Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

**UPDATE AS PROMISED** - 2.5 months later with limited alarms (0 to few a day) the battery percent goes down about 30 percent a month. As i am approaching the end of the third month i will be at 10 percent remaining. For heavier use, i would say 2 months battery life and light use (light in a backyard where mine is and its winter) 3 months. Reolink Argus 2 – better than the Blink XT If this camera had free cloud storage and long lasting batteries like the Blink XT it would easily be the best and it still is due to some cool features but it is not by a lot. I will be reviewing the Reolink Argus 2 and then comparing it to the Blink XT (another battery operated camera that is owned by Amazon and if you spend more than 5 minutes of researching battery operated cameras you will see it so hopefully this will be helpful lol). Also, I bought the Ring Spotlight battery camera as well and will update this review once I compare that one for all you researchers. I got this for 20 bucks off the 130 price on Amazon, it was a lightning deal. There is no number to call this company you have to email them but so far the pros outweigh the cons. Pros: - Instant notifications. This is huge for me. For the BXT there nothing in the instructions that I saw says this and I read it from other reviewers but it only notifies you AFTER its done recording. The lowest time to record I believe is 8 seconds so that means you won’t get alerted for 1-2 seconds after that for your phone to actually receive so like 10 seconds compares to Reolink’s 1-2 seconds without the delay. - Much better at night, the Reolink has more Infrared lights and has this starlight future which makes the picture more clear in color at night and black/white feature - It does have a siren or pre-recorded alarm. Other reviewers/questions said you cannot manually trigger the siren and that its motion activated. This is one of the reasons why I bought the Ring as well because I want to trigger an alarm if needed not have it motion activated for obvious reasons like a mailman coming to the door. You can shut this feature off if you want. However, you can set a pre-recorded alarm and only have it at night like “go away, I am watching you, leave right now” something like that or you can trigger the siren which is like 2-3 seconds and not very loud but in the middle of the night with not much noise it would hopefully spook a bad person away. - It does have 2-way audio. This is mostly going to be used if you use it at your front door as “doorbell camera” I have the Nest doorbell (bought it over the Ring doorbell in case you are interested in one of those as well) For example, if you are at the grocery store or work and the delivery person is your door you can tell the person to leave it. Honestly, I don’t even use this feature because I don’t want to spook the person on the other end but its cool to have it and if you have kids im sure they would enjoy using this feature. I use it to spook my mother in law and sister in law when they come over!! - Does come with an outdoor “skin” whereas the BXT does not. As I am typing this it sounds like I am just hating on the Blink XT which is kind of true but I am trying to educate as many reviewing “friends” as I can. It has rained like 7 straight days here in New Hampshire and the camera on the BXT keeps getting fogged up/rain droplets on it and the Argus 2 has this protective lip on top of it with the case you can put on it that would solve that problem. - It does have local storage that I briefly mentioned earlier. Some people are paranoid with their videos going to their cloud. Mine is just of the back door of my house so I don’t care but your storage has to go to a memory card or you can pay for the cloud feature. It was free in beta stage up until very recently. Cons/Comparison to Blink XT - Not long lasting batteries (Reolink and Ring both last 1-2 months compared to Blink’s 1-2 years) - In the future you have to pay for cloud storage it used to be free - Slow to open notifications especially not on WIFI - You have to look at live view before seeing the recorded clip meaning when you open the app after a motion alert you then have to click the playback button there should be a setting of which one you want. - The company is in China. When I had questions about the BXT or Ring I called them. I have seen other reviewers who are emailing the company it days and sometimes weeks since China is many hours ahead of us. I called Ring last Saturday night at like 10pm (was bored and yes researching, a favorite hobby of mine and I got a hold of nice girl…you can’t do that if you have a question with Reolink so let’s hope I don’t have any issues! Update: *** I am going to be returning the BXT for the Reolink Argus 2 and am waiting for the Ring Spotlight battery cam but that is $200 (I called Ring and got 5% off – ALWAYS CALL PLACES TO GET COUPON CODES) so I got it for $190. The BXT and Argus 2 was 130 but got both for 110 and the Ring you have to pay $3 dollars a month of $30 dollars for the year to record with the Ring. Not sure if it’s worth it yet though! I am going to attach two similar pictures to show the differences in quality at night. The one without the time stamp at the top is the BXT. I also attached a picture showing myself on the BXT to show you that due to low quality at night (which is when I want to rely on a camera the most, most likely) you can’t make out the features in my face. *** If you found this review helpful, please click helpful so I am encouraged to keep writing updates and the other battery operated cameras I am testing : ) - One final note if you are considering an indoor camera and you don’t care if its wired the Nest cam is awesome and records 24/7 non-stop so you won’t miss anything whereas most cameras including all the others I have talked about only record in motion clips. !!!!!!!Thanks for reading this all!!!!!!!