This appeal of this feature wasn’t immediately clear to me, but a Ring spokesperson explained that it will be valuable “for customers that want to be extra careful to avoid recording miscellaneous conversations or audio that does not pertain to their home security.” While Ring emphasizes that subscriptions are optional, you’ll be restricted to real-time viewing of what the camera sees if you don’t opt in to one after your 30-day free trial. Its Presence camera has onboard storage in the form of a 16GB microSD memory card, and you can download recorded video to your smartphone via the app.
The Maximus Camera Floodlight that I reviewed in earlier in 2018, which is based on Kuna’s technology, allows you to look back in time two hours and download up to three videos per month without a subscription. Costlier plans increase the number of cameras covered and extend the time you can look back at recorded events. We previously reviewed the Ring Spotlight Cam, which is designed to be plugged into an outdoor outlet and has a single LED light. Like the aforementioned Netatmo and Kuna products, most people will install the Floodlight Cam as a replacement for an existing outdoor light. That’s a whole lot easier than cutting a hole in your exterior wall, installing a junction box, and running Romex to it.
It’s relatively easy to replace an existing outdoor fixture, and Ring makes it even easier with excellent instructions and videos covering every step of the process that you can watch on your phone. These lights are rated to produce a combined 3,000 lumens of brightness, but to my eye, the dual floodlights on the Maximus covered more area.
This could be due to the cone-shaped shades on the Ring product that focus the beams more tightly than the flat LED panels on the Maximus, which are rated to produce 2,400 lumens. The Floodlight Cam’s motion sensor detects movement over a 270-degree radius and can be fine-tuned to reduce or increase its sensitivity (you can, for example, set it to respond only to humans and ignore cars or four-legged visitors).
The Ring app provides an excellent tool for creating multiple irregularly shaped motion zones, so that you can prevent objects such as shrubs and trees from triggering the lights and camera. Ring The ability to plot more than one motion zone makes it easy to prevent windblown trees and shrubs from triggering false alerts.
The Ring Floodlight Cam records video with excellent quality, with just a little barrel distortion at the extremes of its field of view. Ring attributes this limitation to the 2.4GHz frequency band’s superior range, but the fact that it’s equipped with an 802.11n adapter tells me the choice has more to do with bottom-line cost.
The Ring Protect Plus plan covers an unlimited number of cameras, so you could put one of Ring’s doorbells at your front door and its Floodlight or Spotlight cams at every other door and anywhere else you have electrical power (or not, since some of its Spotlight cams run on battery power, and with optional solar-power recharging).
At-Home Review: Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro
Ring makes the process as easy as possible by including a variety of different-sized screws for the electrical box (other models include a single set of screws that might not fit the holes of your electrical box) as well as both printed instructions and in-app instructions with animated GIFs to show you each step. You also have to angle the camera between 45 and 60 degrees off the wall and input its approximate height off the ground.
Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro review
The Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro is a simple home security camera that records clear video and comes with built-in LEDs and a siren to deter Intruders. The Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro is a simple home security camera that records clear video and comes with built-in LEDs and a siren to deter Intruders. The Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro has 140-degree lens and records clear Full HD video in color during the day, and at night providing the LEDs are alight. It also has built-in speakers for conversing with anyone in the camera’s field of view, along with a piercingly loud siren which can be remotely activated as a severe deterrent to any would-be intruders.
On top of this, the security camera also has the same pre-roll feature found on the Ring Video Doorbell 4, which stores four seconds of color footage recorded before the motion was detected, again giving you a better understanding of what triggered the alert. The only real downsides for some users are the fact that you have to pay for Ring Protect if you want to store footage to review at a later date (which, let’s face it, you will), and access the features we’ve mentioned above.
However, if you’re an existing Ring user though and are after a smart security camera that does it all, the Floodlight Cam Wired Pro should be a top contender for sure. Another cost you’ll need to take into account is a Ring Protect subscription which unlocks a premium service that provides cloud storage for video and access to some of the features to reduce unwanted alerts.
This is a swanky-looking security camera with a sleek weatherproof plastic build that’s sturdy, with rounded edges and swooping curves that lend it a rather modern look.
The angle of the camera and floodlights are easily adjustable, too, letting you achieve your perfect setup with the confidence that they’ll stay where you’ve pointed them. The Floodlight Cam Wired Pro’s 1080p camera offers a generous 140-degree horizontal and 80-degree vertical field of view, which should be more than enough coverage for most people’s needs. Video is crisp and clear in daylight, though we occasionally experienced a few pixellated moments if we’re viewing a live stream from the back of our house where the internet connection is at its weakest.
It’s not a feature that’s proven to be massively useful, though we suppose it could one day reveal the colour of a suspect’s clothes for easier identification. Like many Ring devices, the Floodlight Cam Wired Pro also has a built-in speaker, letting you scold suspicious cats or their burglar counterparts remotely via your tablet or phone.
We only dared test it for five seconds or so, and even from the back of the house, we could clearly hear its piercing wails, similar to that of a car alarm.
If you don’t, there’s almost no point in forking out this much cash, as you can spend your money on a more basic camera that just offers a live feed.
If, for example, someone walks diagonally across your driveway to the side of your house, you can trace their path as a series of dots in a map that’s not too dissimilar from the one you might find in an online FPS. Lastly, if you’ve got an Alex-enabled smart display such as the Amazon Echo Show 10, you can also summon up a live view of the camera feed using nothing but a voice request. From crisp video to powerful floodlights, built-in alarms, customizable motion alerts and even innovative birds-eye view smarts, it offers plenty of tools to tinker with. If you’d rather not pay for the ability to record videos then there are alternative devices like the Nest Doorbell (battery) which offer free storage. If your home’s crammed with Google Assistant-powered devices and screens, then you’ll be disappointed in the lack of compatibility with Ring.
Ring Floodlight Cam review: A perfect deterrent?
(Pocket-lint) – Ring is perhaps best known for its video doorbells that not only let you speak to anyone at your front door when you’re not around, but can even be used to help catch any unwanted visitors to your home. Unlike some other outdoor security cameras – Arlo, for example – the Ring Floodlight Cam only works on mains power and doesn’t have a wire-free battery option.
Whichever installation route you choose, for the simplest setup you’ll need to make sure there’s access to a power socket nearby, which will determine to some degree where you place the camera on your property.
Click “set up device” and the app will then ask you to select which Ring product you want to add – you may already have existing ones, or intend to buy more – then to confirm your location.
It’s flanked by the floodlights which output at 3000 Kelvin, putting the beam into the “warm” lighting category, so is ideal for outdoor use. It also allows you to shrink the default zone so it doesn’t constantly go off and send you notifications every time a car drives past your house or the regular dog walkers go by in the early mornings.
We chose to set our zone just on our driveway, so we were only notified when family members came home or, say, a delivery driver came to the door. The Ring Floodlight Cam records Full HD 1080p video – both when streaming live and when it detects motion – and saves a clip to the cloud for future reference.
If you’re away from home and you do notice pesky intruders, not only will they be illuminated by the floodlights, but you can make the rest of your neighbourhood aware of their presence by activating the built-in siren.
Whenever the Floodlight Cam detects motion, it will send a notification to your phone so you can immediately tap into the live view and see what’s caused it. The camera will also record a clip of the motion and save it to the cloud for you to access later through your Ring account – either through the app or on a computer. It records great quality video both during the day and at night, while offering effective and clear two-way communication.
Then, of course, there’s the Cam’s pièce de résistance: the addition of floodlights, which adds an extra layer of protection to your home. As security deterrents go the Ring Floodlight Cam brings classic features into the modern tech world and it does a great job of spotting and notifying you of any potential threats – including scaring them away with the built-in alarm. It too requires proper installation but it offers 1080p video day and night, it’s capable of detecting people, cars and animals up to a customisable 20-metres and the floodlight can be switched on manually if you want it to. It can be either mains or battery powered – the latter great for renters who don’t want to be feeding cables around the place – and offers similar alerts and recordings as the Floodlight Cam. You’ll have to buy the actual ring sound – called the Chime – separately, though, which feels like an oddity for what’s meant to be a doorbell.
Ring Floodlight Cam Review: The Home Security Device to Get
While the company is best known for its video doorbells, the Ring Floodlight Cam that’s geared toward protecting other parts of your house. Among the competition is the Arlo Pro 3 Floodlight ($249), which has a 2K camera, can run on battery power, has LEDs that produce up to 3,000 lumens, and has color night vision. Below the two LED lights is a fairly large, rectangular housing that contains the camera, a speaker and microphone, and a dome-shaped motion detector on the bottom.
It picked up the rust-red deck and fading green grass of my backyard, and I could even make out features of my dog as he bounded around.
So, if you don’t have a plan (like me), the Maximus would often send me alerts when a neighbor pulled in his car on the very fringe of the frame. You lose a bit of definition in Ring’s black-and-white nighttime videos; I couldn’t distinguish any features in my face as I walked in front of the camera.
One thing that the Ring lacks — and the Maximus has — is the ability to play prerecorded messages, as well as sounds of barking dogs, gobbling turkeys and more when the camera detects movement. I found it both unnerving and reassuring to watch video of people stealing packages and testing door locks via Ring’s neighborhood-watch feature. I found it both unnerving and reassuring to watch video of people stealing packages and testing door locks in my neighborhood. For $30 per year (or $3 per month), Ring’s Protect Basic plan gives you 60 days of video from a single camera and lets you share it with others. Without a plan, Ring lets you view live events only as they’re happening, but you can set motion zones. Not only was the quality of the video great, but its other features — such as neighborhood alerts in the app — also further enhance the floodlight cam’s utility as a home-security device.
Ring Floodlight Cam Review
It hasn’t rested on its laurels and has expanded its system to comprise multiple cameras, including the versatile indoor/outdoor Ring Stick Up Cam. Bright and flexible lighting make this an attractive product, but slightly limited installation options may restrict its use in some cases. As with previous Ring products I’ve tested, the Floodlight Cam is well made and feels solid and reliable. In my house (a Victorian terrace), there was cabling for an existing floodlight installed on the ceiling of the small porch. Installing the Floodlight Cam on the side wall inside the porch wasn’t a possibility, since the camera is too big and you’d most likely whack your head on it. Once wired in, the mount doesn’t leave a lot of room for fixing the camera into place, and it took a bit of wiggling to attach the retaining screws securely.
Configuring the floodlight is far easier than you’d find with a traditional, manual model, as the motion sensor is activated automatically at night. The app does let you configure the motion zones and detection distance, which should help cut down the number of times the lights turn on from the likes of a neighbour walking up to their door.
To further cut down on false positives, you can set Motion Zones to only monitor part of the picture. Annoyingly, if you tap an alert, the Ring app opens in landscape mode, rather than portrait. You can filter by type (Motion, Live View or Starred), but you don’t get any thumbnails and you can’t jump to a specific date. All video clips can be downloaded to your phone or computer (if you use the web app), letting you save any evidence that your camera has collected.
Ultimately, the Ring Floodlight Cam strikes the right balance between recording what’s important and not bothering you too much. While the Netatmo Presence is easier to control and provides more options, I managed to configure the Floodlight Cam to only turn on its lights for people walking up my drive only. However, it showed up in the app, where I could view the live feed and use the Floodlight Cam’s motion sensor to trigger Automations. There’s also an IFTTT channel, which lets you trigger other devices when the Ring Floodlight Cam detects motion.
Video quality is decent, with the camera exposing the image well, avoiding any blow-out areas of the picture. And, if the motion light is triggered, the system can record in full colour, giving you more detail to the final picture.
The Presence has intelligent object detection that lets you choose whether to turn the lights on for people, vehicles and animals. That said, the Ring Floodlight Cam is brighter and has two high-power LEDs that enable you to light up specific areas of your garden.
Where Ring wins out over Netatmo is with its reasonably priced cloud storage and slightly easier-to-use app.
Ring Floodlight Cam Review
As we powered up the camera for the first time, it asked us to update its firmware (which seems to be the norm these days), and within five minutes we were in business. To get a firsthand view of how Linked Devices works, we decided to focus on the neighborhood friendly feline. That way, if our mysterious neighborhood cat happened to run through our yard at any point overnight, there’d be a good chance our cameras would catch it! At that point, we thought, two things would happen: we could get a good look at how the camera’s infrared night vision works in tandem with those super-bright floodlights; and we could see the elusive kitty’s path for a few seconds after motion was detected.
Pro Tip: We recommend cameras with infrared night vision because they don’t rely on ambient light. It’s worth mentioning that the ability to link devices together is pretty typical in home security cameras these days.
It’s another perk of building your own smart home ecosystem with a brand like Ring; all of their devices tend to communicate with each other pretty effortlessly. Clearly, our Spotlight Camera in the front of our house failed to pick up the cat before she entered our backyard; we surmise she must have walked in from another neighbor’s yard that backs up to ours.
As a standard feature in most security cameras these days, we’ve seen the extraordinary images captured with 1080p HD resolution. This is most evident from Ring’s floodlight model, where we viewed refreshingly clear and crisp video 24 hours a day, rain or shine. When it comes to audio on the Floodlight Cam, it tends to work pretty well with one exception: we noticed a lot of interference when there was background noise on either side of the conversation. The truth is, ambient noise5 is a challenge for any outdoor camera, as it’s largely unpredictable (we can’t exactly tell the garbage truck to quiet down!).
Even the brands that promise Cadillac-level features in every camera (think Nest Cams) still pick up wind gusts and tree branches, so we consider this a minor issue. Ring is known for giving its users sweeping control over how their cameras detect motion, which alerts you receive, and how much data you get.
Be First to Comment