While most video doorbells have been focusing on a single wide lens or different ways to go wireless, Maximus realized that there was a significant piece of the equation that all other doorbells have been missing: the bottom half. Similar to the song The Mermaid by Shel Silverstein, the top portion of most video doorbells is great, but the bottom half is fairly useless. Video doorbells aren’t exactly inconspicuous, and a sneaky intruder could very easily duck underneath the video feed if the video doorbell is in a less-than-ideal spot.
Maximus fixes this problem by not only including a nice wide 180-degree angle lens up top with 1080p quality video, but also a secondary camera that looks down at about a 45-degree angle with 720p video quality. This eliminates the entire blind spot that exists below most doorbells and gives greater peace of mind to homeowners who choose the Maximum Answer over other video doorbells on the market. It’s also a better way to spot packages that are left at the door since it can see directly below the doorbell, while other video doorbells rely on movement alone to see when a package is delivered.
It’s also got a 30-foot range night vision sensor to see those sneaky sneakies in the dark that might not approach the door fully once they see a video doorbell attached to the wall. It’s even got 6 infrared LED lights on it to properly illuminate the scene and identify packages or visitors at night without looking like a spotlight to the human eye. There’s also a “music-quality” speaker on the front with echo cancellation and 2-way audio support, which enhances both the sound of your voice coming from the speaker and the sound of the person’s voice that’s talking to you through the speaker.
The Answer doorbell also requires less power than other video doorbells on the market while simultaneously providing lower latency, faster network connections for improved response to people ringing the doorbell and higher quality video and audio feed as a result.
Maximus Answer utilizes the Kuna app for all its communication needs, which features the ability to utilize that 2-way communication when viewing the video feed from the doorbell, sound an alarm, and even dial 911 in the event of an emergency. The Kuna app shows full 1-minute recordings of footage every time movement is detected, including the 10-seconds before the movement event actually happened, helping to provide greater context to the scene.
You’ll even find canned messages in the app that allow you to respond to someone at the door in those events that you aren’t able to actually speak to them, such as when in a meeting or while at school. Up to 2 hours of recordings can be stored for free on the cloud, and Maximus offers several different ways to provide longer footage via a subscription model.
Much like Nest, this subscription model includes AI-backed identification of events, including the ability to identify humans, packages, and other incidents to more readily provide specific, accurate information of what’s at your door. This also includes the ability to only detect motion in certain parts of the scene via a grid-based system, so you can ignore that tree that always blows in the wind and erroneously sets off the motion detection.
Maximus Answer is available for $199 at the official maximuslighting.com website, as well as online at Amazon, Home Depot, Costco, Sams Club, Lowes, and even in some Lowesr brick-and-mortar stores as well.