Blink Outdoor (3rd Gen) – Add-on camera (Sync Module required)

Here is the tldr version: This product is inferior in every way to the discontinued Amazon Cloud Cam. The outdoor camera is particularly poor. After buying 18 of these cameras and trying to make these things work as intended I've given up. I've been painted into a corner by switching to these. Theoretically having cameras is better than not having them but not really. - very poor motion sensitivity - sync module is single threaded - undocumented features - no support - very poor account management - buggy firmware - worse than the product it replaces Verbose version VERY POOR MOTION SENSITIVITY The camera often misses people or vehicles at all ranges whether they're approaching the camera or moving across its field of view. On the other hand it will trigger when small insects fly very quickly into frame. It records the stuff you don't want and refuses to record the stuff you DO want. Inexplicable how bad it is. You couldn't engineer a worse outcome if you tried to avoid recording real events while targeting trivial ones. Also, when it decides to record, there seems to be a delay from the time the camera detects motion to the time it starts recording. Something like 3-5 seconds. Not sure why a delay is needed at all. The EARLY NOTIFICATION setting in the app seems to introduce much of the behavior above. Turning it off does not eliminate the poor motion sensitivity however. It's inconsistent per camera. And if you turn it off you won't have the near real time notification (in theory) This may not be a big loss however since the camera always records the wrong thing as per above. SYNC MODULE IS SINGLE THREADED If you have multiple cameras attached to one sync module, only one camera will be active at any given time. This is a problem if you have multiple cameras covering a larger area like a long driveway. One camera MIGHT record but the other will stay dormant. I have three cameras covering my driveway/garage area. I needed to buy multiple sync modules to have even a hope of all three recording the same event. But due tot he motion sensitivity issues not all the cameras will capture the event. Very poor design and engineering for a surveillance system. UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES The EARLY NOTIFICATION feature seems to work in the OPPOSITE way the feature is described. It's like the developer got the toggle reversed when they were coding. So when it is turned ON it doesn't give you motion notifications most of the time. When it is OFF notifications INCREASE. The ZONES feature should allow a user to ignore certain areas of the camera FOV. However if you use it, it seems to decrease the sensitivity of the entire FOV. So with no other changes to the camera except the use of ZONES, less motion will be detected. NO SUPPORT The BLINK company appears to be a failing enterprise. No one answers the phone, there is no email response (two months and waiting for my initial problem) and not even Amazon customer support can get a hold of them. I see some employee traffic on the forums but few recently and as a result the product forums have degenerated into troll soup. Buyer beware, if you buy this system, you're on your own. VERY POOR ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT - you'll never get the product discount As of 7/26/21, the Blink account cannot be altered by any means, either through a linked Amazon account, directly through the Blink website or through the app. The big problem with this is the flaw in how the trial account works. Every device you buy resets the clock for the free 30 day trial period. However you can only receive the 10% discount on purchases when the trial period ENDS. The Blink account shown in the Amazon Account UI never shows any dates so it's a guessing game. If you did what I did and bought an initial camera to test and then buy hardware as needed then you will never get the discount. I've purchased about $2000 of hardware to date. The 10% discount is real money at this point. You'll never get the discount so don't use that in the evaluation of this product. BUGGY FIRMWARE As noted above EARLY NOTIFICATION and ZONES seem to work in unintended ways but it doesn't stop there: END CLIP EARLY... - feature doesn't work at all. Not a surprise since the motion sensitivity itself doesn't work as expected. STATUS LED - This feature does not alter the camera behavior at all. If the camera is recording the light on it goes on despite what the app setting might be BATTERY - as indicated on the product forums, this status doesn't actually work. It will show OK when the battery is low QUALITY - this selector should allow video quality to be altered. It has no effect on recorded video. WORSE THAN THE PRODUCT IT REPLACES The Blink system is definitely inferior to the Amazon Cloud Cam system but Amazon is killing Cloud Cam. Amazon bought Blink in 2018 because of the promise of the two year wireless camera. I'm not sure if these cameras will last two years as promised but the camera has sacrificed a whole bunch of features (like motion sensitivity) to achieve this goal. I would say it's a bad trade-off. The Cloud cams I have can be used as exterior cams by facing them out of windows. The Blink system may not ever catch up with Cloud Cam. This was a poor decision by Amazon. I have a bunch of outdoor and indoor cameras for this system and the requisite sync modules. Overall this purchase was a turkey. If I had to do it over I would buy a professional surveillance system and hard wire them into my home. There would be fewer cameras but I would have the ability to pan and scan, with real motion sensitivity and zoom. I've never been this disappointed with any Amazon branded product before. And this product is strategic for Amazon (company acquisition, branding, replaces an existing Amazon product) If Amazon offered me a way to return all of this crap for a full refund I would jump on it in a second. Good luck.