It’s relatively easy to replace an existing outdoor fixture, and Ring makes it even easier with excellent instructions and videos covering every step of the process that you can watch on your phone. Most people would want to hire an electrician to do all that. That’s a whole lot easier than cutting a hole in your exterior wall, installing a junction box, and running Romex to it. Like the aforementioned Netatmo and Kuna products, most people will install the Floodlight Cam as a replacement for an existing outdoor light. This review is of the Ring Floodlight Cam, which must be hardwired to your electrical wiring and is outfitted with two LED lights. We previously reviewed the Ring Spotlight Cam, which is designed to be plugged into an outdoor outlet and has a single LED light. (This example shows a surface-mounted junction box, which won’t be typical if you’re replacing an existing fixture.) Ring provides excellent installation instructions even if its mounting mechanism is somewhat primitive. Costlier plans increase the number of cameras covered and extend the time you can look back at recorded events. Its least-expensive plan costs $5 per month for one camera and provides a seven-day history with unlimited downloads. The Maximus Camera Floodlight that I reviewed in earlier in 2018, which is based on Kuna’s technology, allows you to look back in time two hours and download up to three videos per month without a subscription. Netgear’s indoor/outdoor Arlo Pro 2 is also unusually generous, providing seven days of storage for up to five cameras. It has no cloud storage option unless you link the app to your Dropbox account. Its Presence camera has onboard storage in the form of a 16GB microSD memory card, and you can download recorded video to your smartphone via the app. Subscription plans are becoming the norm with home security cameras, with Netatmo being an outlier. If there’s a break-in, you won’t be able to provide the police with any forensic evidence the camera might have captured of the perpetrator. All the other features (which I’ll get into in a moment), will work, but you won’t be able to download the video clips, either. You’ll receive alerts when the camera detects motion, but you won’t be able to see the video that triggered the alert. While Ring emphasizes that subscriptions are optional, you’ll be restricted to real-time viewing of what the camera sees if you don’t opt in to one after your 30-day free trial. That subscription I mentioned is the biggest reason why. If you haven’t committed to the Ring ecosystem, you’ll want to explore your options before buying this product. If you’re entertaining guests on your patio, they would probably be more comfortable knowing that their every word isn’t being recorded. This appeal of this feature wasn’t immediately clear to me, but a Ring spokesperson explained that it will be valuable “for customers that want to be extra careful to avoid recording miscellaneous conversations or audio that does not pertain to their home security.” And that makes a lot of sense. A new Audio Off Toggle feature enables you to disable and enable audio streaming on any or all of your Ring devices.
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