expired Posted by DelightfulMarmot964 • May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023 8:07 PM
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expired Posted by DelightfulMarmot964 • May 18, 2023
May 18, 2023 8:07 PM
Costco Members: Blink 1080p Whole Home Security System Bundle
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- The battery life is not great. I had to plug them all in to make them actually usable without constant maintenance. They work fine when wired.
- The camera sensitivity options are not good. They give you a map based on a snapshot to select from a 5x5 grid of where to monitor activity. The issue is that 5x5 is too big. I wish they had finer granularity (7x7 or greater would be nice). The other issue is that the snapshot is based on a certain time of day. So if you use the snapshot from daytime, the sensitivity at night time is screwed up and vice versa.
I have a Nest doorbell camera, which is faaar greater in every aspect. If it was economical to switch from Blink to Nest at a reasonable cost, I would do it 100%. But Nest is really expensive, and requires a subscription. My Blink plan is grandfathered in with free cloud storage... so I will remain until the camera's die (2 have already died out of 5).
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The only thing I don't like is that it does not have an auto-rearm after you disarm the camera. So I had to setup a schedule for every hour to re-arm the cameras.
I can mainly speak to the Outdoor cams but used indoors. Sensitivity is tricky – too low and motion is missed, too high and there is a flood of alerts and reduction in battery life. It's difficult to find a sweet spot. And there is usually a delay in the triggering, a maximum clip length of about a minute, and it doesn't trigger immediately after that – so if there's lengthy activity it's not all going to be recorded. I find Eufy or Wyze powered cams capture the entire event more often, but they're not designed to run on AA batteries.
Battery life is going to depend on your use case – if there's a lot of activity the battery life is weeks, not months or years. And if you follow the instructions, be prepared to pay a premium for the Energizer Ultimates (and I mean a big premium unless you shop around).
Everytine someone rings by the time the i press to see who it is, there's a solid 2-4min loading time. Sync module is about 5ft from it.
decided to try the subscription and having the videos available immediately was a pleasant surprise
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Ultimately, I decided to replace it with Ring. It's a superior product in every way except for price. Troubleshooting the Blink devices was doable but still frustrating. For example. if there's a wifi outage/power outage, the connection completely bugged out and I had to manually spend like 10 minutes troubleshooting the WiFi connection on my phone to get it reconnected. And I work in IT as an egineer.
The app/UI experience is slower and worse overall as well, trying to connect to a live camera took 10+ seconds.
Ring is better overall and brings into play pre-roll videos and just more security features, whereas Blink felt more like security theater. Sure, it technically captures videos, sometimes, but meh motion sensitivty, video quality, no pre-roll, restrictive times, I didn't feel that much more secure with the system.
I understand neither are truly very secure systems but Ring is a good step up while still being convenient.
At the end of the day, Ring and Blink are both Amazon owned companies now, and Blink caters towards a more budget conscious crowd. However, even with local storage, you get a very stripped down experience without a subscription. It's worth paying the monthly subscription for cloud backups anyway if you want better security having it somewhere in the cloud as opposed to easily a potential security risk taking your security storage with them, and if you're going to that point, then pay for Ring instead, since both offer $10/mo memberships for all devices under one house (Blink is cheaper at $3/device vs $4/device when you have <4 devices)
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