Blink Video Doorbell | Two-way audio, HD video, motion and chime app alerts, and Alexa enabled — wired or wire-free (White)

Good for existing Blink customers. 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.

This checked all my boxes for home monitoring system. I was initially looking at another brand because they had a wireless video doorbell that came with its own chime. My home was built in 1897 and I don’t have existing doorbell wiring or chime in the house. So wireless doorbell that came with a chime was the way I wanted to go. Only problem, this other brand didn’t offer all the options and/or configurations I was hoping for.Then I was introduced to Blink. It had all the options I needed. Granted it doesn’t have its own chime, BUT….you can use the mini or Alexa as your indoor chime. Perfect! Had the corner mount so I could point the video doorbell camera towards the entrance to the porch. Again, old home on a corner with a wrap around porch where the entrance to the porch was on the corner and the door was at the end of one side. Does me no good to have the camera pointing straight ahead into the front yard. You can mix and match all of the devices to get the optimum setup for your needs, and they all connect seamlessly.Then I started doing my research on Blink. Reading the reviews from customers really made me question if I should buy. Too difficult to install. Too difficult to set up. Can’t connect to Alexa. Battery life a fraction of what they claim. Cameras always disconnecting. I’m glad I ignored the reviews, chalking up the technology issues to people just not being tech savvy. I was right.Installation was extremely simple. Not a fan of the online instructions instead of a booklet, but I managed.Sync Module, video doorbell, 3 outdoor cameras and 1 mini indoor camera connected to the Blink system with no issues.Connecting to Alexa was equally as flawless. Set up the Blink skill in Alexa and “she” immediately found all the Blink devices. Our Echo in the living room, Echo Dot in the bedroom and the indoor mini will all serve as chimes wherever we are in the house. The Echo devices will also announce any motion detection. We can arm and disarm the system by voice command with Alexa. Disarm does require a voice pin code which you have to set up in the Alexa app.Setting up and managing the devices in the blink app is fairly intuitive and straight forward. You can adjust the motion sensitivity, set up privacy and no detection zones. After setting up the doorbell out of the box, we would get random motion detection notifications. After checking the clips, it had to be either vehicles passing in the street facing the door, or a flag flapping in the wind at the end of the porch where the steps are. I shut off motion detection in the street, lowered the sensitivity slightly, but left the flag area on, and no more false detection’s. So it was definitely not the flag tripping it. Camera still picks up people as they come to the top of the steps and alerts us.Video quality is pretty decent. I’m please so far. Haven’t been able to test what the night video looks like, or the two way voice at the doorbell yet. Once I am able to and if there are any real issues, I will edit my review.As far as battery life, it’s too early to tell. All the documentation I have read indicates that with the sync module and turning off settings or features you don’t really need will extend the battery life to the 2 years claimed. Time will tell.If I had a complaint so far, it’s the fact that the time it takes from notification until a live view of the camera finally comes up in the app, the person tripping the motion detection has dropped off the package and left. That timing needs reduced greatly.

Easy Install, Works Great. Installed as a wired replacement for old doorbell. Installation was relatively easy but did require a little bit of mounting and wiring skills – just a little bit, the instructions were very clear and complete. I was a little concerned about the mounting position since the access to the old wiring was rather low, however it worked out great since the camera has a nice wide view.Operation is good and the camera view is very clear. The nighttime IR may need a little adjusting to eliminate reflections – easily done in the app. Setting motion locations was also very straightforward and effective using the app. Overall – very satisfied.