Ring Doorbell Camera Mini-Review

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 8:55 pm

I installed one of these on my father's house last week and I have to say I'm pretty impressed. You can get it at Home Depot for $200.

If you have an existing doorbell (I did) it just connects to the doorbell wires. It replaces the doorbell button and contains a VERY wide angle camera. If someone rings the doorbell, the Ring app on your phone allows you to see who's at the door, and to speak to them if you want to. You don't have to be at the house - you can answer the doorbell from anywhere.

You also have the option of enabling motion detection. Anything moves within range of the camera (you can adjust the range and angles) and it alerts you.

You get a 30 day trial of their cloud storage which stores all the videos for any event (doorbell ring or motion) to their cloud server. If you decide to pay for the cloud storage it's $30 a year, which is a no-brainer.

The quality is great. A little dark at night so I would recommend leaving the porch light on (I just replaced the porch light with one that automatically comes on at dusk and leave it on).

Surprisingly low latency, even when I spoke to someone at the door from 300 miles away.

It comes with everything you need to install it except a drill. It comes with a masonry drill bit and anchors if needed, wood screws, a small bubble level, and a screwdriver tool with two tips - one a standard phillips for the mounting screws, and a special spline tip to lock the unit to the base that attaches to the wall.

It's easy to setup. Needless to say you have to have Wifi at the house. You just install the Android or iPhone app, it searches for the doorbell unit (which runs it's own Wifi hotspot initially to aalow it to be configured). One the phone connects to the unit, it searches for your Wifi network and asks you for the passphrase. Very easy.

Multiple people can have access to the unit. For instance mine is the master account, and I have the cloud storage billed to my account. But my father has his own account and I setup my account to share the doorbell with his account so either of us can answer or access the stored videos.

You can also have multiple devices: for instance a front and back door doorbell camera.

I will probably install one of these on my own house. I really like it.

https://ring.com/

Here's a couple of videos from my camera (you can log into your Ring account and create a URL link to any stored video):

Daylight video, with me demonstrating it to my father:
https://ring.com/share/67086748

Night time video:
https://ring.com/share/71190234

Post by **Genom** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 9:16 pm

Does it allow you to save videos locally?

Losbot · Post by **Losbot** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 9:56 pm

You can probably D/L them from the site.

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 10:21 pm

pretty cool

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Nov 09, 2015 11:03 pm

Yes, you can download an MP4 file from their cloud storage, and BTW I can tell from the link that they are using Amazon S3 for their cloud storage.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 12:51 am

I was looking for something like this a few months ago. Just ended up saying screw it because I didn't like what I was finding & put a peep-hole in the door.

Post by **Genom** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 9:42 am

I mean without the cloud service.

I dont need that, have plenty of local storage, a static DNS and VPN.

DaMaN · Post by **DaMaN** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 10:21 am

That is pretty sweet, thanks for sharing. Who was that guy looking in the trash at 4:30AM in the morning?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 10:53 am

A friend. I asked him to take out the trash for me. He drives a cab in the evenings

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 10:56 am

Genom: Nor sure how long they store them without the cloud plan. Maybe 24hrs? If so u could probably write a script to download them.

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 1:41 pm

I've had mine since sometime last fall. My only complaint is the lag time between when someone rings it, or catches motion to when I get an alert on my phone or ipad. It's not instant.

I tried motion for some time but it's too sensitive, picks up branches moving in the wind and some cars driving by (~40' away) and I've set sensitivity and range sections to bare minimum too.

They occasionally update SW and I hope that it gets better someday.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Nov 10, 2015 4:13 pm

I'm getting around 3 false motion detections a day. Rising sun, and cats usually.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 5:33 pm

Well they just pushed out an update that addresses my only complain with the product (a LOT of people's complaints from the forums). You weren't able to watch a live view from the camera at any time you wanted, only when someone rang the bell or when motion triggered it.

Now there's a "Live View" option. I can watch the video feed any time I want.

https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/artic ... -Live-View

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:01 pm

I'm still waiting for mine to be updated. On FB, someone said by the 25th. Doesn't really thrill me either way as there's nothing much to see other than if someone's at the door and it already does that.

Bob, with your ring app, where it shows the doorbell as in the link above, does yours say "hardwired" there? Mine is hardwired but shows "battery" there but when I open the settings icon (gear), says "hardwired". Hopefully I'll get it w/o needing to call tech support (or wait until late May)?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 23, 2016 7:23 pm

Mine only says "Battery" buy mine IS hardwired, and the live view works. Might be a bug.

I had to manually update the Ring app on my phone. I don't allow apps to auto-update.

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Ring Doorbell Camera Mini-Review

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