Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We’ve had this camera installed on our front door on a busy urban street since its release in June 2019. The Peephole Cam isn’t perfect, but it has worked reliably during hot and cold seasons, rain, snow and high humidity. Ring has continued to improve the camera’s feature set, making this device more effective than it was when released. Accordingly, we have raised our rating to 4 stars. New control over motion zones: Ring recently implemented custom control over motion zones on its battery powered cameras, including the Peep Hole Cam--a capability that its plug in cameras have had for awhile, and that is invaluable to prevent false alerts in areas where there is a lot of activity. Faster App: When first released, the Peephole Cam had a major streaming latency problem. When motion was detected or when someone rings/knocks, it took ten seconds or more for the camera to stream the video to the user’s phone. Ring’s "Rapid Ring” app eliminates this video streaming latency. It works well, and is designed as a companion to the full-featured Ring app. Design: The physical design of the Peep Hole Cam is great--much smaller form factor than the other Ring doorbells, battery is inside the door where it stays at room temperature and is less likely to be stolen. Battery power, even on a busy urban street, lasts about 6-8 weeks--the battery is also easy to change when needed. The appearance of the device, both outside and inside, is quite good. It's modern and doesn't degrade aesthetics at the door. Knock sensor not very effective: We have the knock sensor set on its most sensitive setting and have a solid wood exterior front door. Sometimes it lets us know when someone has knocked. Sometimes it doesn’t. No control over field of view: As mentioned in our original review, the camera’s field of view does not cover the lower area in front of the door, so it cannot be used to monitor packages. Please see the attached two photos--one photo is of the front of our place, showing the Peep Hole Cam mounted in the front door. The other photo shows the view from the Peep Hole Cam. Note that the entire area in front of the door even including the stairway leading up to our front door, which extends out for about six feet, doesn’t appear in the Peep Hole Cam’s field of view, while the camera does show--of no security value--lots of sky. It’s remarkable that Ring, an Amazon company with a strategic imperative to reduce package theft, hasn’t addressed this deficiency. Here’s our original review from June 2019: We had been waiting for the release of this camera. We received and installed it on June 21. Positives: Small exterior form factor, battery inside the door where it is less subject to temperature extremes and cannot be stolen, knock sensor and integrated peephole with a doorbell and high-res camera. All great features unique to the Door View Cam in the Ring smart doorbell range. Negatives: When installed in a peephole at normal viewing height, the camera does not show the area directly in front of the door where delivered packages would be left. The camera lens appears to be sufficiently wide angle but just not aimed correctly--depending on the installation, video recordings will show the sky or the ceiling of the hallway (minimal security value), but not the lower area in front of the door. For this camera to monitor not only visitors but also delivered packages it would either need to have a better fixed camera angle, or be mounted 2-3 feet from the floor, or allow the camera angle to be adjusted by the user. Mounting the Door View Cam on a door facing a busy street even when motion sensitivity is set to the lowest levels generates lots of false positives. To eliminate false positives requires turning off motion detection since there is no effective way to set and adjust the motion zones. Ring offers motion zone customization on some of its other cameras. Why not on the Door View Cam? [UPDATE: Ring got in touch on this. They are intending to transition their battery-powered cameras, including the Door View Cam, to the more advanced motion detection used on their plug-in cameras. No release date yet on a firmware update.] There is significant latency between when someone knocks or rings the doorbell and when the video and doorbell ring appear on one’s phone. From talking to Ring Technical Support I understand that there is a focus on reducing this latency. The final negative in the design is that the peephole is low quality--poor optics with lots of distortion and minimal light transmission, making it difficult to see anything with any detail. Even a $20 peephole viewer has better optics than this $200 state of the art camera. We like Ring equipment and consider it the most functional home security system on the market--generally well-designed, well-performing and reliable. This camera is a rare miss. Hopefully Ring will address these problems as much as possible in a firmware update and release a 2.0 version of the camera in the near future.