What happens when two cameras walk into a doorbell? Eufy's $260 Video Doorbell Dual hopes to answer that question -- and for the most part, the result is impressive.

Eufy's smart buzzer has landed in an increasingly competitive market. In the past few months, we've gotten the first genuinely good sub-$100 wireless doorbell cams, and now, thanks in part to Eufy, competition on the higher end of the market is heating up, too.

When you peek under the hood of the Dual, you realize it has a lot more going on than just two cameras. It's got tons of features, plenty of local storage and impressive performance. What could have been a breakaway Editors' Choice winner, though, stumbles near the finish line, due to subpar night vision and sluggish notifications.

A winner… on paper

Eufy's video doorbell is high-end. This thing costs $260, which is more than most doorbell cameras on the market -- and normally that would give me pause. But for that price, you're getting two cameras on your buzzer and the Homebase, a base station that plugs into your router, offers 16GB of local video storage and provides a built-in chime. Add in the premium secondary features, like 2K resolution, 4:3 aspect ratio, smart alerts, facial recognition and Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility, and you've got a pretty solid package.

The local storage is a big selling point here, as it eliminates the need for cloud storage subscriptions. Sure, $260 is a pretty high up-front cost, but if you use the Eufy Dual for a couple of years, it'll come in cheaper than doorbells from other developers that require $3 or $6 monthly fees. And if you really can't live without cloud storage, Eufy offers 30 days of rolling storage for a competitive $3/month.

The Video Doorbell Dual is battery-powered, with up to six months of battery life, according to Eufy. But it can also be wired to extend that battery life and use some existing doorbell chimes. A wired-only version is releasing soon.

But the big scene-stealer here is the second camera. Because what's better than one camera? Two cameras! No, the Dual doesn't give you 3D vision of your front stoop; it gives you a front-facing view of the delivery person at your door, and a downward-angled cam to capture the package they're dropping off.

Now is a second camera strictly necessary? Not really. Other video doorbells give you that nice head-to-toe view with a 1:1 aspect ratio and a wide field of view. But Eufy avoids the fish-eye effect of some of those cameras by simply providing two separate feeds. You can even angle the package cam to either side if you want to adjust where it's focused.

That second camera is a little less beefy than the front-facing one, with 1080p resolution, a 98-degree field of view, and an identical 4:3 aspect ratio.

All right, this thing seems pretty cool in theory, but how well does it work in reality? I put it to the test to find out.

Buzz off (or, how I tested)

I ran three basic tests on the Eufy Dual, the same ones we run on all of our video doorbells. First, I tested the front-facing camera's "vision" -- both during the day and at night -- by standing at various distances with an actual vision test chart (you know, the one from the eye doctor's office with the descending lines of letters at diminishing font sizes).

Second, I tested both cameras' notifications, making sure they correctly identified their subjects (the Dual includes person, package and facial recognition). I also tested how quickly the notifications arrived in these events, seeing if I could intervene in the case of a mock package theft, for instance.

Finally, I set up the video doorbell and let my camera guy Chris try to rip the buzzer off the wall.

Vision

The front-facing camera is a 2K cam with high-dynamic range, so I expected high performance in the vision test, even with changing light conditions and at significant distances. The result wasn't particularly impressive, but it also wasn't bad. In general, I got sharp readings when the vision test chart was up close, and decent performance at farther distances, up to 30 feet.

One odd thing, though: in some clips, the image was a lot sharper than in others. Essentially, when the light was more severe (direct sun, versus cloudy conditions), the image was a lot muddier. Likewise, some of the vision tests appeared sharp while I was viewing the live stream, but appeared much more pixelated once I downloaded the saved clip.

None of those issues was terrible, but the performance wasn't quite as sharp as you'd expect from a 2K cam with HDR.

I repeated the test at night, and the result was significantly worse. Up close, I got a sharp reading of the chart, but beyond 10 feet or so from the camera, the chart essentially faded into the night altogether.

Frankly, this was one of the worst night vision tests I've run on video doorbells. Right up close, you get a solid image. But as soon as you're farther than 10 feet away, you might as well be invisible. Just out of curiosity, my camera guy tried creeping up to the camera, in the center of the frame, no less, to see when it would pick him up, and he could get within 15 feet or so before it registered him at all. That's not good.

It's weird to see such a weak basic feature on a camera as feature-rich as Eufy's.

Smart alerts, notifications and more

Eufy's different from most doorbell cams not only because of the dual cameras, but also because it includes two types of sensors: a passive infrared sensor to detect body heat and a motion detector to scan for movement. Add that to the smart notifications, and you'd expect some quick and accurate notifications.

Eufy succeeds on only one of those counts.

When I simulated a package delivery without a doorbell ring, I received a notification and a nice full clip of the drop-off -- but it was about seven seconds after the fact.

Next, I tested to see if a doorbell ring would speed up that notification. Based on the default settings, a doorbell press pulls up a live feed from the camera rather than a recording of the event… but the delivery person was already long gone by the time the live feed came up.

You can probably guess what happened when I simulated a package theft. I received a notification, got the full clip, but the would-be porch pirate was already gone, and any ability to activate two-way talk and intervene wasn't going to happen.

Finally, I wanted to test facial recognition, which the doorbell cam effectively accomplished in good conditions.

Now, interestingly, Eufy offers some different personalization here, letting you turn on radar sensing to get earlier notifications and letting you connect the Dual to other motion sensors out in the yard to trigger its recording earlier. You can also change the settings to make the app send you simpler notifications that are marginally faster, and to make it so a motion notification brings you straight to the live feed rather than to the saved clip.

When I activated all these settings to aim for the fastest response time, it made almost no noticeable difference in the test results.

Overall, Eufy ran into the same latency problems you see with most wireless video doorbells: it takes a few seconds to sense motion, notify you, open the app and retrieve the live feed. Those crucial seconds often mean you can't intervene in the case of porch piracy as immediately as advertisements boast.

That said, I really like the flexibility in the app, and for most use-cases, I actually like the default settings, so I'm not always just catching someone walking away from my porch. Instead, I'm getting the full story of what they did when they approached, even if it's delayed by a few seconds.

To test the bottom camera's notifications, I ran a unique test, seeing if it could distinguish between deliveries and other random stuff. Across the board, the bottom camera effectively identified boxes in a variety of sizes and colors. It only failed the test once, with a bright blue box, which it picked up in two subsequent tests.

But this raised the question of whether it could NOT identify things that were decidedly NOT packages. I dropped everything from a fruit platter to a pool noodle to a log in front of the doorbell, and the Dual didn't identify a single one of them as a package.

In short, the bottom camera really seemed to know its stuff.

The final test

It might seem like a useless test, but since we started trying to pull video doorbells off the walls where they're installed, we've discovered a surprising number of smart buzzers are a breeze to steal. Again, it's unclear how big of a risk this truly is, but if you're worried about your new doorbell cam's durability, this isn't a bad place to start.

Turns out, Eufy is pretty tough to pinch. Despite Chris's best efforts, his thumbs were no match for the Video Doorbell Dual.

This is in line with the Dual's general design, it seems. The cam can withstand inclement weather as well as it can thwart thieves, operating at temperatures as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit. That's much lower than most video doorbells on the market, including those from big competitors like Nest, Ring and Wyze.

The takeaway

Eufy is offering a great video doorbell here, for the most part. Sure, it's expensive, but it's got an included chime and local storage. Plus, Eufy seems to have really gone all out with the extra goodies: you can leave personalized audio messages for visitors, use loitering detection, set up Amazon Echo and Google Nest smart speakers as chimes and more.

Those really cool features make the terrible night vision even more mysterious to me, though. Add that to notifications that are a little slower than would be ideal, especially on default settings, and what could have been an editors' choice is instead just a solid smart buzzer. Maybe next time, Eufy.