Ring Home Security System

Investing in a home security system can be a big deal. Some questions you're going to want to ask yourself are:

• What other products does this company offer?
• Are those products good quality and reliable?
• What kind of features are you getting with these products here?
• Do these products integrate with other smart home systems?

Let’s take a look at Ring and go over what they offer as a company and how they stack up against competitors like Nest. It’s likely you have heard of Ring before, mainly because it puts a lot of money into marketing. Its advertisements are everywhere, and that’s possibly because it’s owned by Amazon.

Ring has a lot to offer. Its product page lists security cameras, doorbells, home security systems, and smart home lighting. It offers many products to integrate into your home. On top of that, they have one of my favorite apps, which is jam-packed with features, most notably the ability to view all of your camera feeds in one spot.

Ring has a feature called Snapshot Capture, which takes a photo every few minutes so you can scrub through it. This gives you the impression that it's been recording 24/7.  If something happened in the middle of the night or when no activity was triggered, you can go back to the snapshots and get at least a photo of what was happening on that camera.

Another feature that Ring built into the app is Neighbors, which allows you to connect with other Ring customers to share suspicious activity that's been going on around your neighborhood. It essentially is like a digital neighborhood watch. Whether you have cameras or a security system, it can all be controlled within one app.

Ring’s products are pretty competitively priced. It does have a subscription fee for their products. So, say if you have one camera and want to set up a subscription fee, it is $3.99 a month or $39.99 a year.

If you have more products, like additional cameras or the security system, you can get the Protect Plus plan, which is $10 a month or $100 a year. It will cover all of your cameras, give you cloud storage recording, and 24-hour monitoring if you have their security system. And if you want 24/7 professional monitoring and 24/7 backup internet, the Protect Pro plan can make that happen.

Ring’s Video Doorbell started out as their flagship product. With previous editions of their video doorbell, people were having a problem with the delay between when the camera detected motion and when it actually started recording. A lot of times, people were only getting recordings of somebody leaving their front door. They weren't capturing anyone walking up because this is a battery-powered doorbell.

Ring’s solution was to implement Pre-Roll in its Video Doorbell 3, which allows it to record in low-quality, black and white four seconds of footage before the actual 1080p footage starts recording, which sounds promising if you want to get somebody walking up to the door. The problem that I found with this doorbell is that the quality is so low, even walking up to the door. I found that the Pre-Roll feature wasn't really very useful in my situation.

In my opinion, the Peephole Cam is a great product. I love how you set this up. It has no wiring involved. All you have to do is take out the existing peephole in your door and put this camera in, and you're done. The setup took me about five minutes.

I like the location of this camera—in the center of my door—more than the Ring video doorbell’s location, which is lower and off to the side. This one captured faces better because it was right in the line of sight with people who were standing at the door.

I previously reviewed the Indoor Cam, a cool little camera that retails for around $60. I had it in my house monitoring the living room, and I thought the quality was fantastic.

Switch over to the battery-powered Stick-Up Cam, and I have to say that I was very disappointed with this camera. It’s both an indoor and outdoor camera. The quality I was getting out of this product was poor. Not only was the video blurry and just didn't seem like good 1080p quality, but the audio was awful too. A lot of times it wasn't picking up the audio, or it was constantly cutting in and out during my tests.

How does Ring stack up against its competitors like Nest?

I would say that Ring has more products than Nest does. Because Ring is owned by Amazon, all the Echo devices, Dots, and Echo shows, and the like are all compatible with these Ring products, which is a big plus for Ring. They are pretty compatible with everything.

Ring products are also quite a bit cheaper than Nest products, but I will say that Nest is much more of a premium product. Nest’s cameras have 4K sensors, even though they're shooting at 1080p. That gives you so much more of a clearer, crisper image than what you're going to get out of the Ring devices; however, you're going to be paying much more for those Nest products.

As I mentioned earlier, Ring has one of my favorite apps out there, it’s just so clean and well-designed, it's easy to navigate, they have a lot of features built into it.