Blink Outdoor (3rd Gen) - wireless, weather-resistant HD security camera, two-year battery life, motion detection, set up in minutes – 1 camera system

Invested in the Blink Outdoor camera system over the holiday and here are my thoughts after 45 days of usage.PROS:1. Super easy to set up and install. It pretty much installs itself.2. User friendly cell phone application. My only complaint is the inability to share access to the app with other household members. I'm not the only one who needs to access footage or receive alerts. You should have an admin user + other standard household users.3. Image quality is decent as long as there is sufficient lighting.4. Two way radio. Speaker is not great but microphone picks up even faint sounds. I could clearly hear someone talking on his phone while sitting in a car in front of my house.5. From the app,. you can turn on/off the blue/red LEDs on the cameras to make them more or less noticeable depending on your needs.6. App will show you battery life. Each camera can have it's onw settings including sensitivity, clip length, privacy zones, etc.CONS1. Night vision is not impressive at all, especially when the subject is 10+ fit away. I work around the issue by keeping my outdoor lighting on. Image #1 is at night with outdoor lighting.2. Motion sensor feature is finicky. It detects motion BEFORE the subject enters the field of view. Motion sensor works best when subject travels across field of vision (left to right, right to left), especially if subject originates from outside of the camera's field of view. To get the best results, camera should be positioned in such a way that potential subjects travel L or R or R to L (not walking toward/away from camera)3. Activity zones do not work as they should. I don't want my camera triggered by movement in my neighbors' yard but even when graying out that area, camera still picks up movement there.Overall, I am satisfied with this system. I now have 4 cameras installed on my townhouse and I feel like the system met all my needs.

I am happier with this outdoor Blink than I thought I would be. Amazon discontinued Cloud Cam which I had and loved. I decided to try this system. It is extremely easy to set up, even for a person like me who is not tech savvy. The night vision is good on the medium IR setting. Since these are battery run, you want to be careful with your settings to save battery power. I set the sensitivity to the middle of the bar (5) and that is just perfect. I have two cameras outside. One overlooks our driveway and the street. That sensitivity setting means it does not record/alert on every passing car. It only records people in your driveway or things like the trash truck stopping at the curb. I set the recording time to 30 seconds rather than 60 to save battery. Any time you want to view what the camera sees, you just hit the video button and it will bring up live view. One important thing. The bracket that comes with the camera is not very good and you cannot easily adjust or rotate your camera. I ordered a box of 3 tiltable brackets. They were easy to install, even on our brick exterior, and you can rotate the camera into position. Amazon sells them as "All-New Blink Outdoor Camera Surveillance Mount, 3 Pack Weatherproof Protective Housing and 360 Degree Adjustable Mount with Sync Module 2 Mount for Blink Outdoor cameras".

Blink cameras are still years later a good buy for those looking for security cameras on a budget. I've owned four of the original Blink G1 cameras and even after some six years they're still going strong. Helping a friend with their security needs spurred me to look at Blink's current crop of devices and I purchased two new G3 cameras. The G3 cameras I purchased have the ability of two way communication which G1 did not, so I swapped them out placing the G3 cameras at my front and back doors andoved the G1 cameras that had been there to elsewhere.Things to think about and remember... Blink still touts two year battery life. You'll need to take into consideration where you place the camera and the settings as the busier the yard (I have a zero lot yard) and the higher you toggle your settings the less battery life you can expect. To avoid having to swap out batteries, consider investing in a solar panel. Whether it's a third party manufacture or now Blink sells a solar mount it's something to think about. I purchased panels for my G1 cameras (and as a given I purchased them for my new G3 cameras) and haven't worried about power in some six years. The panels even are robust enough that is the sun isn't out for days they can still provide days worth of power before needing to recharge and by that time hopefully the weather will have improved.As much as I want to like my new G3 cameras for their ability to communicate both ways, I get some feedback. I've yet to have a visitor to either the front or back door and have an actual conversation through the cameras, but I'd have appreciated them being noise cancelling. If you have the volume toggled on then they will alert based upon the noise. I've got the volume toggled off and the camera set to thirty seconds or less for motion. I figure I'll get the motion alert and toggle on the volume to then speak with whomever and avoid alerts because the camera heard an errant noise.Daytime recording is great, the G3 cameras had no problems and the quality was comparable to my G1 cameras. The night recordings suffer as Blink cameras have never done really well at night, but you should know who's supposed to be around your residence and not. Obviously if you see someone on a motion recorded clip around your house in the overnight you've likely got a problem regardless of the lack of detail. This however could easily be fixed by just pairing up your camera with an inexpensive motion activated spot lamp. You can find wired, battery and solar powered spot lamps for cheap at your home improvement store or Amazon. Both pointing in the same direction they'll likely see the same thing and go off the spot lamp illuminating and allowing for good enough night time recording in color with detail.Wish Blink would introduce an outdoor rated pan and tilt camera. A family friend had some they wanted my help with and they didn't work out so got them something else. But I kind of like the idea of a pan and tilt camera on the cheap which I think Blink could do. But Blink cameras are so cheap, and usually even on sale in bundles, you can easily buy a few and scatter them around to cover everything.The app, the app, the app... Was thinking about switching from Blink to Reolink but instead stayed with Blink. Was interested in Reolink and even bought a few for testing but the app was a mess compared to the Blink app. I'm an older grandfathered Blink customer so I get free cloud storage and access, new customers will have to buy a subscription. You'll want the subscription for the alerts and immediate video playback as in my testing I've found the local storage option cumbersome and worthless. Your alerts get recorded sure, but to Blink servers and then a once daily dump during the overnight hours to your USB drive if you go local. So that alert you get at work at 8am on Monday, you have to wait for the dump overnight Monday and into Tuesday and then on Tuesday you have to unplug it and use a computer to see what happened at that alert Monday at 8am. Defeats the purpose of running your system local, but this is Amazon and they make their money based on subscriptions.That said I give props to the Blink app for it's rich notifications and ease of use. I get an alert and in the notification with limited exception is a tiny pic. I can tell if it's worth watching and if not just swipe or delete even from the notification. I can pull down on the notification for a bigger picture. If it's worth watching immediately I can tap the notification and it opens and pulls the video then and there for playback. By comparison, the Reolink cameras I was testing don't have rich notifications so you just get these, "...person detected..." notifications which can mean anything from a criminal to a person waking their dog (again, zero lot lawn) to the mailman coming by. I had to open each notification but it doesn't go to the video. It does to a sleeping camera (to conserve power the camera (Reolink) is asleep), the app has to wake the camera and connect, the you're taken to the live view and whatever it is could very well be gone by then. So you then click videos and swipe through the feed that camera has recorded that day / or whenever the last time you wiped the internal SD card of videos. So what the Blink app does in one tap took me nearly seven taps just to see oh yes, it was just the mailman.The Blink app is also organized with each camera having a nice equivalent of a table of contents to section the settings why the Reolink I was testing had it all on one page and demanded scrolling. But once you dial in your settings you don't often change things so I guess that's not something to really worry about. But just the ease of use and directness with the Blink app compared to the blind notifications and swiping of the Reolink app made me decide to send the Reolink cameras back, buy some more Blink cameras and to stay with Blink.The biggest thing I could hope for in the future from Blink is that the cameras will become smart enough to not be bothered by the clouds and sun as some days my cameras go nuts only to find they're being triggered by the difference in light on my lawn as the sun goes in and out of the clouds. And I'd like to see some person detection as despite using zones to filter out the street I still get vehicles going buy (I get several good pictures of the garbage truck every Tuesday...). Maybe the ability to record a vehicle only if it stops within the frame of the camera for however many seconds so if someone does roll up on your place with intent to do harm it'll trigger a recording and not a bunch of pictures of just vehicles going by. And true, feature rich local storage.But all in all, despite their problems which are really just minor, you can't really go wrong with Blink cameras. I spent some six hundred dollars on just five Reolink cameras and solar panels (they were in a two-fer bundle each) and I ultimately sent them back. For the price paid for five cameras I could've gotten five Blink cameras and third party solar panels for cheaper or could've gotten several more than five Blink cameras and panels for that six hundred dollars. While you do get what you pay for, there's no reason that home security cameras have to cost a small fortune.