Top-Notch Security and Convenience: A Review of the Blink Video Doorbell with Two-way Audio, HD Video, Motion Alerts, and Alexa Integration

2 thoughts on “Top-Notch Security and Convenience: A Review of the Blink Video Doorbell with Two-way Audio, HD Video, Motion Alerts, and Alexa Integration”

1. Originally we purchased a Ring doorbell which I loved initially until I realized it was stuck downloading firmware. Dealing with Ring support I cut my losses and got this doorbell from Blink. Quite literally 1/5th the price of the Ring.

   The Blink doorbell nearly fit in the same location which was nice. Now I only have a small hole where the Ring unit was. This doorbell only has 2 screw holes for securing it to the house, less than ideal but still, secure enough. It is able to be wired into a regular doorbell transformer so I have it on ac power. I’m not sure if it was meant to be able to ring an indoor ringer but I couldn’t get it to work, but also suspect the old indoor doorbell isn’t functional. It came with the house that was built in 86 so I wasn’t hung up on that working.

   However… This doorbell doesn’t come with a ringer, not really. It will ring OUTSIDE, the unit itself will chime, you will NEVER HEAR IT inside your house. I mean I supposed it’s possible if you live in a tent. Blink has some indoor cams that will double as wireless door chimes, get a set, call it a day, you won’t be disappointed.

   Supposedly you can get Alexa to squack when someone rings the door bell also, don’t count on that working consistently, it’s a nice thought, dare to dream right? We have 8 Alexa devices throughout the house and maybe 1 in 10 doorbell rings will also ring on the Alexa devices. The Blink indoor cams, chime every time so again, that’s the best solution.

   The doorbell also comes with a wedge if I remember correctly, for turning the doorbell from being buried in a corner to face into your entry way a bit more, but if there is siding or something that faces your doorbell towards the sky or something like that you’ll have to figure out a way to aim it more directly at visitors. I ultimately removed a swatch of siding to mount the doorbell flush against the house and that was the best solution and viewing angle.

   Overall, video picture isn’t bad, motion detection is a bit sensitive, but still tweaking that. For the money you can forgive a lot of this doorbells short comings. None of them are deal breakers, but there are little things that you don’t know about till you get your hands on one.

   I will say this, research your purchase, if you already have Ring, stick with Ring, in order for most of these smart cams and doorbells to save videos, you have to subscribe to Blink, or Ring or whatever for their cloud storage. Typically it’s $4 per single device or $10 for unlimited devices, per month. Originally I thought I had read that Blink would allow 7200 seconds for video storage in their cloud without a subscription. Yes that is correct but ONLY if you have what they call a legacy or grandfathered account. So if this is your first Blink device, and you want clip storage in the cloud, you will have to get the basic sub for that. If you have other Blink devices and a hub with USB flash memory storage, you can live without the sub. The nice thing about the cloud storage is you can manipulate your saved clips much easier than if you just have the hub and USB storage. It’s a toss up depending on how much convenience you want. Just know that if you can’t live without the cloud storage option, you will be paying for a sub for each brand (and apps for each to control them), there isn’t anything out there that can combine them all into one. I didn’t want to have Blink, and Ring, and …? subs because that’s getting expensive just to save clips so I opted to go with all Blink devices.

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2. I am a long-time 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 system.

   Install: 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 wall.
   You 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. You’d have to attach a small board to the surface of anything like that and then mount it to that board.

   Power vs. batteries: I have one of those wired doorbells that is old-school, 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 correctly.

   Set-up: 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 system/sync module and you are ready to go.

   Motion 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 camera-based 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 don’t 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 motion.

   Video quality: Very good, with a wide angle, almost fish-eye 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 two-way conversation with whoever is at the door, but I haven’t tried that yet. I am, overall, very happy with the camera quality for the price here.

   Sound Chime/notifications: 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 don’t use Alexa so didn’t 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 doorbell.

   What don’t I like?

   I 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 won’t 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, etc.

   It is annoying that even when the device is hard-wired, the light around the doorbell button isn’t 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 don’t 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 isn’t hardwired you don’t want the button lit, but when it is powered it really should be lit in the dark.

   For $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 customer.

   I am surprised that they killed off the little bit of free cloud storage for new customers. That can’t 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, high-priced options. Blink’s 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.

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