Blink Indoor Home Security Camera (1st Gen) 2 Cam Kit

Absolutely love this system and highly recommend it for anyone looking for an effective and economical home monitoring system. Configuration and installation of the system was relatively easy and quick. Image and sound quality is excellent. The five camera system costs about the equivalent of one and a half of the more well known cameras from Next, Dropcam and Canary which for months I had been contemplating purchasing but would have needed at least two cameras from those systems to get sufficient coverage for just the inside my house. With the Blink five camera package I have much better coverage and at a lower cost. I have two cameras inside the house and three outside, one at the front door, one in the covered lanai at the back door and one viewing the back alley from under the eve of the garage. Blink states that the cameras are intended for inside use only, but mine are protected from rain by large overhangs. They say cameras designed for outside use are under development but the currently available cameras have a stated operating temperature between 32 and 95 F, living in Florida the lower temp won’t be an issue and the higher temp will only occasionally be exceeded by a few degrees so I decided to try them outside anyway. The fact that the cameras require no power cable make them so much more versatile and useful than any others. The cameras can be placed at any location (within range of WIFI and the Blink sync module) and provide excellent monitoring coverage throughout my home and property. I am even getting excellent results from a camera that is at the very edge of my WIFI range with a weak signal. The video quality is excellent and they do work very well even in low light. The cameras do not have the night vision features of a lot of other cameras but they do have a very bright led light which can be configured to automatically illuminate when motion is detected. I find this feature to be very effective and expect that this alone would be enough to frighten away many would be intruders in much the same way that motion activated flood lights do. There is a small blue light that illuminates when the camera is activated and while this prevents the cameras from operating in a “stealth” like mode, I think this can also alert would be intruders to the fact that the premises are monitored. Even if they go directly to the camera and disable it, it’s unlikely that they will be able to react quickly enough to prevent the alert and video clip from being sent. Which brings up the point that the video clips are limited to a maximum of 10 seconds with a minimum pause of 10 seconds between additional motion activated clips. After having these installed for a few days and reviewing clips of myself and others being captured, I find this to be quite effective and much better than one might expect at first glance. Of course it doesn’t catch every second of the action but it certainly provides enough to know if my home has been invaded (or is about to be invaded with the protection that the outside cameras provide) and continues to capture additional if sporadic coverage. Also, since I have multiple cameras, often one camera picks up motion as I'm leaving the area of the initial camera effectively providing continuous coverage as motion moves throughout the house and property. Each saved video clip is named using the camera name and time stamp and is neatly arranged in chronological order. As I mentioned before the image quality is excellent so identifying an intruder shouldn’t be an issue. Finally, I love the arming features, arming the system simply means the cameras are set to capture motion, send alerts and store video clips. Arming can be scheduled, so for example the system can be scheduled to arm at midnight and disarm at seven am everyday, and multiple arming schedules can be configured as well as custom schedules for each individual day of the week. The arming schedules can be enabled or disabled so if you go on vacation you can simply arm the system, disable your custom schedules and the system stays armed until you disarm it, which is done from the app and so can be done regardless of your location or proximity to the house. The most valuable arming feature for me is the ability to exclude individual cameras from arming. This enables me to leave the system armed 24/7 with the inside cameras disabled so I receive alerts only when activity is discovered outside and approaching the house. With the mounting bracket provided I was able to mount the camera above the front door and aim it downward in such a way that it only captures motion on the front porch and the walkway approaching the door, this way street traffic or persons walking by on the sidewalk do not trigger an alert. The only false positive alert I’ve noticed is when a very large truck such as the garbage truck rumbles down the street. Cameras can also be activated manually just to take a peek at what's going on at any given moment and viewed in ten second increments with the option to continue viewing immediately following each ten second viewing with no delay. I hope this review is helpful to anyone wondering about the effectiveness of this system. The product is relatively new to the market with additional features and improvements being implemented regularly, but even in it’s current state I find this to be an excellent and economical system for peace of mind home monitoring and ready for prime time.