Ring Doorbell Review

Equipment Pricing

Let’s get down to brass tax. Ring has a wide array of pricing when it comes to their video doorbells, ranging from only $59.99 with the wired Ring Video Doorbell all the way up to $349.99 with their Elite version. For all the options except the Video Doorbell 2 and 3 Plus, both of which are currently unavailable, financing is available through Affirm in either three, six, or 12-month contracts. This payment plan could be a good option for someone who doesn’t have the money at the time of purchase, but we decided to buy all of our video doorbells upfront over a few months to keep our monthly bills to a minimum.

Video Review

Video

A video doorbell at its core is just a camera, so clear video was a necessity. After all, we primarily used these devices to greet guests, and if we couldn’t see who they were, the video doorbell would become kind of pointless. Luckily, Ring delivered in this area, for the most part, producing a clear and beautiful image.

Quality

Watching the video doorbells’ footage on our phones, Echo Show devices, and Fire TV, we enjoyed seeing our guests and delivery people’s faces in 1080p HD, the standard that we expect from the smart security industry. All current Ring Video Doorbells offer a 1080p HD resolution, including the original revamped Ring Video Doorbell released in 2020. If you bought a Ring Video Doorbell 1 before 2020, though, you might notice that the video quality is slightly lower at 720p HD.

Field of View

Of course, we also wanted our cameras to capture the most possible in terms of their viewing angle. When it comes to video doorbells, the widest possible field of view is 180 degrees. Any more than that and you’ll be seeing your actual front door or wall, which is unnecessary. On the other hand, if the viewing angle is less than 120 degrees, there will be blind spots wide enough for a person to hide in. For Ring doorbells, the viewing angles were either 155 degrees and 160 degrees, so the differences are barely noticeable. The original Ring Video Doorbell, Video Doorbell Wired, and Peephole Cam all had a 155-degree viewing angle, while the rest had 160 degrees. No matter which video doorbell we used, we could see all of what we wanted to see, namely, our stoop and front yard area, so we were satisfied with all of them in that respect.

Storage

Although we didn’t have an intrusion while testing our Ring Video Doorbells, there was still footage we wanted to keep: our grandparents visiting our apartment for the first time, the kids coming home from their first day of school, or even that time that we missed a step, because hey — we can laugh at ourselves.

Local

There will soon be a way to store videos locally on Ring Cameras, but be forewarned, it won’t be free. To enable local storage, or Ring Edge as the company calls it, you need the following:

• Ring Alarm Pro base station: This new base station for Ring Alarm security systems, which costs $249.99, is a hub and Wi-Fi router in one device. It also features a microSD card slot where Ring doorbells can send videos for local processing and storage.
• Ring Protect Pro subscription: This new subscription-based plan gives the Ring Alarm Pro extra features, including Ring Edge. It costs $20 a month or $200 for the whole year.

Now, just to be clear, we’re not sure when this feature will be available. It could be weeks, or even months, after the Ring Alarm Pro’s release. So if you need video storage and you need it fast, we recommend cloud storage, which brings us to our next point…

Cloud

While Ring didn’t give us any cloud storage for free beyond the 30-day trial of Ring Protect that came with each video doorbell, we opted to sign on for 60 days of cloud storage. Now, since we tested out seven different video doorbells, for us it made sense to get the Ring Protect Plus plan, which covered all of our Ring devices at our Brooklyn apartment. This plan costs only $10 a month, although we could’ve saved some money and paid $100 for a year (if we weren’t so darn non-committal!).

From there, we downloaded the clips we wanted to keep onto a hard drive we had lying around as a backup. This process was a bit more work than if they all saved directly on a micro-SD card, but overall, we didn’t exactly break the bank paying for 60 days of cloud storage. Now, Ring Protect actually gave us more services than just cloud storage, but we’ll get to that in a little.

Smart Home Integrations

Like we said, Amazon owns Ring, so it wasn’t surprising to us that we could use Alexa to control our Video Doorbells totally hands-free. But we were a bit surprised to find out that we could also use Google Assistant, although our capabilities were much fewer.

Alexa

Here are some commands we had Alexa5 carry out with our video doorbells from Ring:

• “Alexa, answer the side door.”
• “Alexa, show the front door on the Echo Show.”
• “Alexa, stop the front door camera.”
• “Alexa, show me the most recent activity from the side door.”

It was really cool to be able to see and speak to our guests without even having to push a button. Because sometimes, our phones are just too far away! In fact, to make things even easier for ourselves, we set it up so that whenever anyone was at the door, the footage automatically showed up on our Echo Show. Talk about futuristic!

Google Assistant

With Google Assistant, we could only say:

• “Hey Google, talk to Ring about starting a new recording.”
• “OK Google, talk to Ring about the health of my devices.”
• “OK Google, talk to Ring about the last time my doorbell rang.”

While we have Chromecast, we couldn’t show our video doorbells’ footage on it, which seemed like a bit of a waste, although we showed it on our Nest Hub.

Clearly, Ring’s video doorbells worked better with Alexa than they did with Google Assistant.

Third-Party Compatible Devices

Not only did we command our Ring Video Doorbells as if we had telekinesis, but we also hooked them up with a slew of connected devices from third parties like Dome, Ecolink, and GE. When we had our grandparents staying with us, who are hard of hearing, we had our Dome siren go off every time our Ring Video Doorbell Elite detected a person so they’d know about visitors.

All in all, we loved integrating Ring’s doorbell cameras into our smart home, although we’d recommend it to someone in the Amazon versus the Google smart home ecosystem.

Installation

We touched on this topic previously, but setting up each Video Doorbell took only a few minutes, especially if they could be powered by a battery. First, we downloaded the Ring app and created our account. Next, we added each device one by one, naming it based on its location, i.e front door or side door, and added it to our home’s Wi-Fi network. From there, we had to actually install each video doorbell, which, for the battery-powered devices, required only some screwing. With the Ring Video Doorbell Pro, we had to hardwire it to our doorbell and chime setup, which worked as we had a 24-VAC transformer, although if we didn’t we could’ve just used a power adapter from Ring. As for the Ring Video Doorbell Elite, we connected this via a Power over Ethernet cable, which, again, was included.

If you’re looking for faster setup, we’d recommend any of the video doorbells except the Pro and the Elite; otherwise, they’re all battery-powered, so you’ll only have to mount it where you want, which took us only a few minutes instead of about an hour.

Monitoring Options

Remember when we said that the Ring Protect Plans are more than just cloud storage? Yea, we’re going to explain that more here.

Ring Doorbell Monitoring Matrix

Again, we got a Ring Protect Plus subscription. It’s the practical choice for us because it gave all our doorbell cameras cloud storage for $10 a month, as opposed to paying $3 a month for each camera’s storage. Also, our testing period of the doorbell cameras overlapped with when we reviewed the Second-Gen Ring Alarm, and the Protect Plus plan gave our Ring Alarm professional monitoring plus cellular backup.

Now, there is one more plan from Ring, the Protect Pro plan for $20 a month. This plan works best for Ring Alarm Pro owners, as it has features built specifically for that base station, so we’ll not go into too much detail. However, the Pro plan does include all the features of the Plus plan, including cloud storage.

If you want to dive deeper into Ring’s pricing, check out our page on Ring’s doorbell camera costs.

The Ring App

Say we weren’t home and we wanted to tell the Amazon guy to leave the package at the door; no matter which video doorbell we had installed, we live-streamed footage and spoke through the Ring— Always Home app,6 available for both iPhones and Androids alike. The app was also where we reviewed cloud storage and downloaded it to our phone for safekeeping, received person and motion-activated notifications, connected our video doorbells to our voice assistants and other IoT devices, and more.

In our experience, the app was easy to use, and it was simple to turn on those extra features we mentioned, like motion zones and person detection. Of course, we wish that we could’ve controlled all of our video doorbells like that, but with so many updates, we expect that the app will have even more functionality for each doorbell in the future.