Good for existing Blink customers
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2022 | Rating: 4/5 | Best Sellers in Amazon Devices & Accessories
i am a longtime user of blink meaning i am in the grandfathered set of customers with free limited cloud storage for video  overall i think if you are already a blink customer this is a good addition to your systeminstall i needed one of those wedges that turns the camera to face out and using that the install was pretty simple  i agree with the people that noted that the back plate it comes with which you still use when installing the wedge is a little cheap and janky  but the wedge is more sturdy and the resulting install is probably a little bit more solid and better than if i had just mounted the flat plate to the wallyou do need a good sized piece of flat wood to screw everything into  this is not going to mount well to raw siding curved trim pieces around doors etc  youd have to attach a small board to the surface of anything like that and then mount it to that boardpower vs batteries  i have one of those wired doorbells that is oldschool with the metal strikers that hit little chimes not a digital doorbell  this apparently matters because you need more power and a slightly larger transformer to drive one of those doorbells  in turn that means the transformer has enough power to power the blink doorbell  if you have a digital doorbell you may or may not need to rely on the battery for the cameras  it all depends on how big the transformer for your existing wired doorbell is  during the setup it asks you what kind of doorbell you have and has a fairly sophisticated set of settings to make sure that when it sends a signal to the physical doorbell it is sending the correct amount of power to strike the chimes correctlysetup very easy and painless almost exactly the same as setting up a regular blink camera  put in the batteries scan the qr code it finds the camera links it to your existing systemsync module and you are ready to gomotion sensor if you are already pretty familiar with blink cameras you know they can come with one of two kinds of sensors to detect motion  camera based sensors that just detect changes in the picture and more traditional sensors that only detect actual physical movement  the cheaper blink mini only has a camera based sensor while the more expensive units only detect actual physical movement with a dedicated motion sensor  both kinds of sensors can be triggered falsely by something like blowing leaves but the camerabased sensors cannot distinguish changes in shadows and light from actual movement and so they have much higher rates of false detection  unfortunately the blink doorbell appears to only have the cheaper detector that can be fooled by changes in light  it does however have a more sophisticated narrower grid of zones you can exclude from movement than the older blink mini  how much this matters to you is going to depend on where you plan to stick the camera  if you point your doorbell camera directly at a busy road and dont lock out the parts of the image that covers the road you will get constant alerts from every car that goes by or every person walking on the sidewalk etc  so think carefully about where the camera will sit and whether you want one of those wedges to tilt the direction of the thing to keep the camera aimed only at places where you actually want it to detect motionvideo quality very good with a wide angle almost fisheye lens so you get very good broad coverage of the area you are pointing the camera at  there is also a microphone that records sound while you are recording video and it seems to work ok as well  in theory you can use the thing to have a twoway conversation with whoever is at the door but i havent tried that yet  i am overall very happy with the camera quality for the price heresound chimenotifications  when you push the doorbell a chime inside the module itself goes off  it is reasonably loud and lets the person ringing the doorbell know they definitely rang it  the light on the button also lights up briefly to confirm the chime was pressed  would you sitting inside the house hear the chime the doorbell makes outside  probably if you are in a small quiet house  would you hear it  down in the basement of a large house with the tv or music on  absolutely not  so if you are not hooking this up to an existing doorbell with a properly loud internal chime then you will want to have it hooked up to your alexa  i dont use alexa so didnt test that feature  you do get a notification on your phone when somebody rings the bell  but i think most people will want either a hard wired connection or an alexa connected to this thing to make sure they always hear the doorbellwhat dont i likei wish it had the same motion detection sensors as the larger blink cameras  i would have paid more to get that  because it uses the camera to sense motion there are places where it really wont give good results  so think very carefully about where you will place this how often the wind will blow trees and create moving shadows within the motion detection zone etcit is annoying that even when the device is hardwired the light around the doorbell button isnt constantly lit  just as if it were only running on batteries it only lights up when you press the button  not a huge deal in my installation but if you dont have a porch light on your doorbell will not be obvious to visitors  it is particularly odd that they put a red led into the thing which apparently has no purpose other than in the initial setup  the design would be much better if the lighted ring around the button was always lit and then it flashed or turned red when you pressed it  it appears all of the hardware necessary to do that is in the device but it is not programmed that way  i get that when the device isnt hardwired you dont want the button lit but when it is powered it really should be lit in the darkfor 50 this thing is ok  if you get it on sale then it is a good deal at least if you are an existing blink customeri am surprised that they killed off the little bit of free cloud storage for new customers  that cant cost very much to provide these days and it was the key differentiator between blink and some of these other companies that provide more elaborate highpriced options  blinks claim to fame is that it works well enough and is cheap  but if you have to pay a bunch of money for cloud storage no matter what i would probably look at the more expensive options vs blink  it stops being a compelling value once you start having to pay for video storage