A sharp, weatherproof driveway camera that does its job well, as long as you've already bought into UniFi Protect.
The G4 Bullet is the camera Ubiquiti built for the spot every house has: the driveway, the side gate, the corner of the yard where a floodlight camera looks awkward and a doorbell camera can't reach. It's a compact, weatherproof bullet camera that runs on a single PoE cable, records at 1440p, and plugs straight into a UniFi Protect console like the Dream Router or a Cloud Key. I mounted mine above my garage door facing the driveway, and it's been up there for about six months now without a single hiccup.
Night footage is the thing that actually impressed me. The built-in IR illuminator lights up to about 25 feet with enough detail to read a license plate if the car parks reasonably close, and it doesn't wash out faces the way cheaper IR cameras tend to. During the day, the 1440p sensor holds up well in direct sun and doesn't blow out highlights the way some budget cameras do when headlights sweep across the frame at night.
“It already knows the difference between a person, a car, and the neighbor's cat at two in the morning.”
Smart detection is handled entirely by the Protect console rather than the camera itself, so accuracy depends on which console you've paired it with. On my Dream Router it correctly separates people from vehicles from animals close to 90 percent of the time, and the false alerts I do get are almost always a shadow moving at dusk, not something egregious.
Mounting is straightforward. It ships with a mount, a weatherproofing gasket for the cable entry, and a drilling template, and the whole install took about twenty minutes including running the cable through my garage wall. The ball-and-socket adjustment holds its angle well even after a summer of heat, which is more than I can say for a couple of cheaper cameras I've owned that slowly drooped over a few months.
The real limitation isn't the camera, it's what it requires. This thing does nothing on its own. No app, no cloud subscription option, no standalone recording, just a PoE camera that needs a UniFi Protect console doing the actual thinking. If you're not already in the UniFi ecosystem or willing to buy into it, the G4 Bullet by itself is a very well-built paperweight.
Compared to the G4 Pro, you're giving up the physical zoom and a chunk of resolution, and compared to the G4 Instant, you're giving up the plug-and-play wireless setup for a wired install that actually delivers reliable footage instead of the choppy clips the battery-powered Instant produces on a bad Wi-Fi day. For a fixed, wired position like a driveway or a side yard, the tradeoff favors the Bullet every time.
IP66 weatherproofing has held up through a full year of rain and one genuinely nasty hailstorm without any fogging inside the housing, which is the kind of thing you don't appreciate until you've owned a camera that failed at it. Ubiquiti's firmware updates have also kept pace, adding smart detection improvements well after I'd already bought the thing rather than leaving it frozen at launch quality.
At its price, the G4 Bullet is one of the easiest recommendations in the UniFi Protect lineup, as long as you already own or are willing to buy the console it depends on. Anyone deep enough into UniFi to have a Dream Router or Cloud Key already running should just add this to the cart. Anyone looking for a camera that works entirely on its own should look elsewhere.