Google Nest Cam update is causing night vision to look extremely blurry

Ben Schoon | Oct 27 2023 - 11:30 am PT

Google’s Nest Cam lineup doesn’t take the highest-quality video, but it once had a solid reputation for being pretty reliable. After previous updates made daytime HDR footage look unpleasant in the light, newer updates seem to be hurting night vision performance on Nest Cam.

Night vision on Google’s new lineup of Nest Cam products has never been particularly impressive, especially seeing as there are far more affordable products that now support color night vision. But, again, it was at least consistently reliable at the time. With a new update, that seems to have changed.

Firmware version 1.69 for Google Nest Cam products seems to have hurt night vision performance considerably, with users on Reddit noting that footage now looks blurry or grainy. One user relayed an experience of their car being broken into and the footage from their Nest Cam being useless at showing the incident because it was blurry (though images were not shared).

The folks at PiunikaWeb have detailed a timeline of Nest Cam’s night vision woes, with issues as far back as June of this year when the revamped daytime HDR rolled out. However, the newer firmware version 1.69 really seems to be the core of the issue right now. The update started rolling out as far back as mid-September, as a thread on Google’s support forums shows issues dating back that far, but it seems to be affecting more users in the past few weeks especially. It seems to mainly affect Nest Cam (battery) and Floodlight.

It’s something I can confirm on my own Nest Cam units, as night vision lately has been extremely blurry, which was not the case earlier this month. My affected Nest Cam with Floodlight is using version 1.69, and issues seem to have started within the past couple of weeks. There are no issues with the quality during the day, though.

Before (L) and after (R) the 1.69 update

As customers in the US approach the winter months and with the start of daylight savings next week, which will result in more and more dark hours in the day, having night vision issues is certainly a big problem on the Nest Cam, one we hope to see Google fix as soon as possible, but the company hasn’t provided a public response on the matter that we can find.

We’ve reached out to Google for more information and will update this post when we hear back.