Blink 53-024845 XT 3 Outdoor 3-Pack Wireless Security Camera Black

So overall they do the job I purchased them for which was to monitor my front door, back door, and driveway. I originally purchased the subscription but decided to forgo the extra cost. This means the clips are stored on a thumb drive connected to the sync station. The side effect of this is that the clips take longer to load. The angle is a bit narrow and full coverage takes more cameras. The app is really pretty easy to use and set up isn’t difficult. The camera quality is good and the images are clear. Mount quality is great as well as simple to install.My biggest pain points with blink cameras: 1- When motion is detected and I want to live access the camera it takes 30+ seconds to load the view and often by then the motion is gone (delivery person, solicitor, bug, bird, stray animal, windy day, friend at the door, etc.). 2 - The clips saved are short and sensors don’t pick up the motion until it’s close so if someone walks past the camera it often misses them. I’ve adjusted sensitivity and settings but it hasn’t resolved the problem. 3 - On sunny windy days it picks up shadow movement and records clips all day long every couple of minutes. 4 - I only use lithium batteries with the system but the battery life is awful. I’ve adjusted settings and it seems to be a trade off - battery life or regular monitoring.

Me encantó la duración de la batería, fácil instalación, y que voy a armando un sistema con otros productos Blink

This review is more of a work in progress as I am now starting to see the flaws and shortcomings of this systemOverall I'm happy to have this included in my security closet of security systems and other stuff that's cool.Trimming the excess details and rambling from my previous reviews, I'm going to make this as simple as I can.This should not be the main system for anyone looking to get into the whole home surveillance /security projectsFor me, this is great for close range, on the go type situations and in my opinion is best used for the motion sensors.Even then don't count on having enough video to positively identify a criminal. The delay from when the motion sensors are triggered and when it actually starts recording is pretty significant. Sometimes only catching the last second of the person who triggered it leaving the frame.Not only that but it will stop recording even though there's clearly still motion going on, but let's just say it is working properly, you'll still get cut off as there is a set limit to how long the clip can be.On the positive. You aren't forced to pay to use it. You can store the clips locally on the sync hub's USB port with a memory card.It can be set up to function on the go. For example, if you go camping. Take it with you and be alerted before the bear can even sneak into you tent.Ideally the newer models will have some of the issues fixed and I'll eventually purchase more to find out.Regardless I have no regrets

I've only had these outdoor cameras for a few days, so I won't comment on battery life yet. But overall, I'm very happy with these cameras and most of their features. I'm nitpicking a bit here, which is why there are so many Cons. They are minor issues outweighed by the Pros.PROS:* Setup was relatively simple--once you understand it--but the instructions weren't (see below)* Infrared is awesome in the darkest environments and does a good job switching between IR and non-IR automatically* Motion detection works well, as does the 1-9 sensitivity setting, although this requires some tweaking until you find the right setting for each camera* Daytime video quality is excellent and good enough to read stationary license plates up to about 50 feet.* Audio quality is amazing! Individual birds and nearby bees can be heard easily, and normal volume conversations within about 20 feet can be understood.CONS:* The cameras seem to require an active Internet connection, not just a wifi connection (although I could be wrong). This may be because the initial setup requires you to use cloud storage. This could become a problem if your Internet connection is lost or dropped.* Initial setup requires storage in the cloud (for the free trial), even if you install a USB drive in the sync module. I have not found a way to disable the cloud storage. This cloud storage requirement may be slowing down the entire system, since it forces everything to constantly use the Internet.* Setup instructions were weird and unintuitive. The included booklet simply said to install the app. And the app is kind of confusing at first, and I ended up trying to create an account (and failing) and adding the sync module several times until I figured out what it was doing (and I'm an experienced techie). The basic problem is the app requires cameras to be installed only by following certain steps, with no other option.* Setup requires the mobile app and an active internet connection to install the cameras.* Accessing the cameras and video clips requires the mobile app. There are no desktop app or web options.* Cannot schedule individual cameras. The weekly/hourly schedule can only be set for all cameras attached to a sync module. This is unfortunate and will make the scheduling feature useless for most people. It would also be helpful to be able to set quality, motion detection sensitivity, and IR settings on a schedule. The settings I use for night time would be different than the middle of the day or when I'm not at home.* No quality setting on the audio. There are multiple settings for quality of the videos, to conserve batteries, but there's no way to turn down the audio quality, for battery conservation. The included audio quality is great, but it seems to be "too" high for the purpose of these cameras.* Only 2 AA batteries in each camera. This could become very cumbersome to replace batteries if your camera is installed in a hard-to-reach location. The cameras SHOULD have 6, 8, or 10 batteries instead, so you don't have to replace them often. I would happily pay the extra battery cost so that I wouldn't have to climb up there very often.* When a camera is "in use", its settings cannot be changed, and if you try to change the settings, you'll get an error message, causing the app's settings screen to get out of sync with the camera's actual settings, until you go back and modify the settings again.* The "Talk" feature produces garbled, broken, delayed (by 3-5 seconds) audio that is unintelligible, no matter how close the camera and sync module are to your router. I have about 115 Mbps bandwidth, and it made no difference. You will never be able to use this to have a conversation of any type, even if they could understand what you're saying. This seems like a very odd flaw since the recorded audio is so excellent. This was obviously an oversight by the engineers.* The Android app's setting to disable the vibration on notifications doesn't work. It always uses my phone's setting and ignores the app's setting.* Insects near my 4 cameras are causing 15-30 false alerts per day right now, until I can figure out a better placement or setting. Other than the wear on the batteries, this is not a huge deal, but it can be annoying.* The installation hardware is inadequate. Each camera comes with 2 large wood screws that are too big and too long for almost every installation. Much smaller wood screws and double-sided tape or Velcro would have been much more practical. I ended up not using any of the screws that came with the cameras because they were too big or impossible to use on the required surfaces.* The back panels on the cameras are VERY weird to remove for battery installation. There are no instructions that I could find on how to do this, and the included plastic tools are not intuitive. I nearly broke one of the cameras trying to get the back panel off using the included tool. There's a certain trick to hooking and unhooking the tool from the back panel that you'll have to figure out on your own.* The cameras and lenses are fully exposed to sunlight and weather, which is not ideal. The cameras should come with a small hood the lens or camera to protect it even more from weather and shade from light.* User access cannot be customized. The only way to give someone access to a camera is to give them your password to your account and entire system. It would be helpful to be able to grant someone limited or temporary access, such as a neighbor, child, relative, or visitor.

When we first purchased cams back in 2017, we compared to Arlo and Ring before we chose Blink. Now we are up to 10 cams, covering every angle of the house. Here are my findings after using them for almost 4 years (and still buying more):PROS:> #1 video quality is excellent. Day time is a bit better than night, but night vision is as good as it gets with cams. POSITION of your cam matters a ton. I started out putting them way high up and quickly realized - if you actually want identifying features - they need to be lower. Otherwise... yeah you see someone walking past, but you cant ID anything, so what is the use.> So inexpensive - so easy to integrate. Anytime we have ANYTHING we need to cover, we just order another cam and it literally takes 5 minutes to get it out of the box, batteries in, and added to existing system.. seriously - 5 minutes.> The app is great. Very intuitive. Our first cams had very few "advanced features" every time i order new cams, they have improved their features. Now you are able to zoom all the way in to very small areas, to capture certain areas and exclude others.. For example - old cams you had to block off large sections of the capture area to avoid the cams picking up movement from trees, but now you can pinpoint one little part of a branch on a tree to exclude if its triggering the cam.> Motion detection is very sensitive - but they have it tweaked just about right. It never misses anything, but if you setup your exclusion zones well - you can get it almost perfect. I dont have a lot of false alarms and I'm running 10 cams. We have one setup to look at the sidewak, and after much tweaking, we can actually exclude the street... but pick up both sidewalks on both sides of the street. You can setup the app to alert you or not alert you.. you can turn sound on or off on alerts. On windy days I do end up just going into the app and turning off all cams that are setup around lots of trees until the storm is over.. but thats like a few times a year.> Super easy playback and control of cams. It's instant - you can control them in any way, very easily. If I am working on a project in the yard, I dont want my cams on for hours, running out of batteries - so I just go into the app and turn them all off. It takes seconds. Likewise - if i hear a noise at night, super easy to open the app and live view any cam so i can look all around the house and see everything happening outside, from every angle.> Extremely easy to move around. We have had them for years - so we move them around occasionally. I even had mice in our crawlspace under the house at one point and just grabbed one of the cams off the side of the house and stuck it down there so I could catch them at night. Theres no commitment with these - no hard wiring so you can mount them anywhere and taking them on and off the mount takes 2 seconds.> No subscription needed to store clips. thats BIG for us. We would not like blink as much if they changed that. We run a lot of cams and it just stays 100% full storage - we can still access a few weeks worth of video, it just deletes oldest. You can download/save any videos.> Lots of mounting options. You have to buy them separately if you want anything special, but I have 3 different types of mounts - one for trees, one around porches that need to be secured so they cant be taken, and then the standard mounts for cams not at risk of being taken. There are camo skins as well - I have on in a tree that you pretty much cant see unless you know its there.> Customer support is super decent. In the winter of 2018, one of my cams took on a green hue to the image when the temp went down to about 10 degrees outside. I emailed customer service explaining the issue and sent a screenshot and within 24 hours they asked me for the SN of the cam, and did a firmware update that fixed it. I was quite happy with that.CONS:> So while the batteries are awesome because the cams are so easy to move around and deal with... i blow through batteries. Fortunately, i just get 20 packs of AA's, but with 10 cams - even though Blink ~says~ batteries can last a year? it totally depends on usage. So we get LOTS of traffic on our front cams because we live in a busy area and have people walking past all day. I change out the batteries on every one of those front cams once a month. Granted - thats many hundreds of video captures and ideally, we should connect those cams to electricity somehow - that is an option with blink, but I dont mind changing batteries. On the cams in the back yard and side paths - I really can go once or twice a year changing those, except for the ones that catch a lot of foot traffic. So the battery usage is totally dependent on traffic. Personally - the cams are a big deal to me, so i dont mind it at all. Benefits totally outweigh the downsides.> The biggest difference between Blink and some other companies is that i see other people with hardwired cams that can catch EVERYTHING in a continuous fashion, for hours. like the surveillance videos you see online where the cam just happened to catch something happening down the street...Blink doesnt work that way. it only captures immediate video clips, triggered by motion activation. It does store all videos.. you can see something weird in your yard and look back through videos to find out what happened - but it isnt 24 hours of continuous video feed.> You can get gaps in your videos. So it can capture 1 minute of video at a time, but then it takes a small break before it starts capturing again, so if something is happening and its videotaping an event - it will record an entire minute of excellent footage - but then it takes a 5 second break before it starts recording again. that doesnt sound like a long time, and for security it's not normally an issue.. the average bad guy is in and out quickly.. but it is annoying that it takes 5 seconds to re-trigger. So.... 2 minutes of continuous video... but in the middle of that 2 minutes.. a 5 second break.OVERALL - Super high video quality... cams you can move around super easily... a very easy app... I love blink and the upsides far outweigh any downsides. I always recommend it to people when they ask. You can cover your entire house at a super affordable price, you dont need to be rich at all.. Our 3 year old cams are still as good as our brand new ones. The peace of mind the cams bring me is priceless. I know every single thing happening everywhere, all the time outside. The affordability made it possible so that nothing can ever surprise us.