Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsVery good camera, but security light has a major flaw.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 19 April 2023
I got this light to replace a generic chinese security camera that had been covering the front of the house. The resolution is about the same, and the wattage of the security lights and IR are about the same, so I'm able to do a direct comparison.
First, the installation is very easy. There are some nice QoL improvements, such as the little strap inside that you can use to hang the light while you're wiring it up, rather than (as usual) having to have three hands: one to hold the light, one to hold the wires and one to screw them in. This actually made the most painful part of the installation very easy.
Once installed, getting the camera hooked up was pretty easy. It added itself into the ring system painlessly, but it did take about 20 minutes to sort itself out with the mesh network we have in the house.
The camera is on the outer wall of a farm house (with 2 foot thick stone walls). The nearest mesh node is about 15 feet away, so the signal isn't brilliant, but the camera still manages to get a good video stream out to the storage, and I can wake it to watch the driveway pretty much any time.
When setting up the motion detection, I noted that you could add/remove lots of polygonal zones, but the nodes couldn't get too close to each other. So, if you have a curvy tree you want to omit from the motion zone, it's tricky to make it follow the curves, as the vertices have to be quite far from each other.
It's the motion that's the most frustrating thing about this camera. Right next to the camera we have a 'dumb' security light. There's a flue vent about 10feet away below and to the side of the camera/light. In colder weather, when the boiler is on, the wind can whip the warm exhaust from the flue up and in front of the camera/light. The security light completely ignores the clouds of warm exhaust and doesn't trigger. The Ring security light, however DOES.
In fact, we noted that the ring security light, even on its most insensitive setting will trip for all kinds of things, like mice, falling leaves, swaying trees, birds landing on the shed and (as mentioned) the warm exhaust from the flue.
This means that I have to turn the lights OFF for most of the night whenever the heating might be on, otherwise it's flicking on and off constantly for hours, wasting power and flooding the hallway with reflected light, waking us up.
This is absolutely due to the use of a camera and frame differencing to do the motion detection rather than a faceted IR on a simpler unit. The engineers of the ring camera need to look at how to reject whole-field sudden changes as well as very small animals and leaves.
In the meantime, I need to have a separate, dumb, IR light next to the very expensive Ring light, which spends most of its time in camera-only mode.
