot for your money: in the box you get a wireless chime that you can plug directly into a UK three-pin mains socket and a 15-degree vertical mounting bracket along with screws, wall plugs and a sticky pad for mounting it. Note: the Tapo D21 on Amazon, appears to be the same doorbell – it has identical specifications.

The extra-loud wireless chime is the same model Tapo bundles with the D235 and, to give you an idea of how much value that adds to the package, Ring charges £30 extra for its most basic Ring Chime.

The lower price means you have to forgo some features, though. There’s no vertical angle mounting bracket, but given the fact that the D210 only has a 160-degree field of view this is not a deal-breaker. To angle the D210 to see your doorstep you’d need to mount it at such an acute downward angle as to make it otherwise useless.

It also can’t be connected to a mains power supply, unlike the Tapo D235 and traditional wired chimes. The D210 is a battery-only doorbell, but despite this it has a smaller 6,400mAh battery than its sibling, which can be connected to the mains. The D210 also lacks the D235’s anti-theft alarm.

Visually, the D210 isn’t a particularly attractive thing. It’s rather blocky and looks bulky and cumbersome next to the more svelte Blink and Ring doorbells. The build quality feels pretty solid, though, and the doorbell is weatherproof to IP65. This means the D210 is slightly less resistant to high-pressure water jets, which doesn’t strike me as anything to worry about. It should be able to shrug off a rain storm.

That solidity extends to the way the Tapo D210 clicks onto its mounting cradle. It feels like it would be harder to steal than the Blink or Ring competition.

TP-Link Tapo D210 review: How easy is it to set up?

The set-up process is straightforward. Simply download the Tapo app, charge the doorbell, set up a free account and follow the walkthrough to connect the doorbell to your Wi-Fi system (only 2.4GHz networks are supported) and the chime. It’s all as easy as falling off a log and should pose no problems to even the most technophobic.

Tapo bundles all the screws and raw plugs needed to attach the doorbell mounting plate to your front door or wall as well as a high-adhesive 3M sticker for those unwilling or unable to drill holes in their frontage.

Once you’ve installed the mounting plate, either with or without the angle bracket, you simply clip the doorbell into place and you are good to go.

Removing the doorbell involves the use of what looks like a large SIM tray pin which I’d suggest you keep safe because I couldn’t find anything else in my toolbox that was thin and strong enough to do the job.

TP-Link Tapo D210 review: What does it do well?

The D210’s camera is lower in both resolution and field of view than the D235. You have to make do with a 2,304 x 1,296 16:9 video feed at 15fps rather than 2,560 x 1,920 at 20fps, but that still compares favourably with the Blink (1,920 x 1,080) and Ring (1,440 x 1,440) competition.

The D210’s field of view stretches to 135-degrees horizontal and 109-degrees vertical. That means there’s no option to monitor packages left on your doorstep nor can you look up and down your street, both tricks the D235 can perform. There’s still plenty of space to see who is at your door, though, and there’s far less distortion around the edge of the image.

Compared with the D210, the Ring Battery Video Doorbell offers a square image of 150-degrees horizontal and vertical while the Blink doorbell generates a 16:9 135-degree horizontal, 80-degree vertical image. My recessed front door means that wide-angle door cameras are almost useless – images look as though I’ve cut a slit in a football and placed the doorbell inside – so for me, the Tapo D210 is a perfectly acceptable compromise.

For a budget doorbell, the quality of the images and videos generated by the D210 is impressive. In daylight, I found video footage sharp and colourful with no contrast issues in direct sunlight. At night time, performance in both colour and infra-red modes was superior to the Blink doorbell and easily on par with the Ring Video Doorbell in terms of detail and clarity.

Camera aside, the D210 carries over all the D235’s strengths. Its speed of reaction to doorbell presses and motion triggers proved to be every bit as fast as the more expensive model and voice communication was just as crisp and clear.

As with all Tapo cameras, the D210 lets you store recordings on a MicroSD card and access them free of charge via the Tapo app. There is a cloud storage option if you take out a paid Tapo Care subscription, which costs from £2.99/mth for one camera and runs to £8.99/mth for up to ten devices, but it isn’t required.

The D210’s “AI” powered motion detection capabilities work well, too. This includes the capacity to distinguish between people, animals and vehicles (although not packages, weirdly) and to select which portion of the camera’s view you want it to register motion in. It all makes for a system you can fine-tune to your exact requirements, so you’re not bombarded with notifications.

Mention must also be made of the Tapo app. In terms of both useability and features, I’d rate it as one of – if not the – best camera management apps currently available. I particularly like the way the battery charge level is shown on the device home page, the power consumption screen and the camera view widget that lets you directly access a live view with a single tap.

TP-Link Tapo D210 review: What could it do better?

Given the D210 only has 64% of the battery capacity of the D235, you’d expect battery life to be shorter and so it proved in my time with the D210, although exactly how long a full charge will last is wholly dependent on how often the doorbell is used and how sensitive you make the motion detection settings.

Tapo quotes battery life at 180 days if it’s used for an average of five minutes of use every day, which means you will be plugging it in more often than you would the D235. Given the power draw I saw in the Tapo app, though, I can’t imagine you’ll need to charge it more than once every six or seven weeks, even if you use it heavily.

There isn’t much difference between the charging regimes you’ll need to follow with the D210 and the Ring Battery Video Doorbell, but it is much better than the Blink Video Doorbell, the batteries for which I find myself replacing every month, much more frequently than I would like.

I was very impressed with the colour night vision of the D210, but like the D235 activating this means the LED light that surrounds the bell button is always on. That’s despite it not making much difference to the amount of light available on a road with street lights.

It’s not a dealbreaker, but it means you can’t use colour night vision without increasing the battery drain and advertising the fact you’ve got a video doorbell to passers-by.

My final gripe is that there’s no support for Apple’s HomeKit, Matter or IFTTT smart home protocols. There is support for Alexa and Google Home, though, and you can use voice commands to open the camera feed on a smart display such as the Amazon Echo Show 8 or the Nest Hub.

Check price at Currys

TP-Link Tapo D210 review: Should you buy it?

A year ago I bought a Blink Video Doorbell for my house in a package that included the Blink Sync Module so I could store clips locally. Looking at my Amazon account I can1 see I paid £50. Today, the same thing will set you back £39. Given the choice would I now buy the Blink or pay an extra £10 for the Tapo D210? Without a doubt, I would buy the Tapo.

The D210 delivers superior video quality, and longer battery life and setting up the D210 also doesn’t involve having a separate Sync module cluttering up the house. The accompanying app is nicer to use and the whole package is cheaper, too, despite coming with a chime.

Go for the D235 if you want a broader field of view, and the option to power from the mains, but you can’t do much better than the D210 for the ultimate in affordability.