A good, basic camera
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2024 | Rating: 4/5 | Best Sellers in Amazon Devices & Accessories
i live alone in a firstfloor apartment in a nongated community in an okay but not perfectly safe part of town  i cant afford even a midprice camera system and dont have much technical knowledge when it comes to hardware  for the past several years ive been using wyze cameras to peek in on my dog while im gone see whos approaching my front door and even keep an eye on and talk to maintenance workers in my apartment when im not there  but recently wyze had a pretty big failure affecting most of their customers  cameras went offline for hours on end no one could log into their accounts and worst of all communication was nonexistant  i hated not being able to check on my dog or see that my home was safe that day so i started looking for other options and blink minis looked like a comparable solution to be fair ive been using wyze since 2017 and ive only run into whole system issues like this twice in that timerather that replace all my wyze cams at once i decided to to get a few blink minis and set them up for doublecoverage in the areas most important to me  front and back doors and my dog  i set a price watch on the blink minis hoping to get them at a sale price and sure enough i was soon alerted to a 3 for 40 deal and grabbed it i fumbled a little in setting them up not understanding the networks that were trying to connect but i eventually guessed my way through it and got the first camera working  oddly enough wyze had another big system failure right in the middle of all this so getting all 3 blinks going last night has already paid off  as for how the wyze and blink systems comparethe blink mini and the app are a little lacking to be honest at least when compared with wyze  both cameras have motion detection night vision and 2way audio as well as an available 10mo subscription plan to save clips from an unlimited  of cameras  but while wyze cameras allow you to continuously record to micro sd without a subscription or additional expense blink mini will only record clips to sd if you spend another 50 on their sync module  a blink subscription however will record 10second clips when it detects motion and save them for 60 days on the cloud no sd card required 10 seconds is the default i finally found the setting to change it to 30 seconds which is the max but a wyze subscription will automatically record longer clips anywhere from 12 seconds to however long the motion continues at least a couple of minutes from what ive seen and store them on the cloud for 2 weeks  so while wyze doesnt store them as long they do record all the motion even if it goes way longer than 30 seconds  plus blink requires a 10second break between clips whereas a wyze subscription just immediately starts recording even if its only been a couple of seconds since the previous motion endedadditionally blink just isnt as featurerich as wyze  blink has person detection if youre on a subscription plan  wyze does too but wyze also has package detection friendly face recognition and pet detection  so if you want wyze to notify you when someone drops a package at your door but not if someone just walks by it can  blink cant do that  wyze also allows you to set rules and schedules  for example i have my wyze cams scheduled to turn on notifications monfri at 730am when i leave for work  and turn them off at 630pm when i get home the cameras are still on and recording motion clips to save on the cloud 247 but theyre not sending unnecessary notifications when im home  meanwhile every moment still or motion is recorded to sd card  and i didnt have to spend 50 on another module  with blink i can only schedule times for the cameras to be on and looking for motion or i can snooze the notifications for up to 24 hours but i cant actually schedule it not to send notifications at specific timesso whats the verdict  blink mini is a good basic camera at an affordable price especially if you wait for it to go on sale  the 10mo subscription is worth it to save video clips and the picturevideo quality is good  if youre already deep in the amazon ecosystem with ring doorbells echos etc then the blink mini is a nice little addition  but if youre not already devoted to amazon devices for the home wyze offers more for essentially the same price  all that said im not disappointed with my purchase  these 3 blink minis allow me to keep an eye on things even on the rare occasion that wyze fails me