Top positive review
28 people found this helpful
Easy Setup, User Friendly App & Good Quality Video
By Mary Kate on Reviewed in the United States on October 16, 2020
I bought the Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus a month ago and my husband thinks it's the greatest invention ever made! The day after I set it up he was at Home Depot shopping when he got the alarm from his phone that someone was at the door. He pulled up the Ring app on his phone and our fence contractor was on our porch. He talked to the contractor for a few minutes through the Ring. He thought it was so cool that he could talk to the fence contractor who was on our front porch while he was in Home Depot! When I first unboxed the ring, the battery power was about 35%. I was too excited to wait for it to charge so I downloaded the app, inserted the battery, and set it up. (After setting it up, I charged the battery overnight.) We never had a real doorbell, just an old-fashioned handle to twist a real bell and thankfully no one uses it anymore because it was so loud, that I would jump every time I heard it. So, I love the rechargeable battery feature since we had no pre-existing electrical doorbell. We bought a second battery a couple of weeks ago. The battery says that it can last up to six months depending on your settings but we had to replace it after three weeks, but to be fair we did a lot of playing with it those first weeks. If you own one Ring video device there is a subscription of $3 per month and if you have two or more it's $10 per month. So that means you can record, store, share, and view events whenever you want. After finding just the right spot for it I was able to set it up easily. I was a little nervous because I did a lot of research about the Ring and mesh systems and there seemed to be a problem with the two being compatible but it flawlessly integrated into our new mesh system so that must be a problem of the past that no longer exists. At first, we were getting a lot of unwanted alerts so I went to settings then opened the motion wizard, and answered a few questions that seemed to help somewhat. what really helped was going into the motion zones and tweaking those. I turned off the outer three zones of the yard and left on the ones that were closest to the house as well as turned down the motion sensitivity. On almost every screen, there is a button marked "live view" so no matter what you're doing you can easily switch to a live view of your yard. They also added a wedge with the setup kit to use if your front door is on a hill or upstairs so that it tilts the doorbell to make the camera angle just right. If you watch the video I posted, it's of a UPS driver dropping off a package. Because of the motion sensitivity alert, I knew he was there before he rang the bell. We didn't get the Ring Chime because we have 3 Alexa devices in the house that have a large array of doorbell chimes including seasonal ones. We also have an Alexa Show that my husband took hostage on his bedside table so he can ask Alexa to show us who's at the door. The Ring app also has quite a few chimes on it as well so you can switch up how your phone alerts you. I really like the four-second pre-roll. If you notice my video starts with the black & white pre-roll, and I read that it's black & white to save battery power, and then it turns to color. I noticed that I could use my thumb and forefinger to make the video bigger so I can even see the expression on my husband's face as he's getting in the car. Another cool feature is once you set up the Ring and the app you are automatically and anonymously become members of a secondary app called "Neighbors." You can decide how big you want your neighborhood to be. It defaults to three miles radius around your house, but you can make it bigger or smaller. It's good for posting videos of any wild animals you see through the Ring, lost animals, of course, you would want to post any crimes. I saw a posting from my local police force asking if anyone had footage of the 200 block of Main St. on 9/28 between the hours of 5 - 6 p.m. because someone lit a car on fire and they were looking for evidence. I get between eight to ten packages per day because of my business so I am very glad to have the ring and I happily recommend it to everybody! Thank you for reading my review and I hope it helps you with making your purchasing decision!
Top critical review
51 people found this helpful
Video Doorbell 3 Plus - Still not fully refined.
By B.L. on Reviewed in the United States on April 30, 2020
Update: 5/27/20 Ring customer support reached out to me based on my review. It was determined that wifi signal was less than optimal. Connected doorbell to ring chime which increased a signal a bit. After a week, the cheap Ring Chime signal to the doorbell declined and would no longer perform well as a signal repeater. So I switched back to connecting Ring doorbell directly to wifi router. Signal remains a steady -45 (Ring told me the range was fine and they like to keep it under -50 or so). The primary reason for the Doorbell update is the fact that the product does not work as advertised. It has some fatal flaws which are consistent and repeatable and I would certainly imagine are well known. 1. You cannot view the doorbell live until AFTER the motion detection and video has completed processing. Imagine you receive an alert that "motion is detected" or "someone is at your door" and you want to quickly view what or who it is. You can't. Let me repeat: You cannot view live events. 20 seconds for the video capture, another 10-15 seconds for "video processing" .............. and NOW you can connect to your doorbell in LIVE VIEW. RING...please update your product features to say: "View your historical events after the burgler is gone" and "You can view your doorbell camera live only when nothing is happening and there is no active events occurring" I have tested this use case dozens of times. I can sit in the same chair in my office and GO LIVE and view my doorbell in live mode within 4 seconds. However sitting in the same chair, receiving a RING Doorbell alert... forget it. May as well take another couple sips of coffee because you're not viewing anything live until the doorbell is done processing the event. (I was also told that they made a new app "RAPID RING" I suppose to help circumvent the issue. I used that app as well. Same thing - works great... when you want to view your quiet front porch but won't go into live view when there is an active event occurring). The second big flaw: The doorbell has a feature which allows you to only receive motion alerts when people are detected. This is a great feature because I want to capture the cars that go by in the street but don't need to be alerted. This feature works great at night and mid-day. Somehow the artificial intelligence of the system cannot identify a car driving by in the morning or dusk. It's the funniest thing because around our house, we know it's around 6-7am and 6-7pm all the time because we'll start getting a barrage of "unverified motion" events to our devices. Then as soon as it turns night somehow the doorbell begins recognizing that the motion is a car again and quiets down. Overall, a very frustrating piece of broken firmware and app software. p.s. I won't even go into what occurs when you install the software on multiple devices. Let them explain the settings to you. (some settings propogate to all devices when you change them on one..... other settings you have to change on each and every device. what a lazy mess of a software debacle). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Overall a good product but NOT as refined as I had hoped for a brand new version of the hardware and software. 1. I paid extra money for the Ring Doorbell 3 PLUS for the pre-roll feature. (captures the moments before motion is detected). The pre-roll feature is black and white, which I knew ahead of time, but the quality is just not good enough to make the feature worth while. It provides no value and certainly not worth the extra price difference for the Video Doorbell 3 base model. 2. Contacting the doorbell to view it live to see who is there is sporadic. Sometimes it's instant and sometimes it just sits there and waits. This is a critical feature. I need it to contact and connect to the Doorbells live view from the cloud each time, every time, all the time. 3. The software has new features but installing it on more than one device and it gets "wonky" Tweaking the settings somehow get out of synch (especially so if you also use the new Ring Chime - sounds and alerts, etc.). 4. They should offer the Ring Cloud service Free for Prime Members. The product is pointless without paying the montly subscription fee. Since Amazon owns Ring, why make the loyal customer feel like they are getting "Ring Dinged" What I do LOVE about the product is it's ease of installation and setup. (STRONG ADVICE: Charge the battery FULLY before installation and setup. If you fail to do this, the software may always indicate the wrong charge levels. It took nearly 5 hours to fully charge the battery). The battery is removable and replaceable. I installed and attached to existing doorbell wires. Hooking up the two wires took 5 minutes and the wires continue to recharge the battery. The daytime video quality is excellent. The motion detection and the ability to tweak motion parameters is also excellent. (I appreciate the flexibility the software provides to allow me to set up motion detection for everything including cars driving by, but only alert me if it detects an actual person). As I said, overall, a good product. a bit more refinement was expected. I overpaid for the PLUS model which I would not recommend. I trust performance and software updates will improve but should be rock solid already and it's just not.
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