We reviewed the original non-pro, non-wired version of the Ring Video Doorbell a while back, and were decidedly unimpressed. Fast forward to now and we've been using the pro, wired version for almost a year. Our verdict? It's great, and that's a huge boon for the floggers who spend a lot of time away from home but want to have a little peace of mind while they're away.
With the first model we had problems with battery life, wifi signal strength and jerky video. None of that with the Pro, even with its higher resolution 1080p video capability. Part of that is probably due to the fact that we upgraded our internet: the Pro requires a minimum of 2Mbps upload speed, and we've found it works smoothly with our current 5Mbps.
We also ponied up for the $30/year cloud storage. It's a competitively priced and nicely designed app, and being able to see if that was a moose or a mugger in front of your house at 3am is a great feature. Installation was a little finicky with the wiring requirements, but with patience and help from Ring support we got it up and running with a few experimental detours. Our doorbell chime was a little low on the volume side - a chime problem not a Ring problem - so we also bought the $25.99 wireless plug-in Ring Chime.
The motion detection is very usable. You can draw onscreen the zone you want to monitor and set the sensitivity. You can answer rings from your phone or tablet, and talk to people or just watch them. You can also go to live view at any time to just check out the view. It's all the functionality you need in a complete, easy to use feature set.
By the time you're said and done it's a substantial investment: beyond the doorbell there's the installation, chime, internet connection and cloud storage, but the end of the process you've got a pretty good start to a home security system that doesn't rely on a third-party monitor. And it's always nice to see a product improve like the Ring system has.
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