A sharp, weatherproof driveway camera that does its job well, as long as you've already bought into UniFi Protect.
A package went missing off my porch in the spring, and the doorbell camera I owned at the time had a lovely clear view of the porch and no view whatsoever of the driveway the person had walked up. That gap is the spot every house has, the driveway or the side gate or the corner where a floodlight camera looks daft and a doorbell camera can't reach, and it's the exact spot Ubiquiti built the G4 Bullet for. It's compact, weatherproof, 1440p, runs on one PoE cable, and plugs straight into a UniFi Protect console like a Dream Router or a Cloud Key.
Night footage is why it's stayed above the garage door for the six months since. The IR illuminator reaches about 25 feet with enough detail left over to read a plate on a car parked in the driveway, faces don't wash out into white smears the way my old cheap cameras managed, and when headlights sweep across the frame the sensor recovers rather than blooming into a wall of glare. I watched more of this footage than I'd care to put in writing, mostly on account of a possum that commutes across the driveway at 2:40 in the morning on a schedule you could set a watch by. Detection files him under animal every time, correctly, and it separates people from vehicles somewhere close to 90 percent of the time on my Dream Router. What false alerts I get come from shadows at dusk rather than from leaves blowing about at three in the morning.
“A possum commutes across the driveway at 2:40 in the morning on a schedule you could set a watch by.”
The install kit is good and the drilling template is good, and the job still took me most of an afternoon, because running cable through a finished garage wall is the actual project and no camera review tells you that up front. I measured twice, drilled once, and missed the stud bay anyway, so there's a filler-plugged hole an inch to the left of where the cable comes through, which I've stopped noticing and my wife definately hasn't. The ball-and-socket mount has held its angle through a full summer, which is more than the slowly drooping cameras it replaced ever managed.
What this camera does on its own is nothing at all. There's no app of its own, no cloud option, no standalone recording, just a PoE camera that needs a Protect console somewhere doing the thinking for it. Anyone without UniFi already in the house is buying a well-built paperweight, and the console is where the money quietly goes.
Against its siblings, the G4 Pro gives you optical zoom and more resolution for a good deal more money, and the G4 Instant offers battery-powered convenience I've stopped believing in entirely. I bought two battery cameras from other brands over the years, and both of them spent their lives sitting at 40 percent, produced choppy clips on bad Wi-Fi days, and missed the single event I'd bought them for. Wires or nothing is where I've ended up on this, and I'm aware it makes me tedious at barbecues.
IP66 weatherproofing has survived a year of rain and one properly nasty hailstorm without fogging the housing, and firmware updates kept improving detection long after purchase instead of freezing at launch quality. I never worked out why detection got noticeably sharper around the eight-month mark, because nothing in the release notes mentioned it, and I've been quietly waiting for it to swing back the other way ever since. The possum hasn't missed a night since October, going by the timeline in the app, which I checked far more often than I ever checked the alerts I put the camera up for.