"home false sense of security" :P

[WRXtranceformed]

So far the experience with Ring is mostly good. They forgot to ship the solar panel and the Stick Up cam I received was obviously a refurb unit, so I called them, their CS was good and apologized profusely and sent a new one in the mail. I'll report back on my thoughts when that actually gets here.

The setup is stupid-proof (even though the doorbell chime didn't initially work because stupid here hooked the wires up wrong). The Pro bell looks really good and has removable face plates with different colors. There is one that is almost identical to our trim but wifey liked the brown better because it matches our door, so brown it is:


The app interface is pretty good, customizable motion sensor zones and sensitivity are a plus and despite some of the reviews the speaker / microphone are plenty loud for two-way communication. We already caught the post man running through our mulch bed to deliver a package :lol: Being able to pinch and zoom in on live view is cool too.

Only few qualms so far is that there is no way this is 1080p as advertised; it's clear but I would be surprised if you could consider it even 720p:

The night vision is pretty good though with the IR lights (black and white) or when we leave our porch light on (it's supposed to be one of the best out of all of the doorbell cam options):



I saw a bunch of complaints online about people saying that the motion alerts don't get to them fast enough, but I don't think those people understand the process in a cloud based system like this. If someone rings the doorbell, we get a notification basically immediately and can communicate. If it's just a motion sensor trigger, we get a notification and the ability to switch to the live view but to actually watch the motion capture video it takes about a minute or two for it to record, save, process and upload to the cloud where you can then watch it from your app or computer. That is completely acceptable to me; if someone is really lurking around the house it's not likely to be a one and done motion event (like a car passing by or the delivery guy leaving a package) and I would probably catch them on the live view.

As you can see, the fishbowl effect of the lens doesn't exactly capture as much of the yard as a real-life view does, so we will probably proceed with the floodlight cam retrofit assuming the Stick Up cam replacement process goes smoothly.