Ring Door View Cam Review



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Verdict

If you do not have room for a smart doorbell or are not allowed to drill holes, the Ring Door View door camera is a smart upgrade for an existing peephole and can be installed in a few minutes. It offers all the quality features we expect from Ring, including full HD video and clear sound. The lack of support for Google Assistant is disappointing and the camera moves with the front door, making it a better choice if it is offered. That said, this product occupies an important niche and does a brilliant job.

Advantages

  • Really easy to install
  • Excellent privacy controls
  • Works brilliantly

The inconvenients

  • The camera switches with the door
  • No Google Assistant Support

Key specifications

  • Examination price: £ 179
  • 97 x 47 x 20 mm (external)
  • 1080p resolution
  • 155 degree field of view
  • Subscription cloud registration
  • Night vision
  • Support for Amazon Alexa

There are few video bells to choose from, but current models are largely designed to replace a traditional doorbell. The ring door sight cam is different because it is designed to replace an existing peephole in a door. This means that the View Cam door is very easy to install and is particularly suitable for tenants or apartment residents who may not be able to drill holes to install a more traditional smart doorbell.

Ring Door View Cam – What You Need to Know

  • Installation: Take out your old peephole and crack in the doorbell, and you're done in minutes.
  • Detection performance: There are many customization options, but this doorbell's PIR sensor means it's subject to more notifications.
  • Quality of image: The Full HD resolution provides a lot of detail during the day and at night.

Related: best security camera

The Ring Door View Cam is the easiest doorbell to install

Provided you already have a peephole in your door, there is absolutely no drilling or messing around. A handy tool is provided to scrape off the paint that keeps your peephole in place and can then be used to unscrew the peephole.

Ring Door Cam Tool

The supplied tool helps you remove the old peephole and install the new bell

You then slide the ring door camera from the front (it is suitable for doors between 34 and 55 mm thick) and attach the back panel, which houses the battery. Plug in the connection cable (you have a spare cable in the box in case you damage the original) and use the tool to tighten the screw – and you're done. All that remains is to slide the battery, which must be charged via its micro USB port, in place. From start to finish, it took me no more than five minutes to pull out the old peephole and the new doorbell in place – it's impressive.

Back plate of the Ring View door

Plug the cable into the back box and you're done

Once you're done, you can use the Ring app to connect the doorbell to your home wireless network. In the UK, the Ring Door View Cam camera connects to a 2.4 GHz network. You will need a strong signal to work properly.

From the outside, the Door View Cam camera is very similar to the Ring Video Doorbell 2, although this model is much thinner because the battery is housed inside the house. The second advantage of this configuration is that it is harder to steal the camera from the door as it should be pulled out of the front of the door.

Smartly, you always have a peephole, so you can look through the lens to see what's going on outside. It's a much more rational way of doing things than with the EZVIZ DP1, which has an LCD screen inside the door to show the outside view. For more privacy, there is a small shutter that you can lift.

Ring Door View Cam through the peephole

You can still use your peephole as usual

With the front plate attached to the doorbell, you only have one color choice for this model, while the other Ring bells have interchangeable faceplates and a choice of colors in the box.

The View Cam door has new privacy settings to protect your neighbors, but leaves strange results in your video library

Neighbor privacy is a growing problem with smart bells and security cameras. The Door View Cam responds to this with its new Privacy Zone option. This allows you to obscure parts of the video stream, so you do not have to see areas that you do not care about, such as a neighbor's garden. The fault is managed on the device. As a result, no private sequence is uploaded to the cloud.

Ring Door View Cam Privacy Zone

Privacy Zones allow you to block areas you do not want to save.

It's a nice feature, but an imperfect touch. As the camera uses a PIR sensor to detect motion, you may end up with clips triggered by a neighbor where all you can see is the black area. A cloud processing would have been useful to hide or delete clips whose movement takes place in the blackened area.

Motion detection is basic, but the Ring Door View Cam camera has enough options to prevent too many alerts.

The use of a PIR motion detector is a great way to preserve battery life, but that means any movement can wake the camera and trigger a recording. Fortunately, Ring offers a lot of control over settings to avoid receiving too many alerts. An initial wizard configures some default options based on your answers, such as turning off motion detection if you have very close neighbors, and you can also change the settings individually.

First, you can adjust the motion sensitivity. With the help of the slider, you get a live snapshot of the camera view, with a shaded blue circle indicating the approximate area where the motion would trigger a recording. I discovered that it was possible to prevent the Door View Cam from recording when people were passing by the house, but not when the neighbors were coming home.

If your front door opens directly on the street or if a lot of people pass by you, you may not have enough adjustments to be able to completely disable motion detection. .

You also have a little more control over when you receive notifications. You can set a calendar, setting when the door view camera will detect and detect no motion, and you can use the Motion Frequency setting to set how often the camera will send alerts: Frequent, Standard, or Light.

Motion Motion View Cam Motion Detection

Ring gives you a lot of control over motion detection settings

I also like the Motion Snooze setting, which pauses the alerts of your choice for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour or two hours. This is a convenient function if, for example, you load the car or workers enter and exit.

As a result of all the options, I managed to configure the Ring Door View door camera to receive only important notifications: people come to the door.

In addition to ringing, the Ring Door View Cam camera has a knock detection

Visitors will mainly use the Ring Door Camera by pressing the button located on the front. The chime sounds through the doorbell and sends a notification to your phone. Since the Door View Cam can not connect to your existing chime, unlike the Video Doorbell 2, you can invest in a ring chime (£ 29) to plug into your home.

Like the other bells I've tested, it takes about 30 seconds between a ring and a notification on your phone; it is usually enough time to open the door to almost all visitors, although some couriers have managed to create a runner.

You sometimes get the person who refuses to use the doorbell and can knock instead. The Door View camera has a knock detection, with a customizable sensitivity to detect when someone does it and sending you a notification. It works pretty well too, describing the times when someone used the door knocker rather than the bell.

Detection of rattling of the door of the telescope

The doorbell can tell when someone has knocked on the door rather than using the button

However, opening and closing my front door tends to bounce the knocker, which also triggers the shock detection. So, depending on the type of door you have, you can disable this feature if it turns off too much.

The video quality of the Ring Door View camera is excellent, but the movement of the door can be annoying.

When a notification arrives, you can only answer your door with your phone in landscape mode, which is annoying to the touch because it is more difficult to hold this way than in portrait mode. It's a minor nuisance, but I'd like Ring to fix it.

Once you have rung or hit, the video quality is excellent. Ring installed a 1080p sensor and a 155-degree lens to capture everything in front of the camera. This model is equipped with HDR (high dynamic range), which extends the life of the battery a little (it is still necessary to count six to 12 months of charge, depending on the frequency of use of the peripheral), but it meant that there was still a lot of detail at my door even when the sun was shining directly on it. Certainly, it's easy to choose individual features, especially when people are close to the door.

Ring Door View Cam - Daily Example

The daytime quality is excellent, but be sure to place the privacy zones in order not to block a significant part of the image.

At night, the camera uses its IR LEDs to give you a black-and-white view of the world. The lights are powerful enough to illuminate the area in front of your door. The details soften naturally so that it becomes harder to tell the difference between the remote people, but you can clearly see who you are talking to when they are in front of and beside your door.

Ring Door View Cam - Night Sample

The quality of the night images is a little less good but you can always see who is at the door when the person is close

However, the movement of the camera when you open your entry door triggers the recording of moving pictures. This means that when you answer the door, you get lots of pictures on your side of the head. With a traditional doorbell, you always focus the recording on the person you are talking to.

The footage is saved in the cloud, provided you have a Ring Protect plan. The basic Protect package costs £ 2.50 per month or £ 24.99 per year per camera for 30 days of recording; Protect Plus costs £ 8 per month or £ 80 per year, and also gives you access to all registrations up to 30 days. If you do not pay for a subscription, you always receive alerts and can answer the door, but no sequence is recorded.

With a Ring Protect plan, when you go to the Timeline view, you can scroll past events to see what has happened. This can be a little tedious, especially if you have a lot of recordings to go through. You can move to a specific day and filter the events based on what triggered the recording (Ringtone, Motion or Live View). Nevertheless, going back can be painstaking.

The Event History view makes it a bit easier by giving you a long list of records that you can filter by type. However, this view would be better if each event included a vignette.

Ring Door View the history of the cam

There are several ways to view earlier images, but some thumbnails would be fine

There is an Alexa integration with the Ring Door View camera, but no Google assistant.

The integration of Amazon Alexa is nice to see, with the camera Ring Door View Cam able to broadcast a message stating that someone is at your door on all your Echo devices. If you have an Echo Show or Echo Show 5 show, you can also open your door. However, you have to say "Alexa, answer", which is a bit awkward. I prefer the way Nest Hello works with the Google Nest Hub, where you see a preview on the screen and can press the answer button to talk.

Ring Video Door Pro Show Echo

The integration of Echo Show is a good thing, but it would be better if you automatically see a preview of your doorway.

There is no integration of Google Assistant because the ring skill is no longer available. It's a shame, because it would be nice if you could at least watch the video stream of your bell from a smart screen powered by Google.

Should I buy the Ring Door View Camera?

The Ring Door View Cam is a smart product ideal for people who do not have room for a smart doorbell or who are not allowed to drill holes. If you match this bill, then it's really the product for you.

If you have room and you are allowed to ring at the door in a traditional place, I would choose a different product, simply because you get a fixed field of view, while the door view camera rocks when you open and close your door.

The choice depends on the configuration of your home. If you do not have a wired doorbell yet, then the Video Ring Doorbell 2 Ringtone is by far the best option. If you have a wired access doorbell, go for a wired smart doorbell because you get appropriate activity zones to limit what is recorded. The Ring Video Doorbell Pro is an excellent choice: it looks neat, its price is reasonable and includes all the kit you need. This is especially useful if you have Echo speakers and / or other Ring cameras. The other choice is Nest Hello, which is a bit more expensive, but gives you facial recognition and continuous recording. This is the best option if you have Google Assistant smart speakers. However, both products require professional installation.

In the end, it's good to have options depending on the type of house you have. The Ring Door View perfectly fills a niche and allows those who were previously locked out to enhance their security.

Unlike other sites, we thoroughly test each product we examine. We use industry standard tests in order to properly compare the features. We will always tell you what we find. We never accept, never money to review a product.
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