Blink Video Doorbell — Two-way audio, HD video, long-lasting battery life, wired or wire-free install, motion detection, chime app alerts, Works with Alexa (White)

I had an old style push button door bell when I moved into my circa 1999 home six years ago. I quickly replaced it with a SkyBell which worked fine until about a year ago. It stopped consistently advising me of visitors and the microphone / speaker never really worked correctly. So I wanted to replace it with something a bit more up-to-date. My choice of brands would be something that worked with my existing smart home components and existing apps or something that wasn't going to clobber me with monthly subscription costs.I am a legacy customer of Blink, meaning that I don't have to pay a monthly fee for cloud storage. And I have several smart plugs and light switches on TP-Link's excellent app so I pretty much decided that I would go with one of these two brands. TP-Link wanted a subscription fee, so when I saw Blink's doorbell camera at a good price, I jumped. It came the same day, so I installed it the next day.Would it fit the current placement and cover the crude hole carved on my porch for the wires?Would it be an easy setup and would the voltage in my 22+ year old home be sufficient?Would it feel secure when mounted? Yes to all these questions.The existing Sky Bell doorbell cam is pretty small and didn't protrude from the wall very much. The Blink is longer and fatter, so the mount, while secure, is a bit less solid than I would like - it seems to rock a bit when pressed hard. But the wiring was simple. Installation required that I drill one additional hole in my stucco, but it took all of 15 minutes to complete the installation job. Well, 15 minutes doesn't include:- the time I spent undoing the mounting bracket because I put it on backwards (!) and- the time I spent unmounting the whole doorcam to remove the sticky transparent plastic wrap that Blink puts on the cam to protect it from damage while shipping and handling. Funny - no where in the instructions did I see anything about this wrap and it's almost invisible - until you mount it.One pro tip - there is a funny little tool that comes in the bottom of the package that you use to open the doorbell up from the bottom when it is time to replace batteries. A) Don't throw it out as it is perfectly sized to do that job. B) It comes in mighty handy to also force the doorbell on to the mount as well. I had trouble getting the body of the doorbell onto the mount and snapping into place until I used the tool. I put my tool on top of the chime box inside the house where I will completely forget it when I need it.In operation, The Blink door cam works well in detecting approaching visitors and I love how it works with my existing chimes. One thing that needs work is that the app allows me to exclude areas of the camera view from motion detection. This app feature seems to work with my other Blink cameras but not with my door cam. I block out motion detection right next to my door, but it detects motion there anyway. Minor, but it should work better in this regard.I'm very glad I purchased this tool for monitoring my front door. It was a great price and was easy to install. Anyone could do this!

This doorbell is the best! We purchased to replace a Google doorbell which became problematic. The Blink doorbell is very easy to install, and add to our current Blink account. The quality of the picture provided by the camera is excellent. The view focus is easy to adjust, as with all Blink products. We are delight to have this doorbell which adds another security feature to our home.

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.