Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Due to my answer in the QA section receiving many endorsement, i decided to give it a bit more detailed review after 2 weeks into owning the Blink setup. I came from Simplisafe, and i still do have simplisafe's alarm system, but due to their lack of outdoor camera solution, i finally decided to pull the trigger on the latest Outdoor blink and try out the Mini blink as well. First thing's first, the new Outdoor Blink cam works mostly as advertised but the indoor Blink Mini is junk. Read more about the Mini below. But first the Outdoor (good) Blink Outdoor: Motion recording speed & Delay: The Outdoor cam's trigger time is almost instant, in fact, I noticed that it even records a second before entering the frame. which tells me that it might be doing some kind of constant recording into the cam's onboard volatile memory as cache, and once motion is triggered it starts encoding the data and dumps it onto the cloud. So the trigger time is almost instant. However, note that there is a 5 second delay from what's happening Live vs what you see on your phone. so that delay is between Trigger --> Encode --> Cloud --> Decode. I"d imagine that if your Cam is connected to a wifi bridge as oppose to directly to the main router, the delay could be longer than 5 seconds. Compare to Simplisafe cam, the Live vs View delay is about the same. and the trigger time is about the same too. Motion sensor & sensor distance. the motion sensor distance in the Outdoor cam is less than 25 ft. despite what the feature ad would tell you. i have 4 Cams (3 outdoor setup at an angle pointing down 45 degree angle, and 1 in the garage looking pretty much straight flat at my car), 3 of the outdoor ones could pretty much trigger 15~20ft out, while the one in the garage struggles to even trigger at 15 ft. You should also take night vision into account. in NV mode, the distance is 5ft shorter. increasing the IR blast in NV will somewhat mitigate the problem but at a cost of battery drain. i tried moving the cam in garage from pointing 45 degree down to looking almost straight horizontal to improve motion sensing to a degree. So if you have trouble with the motion sensor, try that. Compare to Simplisafe's cam, the Simplicam seems to have farther motion sensing distance. But then again, Simplisafe still doesn't have an outdoor solution. Speaker/Mic the speaker and Mic quality is really good. it doesn't sound overly tiny like you would expect and is loud and clear. compare to Simplicam, the Blink Outdoor has better sound and mic. Wifi Wireless i was surprised how well the wireless works. lots of complains in the review about wireless distance, not sure if they're genuine. but my farthest cam is about 80ft away from my main router thought a living room, a dining room and a garage and garage door (just shy of the max 100ft advertised in the spec), i am still able to get above 33% wifi N signal. But i think a lot of this "might" depend on the quality of your Wifi router. i spared no expense on my home wifi. So my router is 3x3 beam forming top of the line AC router that also has a very wide 802.11 N coverage. it can reach far and carry lots of bandwidth. my advice is invest in a quality wifi router with the most bandwidth and range you can afford. Note that the cams and module only supports 802.11 N. Compare to Simplicam, the wifi signal reach is about the same, if not slightly better than the Simplicam. AC Wireless. part of the charm and strength about the Blink Outdoor is its battery powered wireless nature. Only time will tell how long my Cams will last. I will update this review and reflect the score once my first set of battery run out. My gut tells me it'll be less than 2 years, well less. but i'd be happy if i can get even 1 year out of those cams. Note that the advertised 2 year battery life from Amazon is based on roughly 2 mins of video footage per day per cam. One of my busiest cam facing out the front door is seeing 2~3 times that amount. Resolution/video quality the resolution of the cam and video compression is really good. compare to those legacy 480p outdoor cams, this was a big step up. but compare to the simplicam, i would say the image looks slightly sharper than the Simplicam. but note that true 1080p resolution is only possible with high quality video record setting, which can chew up your battery and storage. Amazon's 2 year battery life is based on medium setting, which is actually 720p. but even at the medium setting, i still find the image to be very sharp and clear. going from medium to high (1080p) setting yield "some" improvement viewing on a smart phone. you likely won't be able to find big difference viewing it on a smartphone unless you view both videos on a large monitor. oh which btw, currently there's no app available for desktop computers. you'll have to either download the footage or pull the backup off your thumb drive to view it on a dekstop. Storage ok, this is the most contentious and messed up part. the ad made you believe that you don't need to subscribe to cloud and able to store locally. what they don't explain to you is that local storage is only a secondary option on top of the cloud subscription. so you CANNOT, at least at the point of this review, store your recordings directly to the USB thumb drive and read off of it directly. how the Blink cam works right now is everything gets dumped to their cloud server, and when you view the footage, it reads off their cloud server. the USB thumb drive is just there to backup "from their cloud server" "once a day". there is no way for you to have the cams upload recordings directly to the thumb drive locally and view them from your phone wirelessly off the USB Thumbdrive. There're a lot of people asking about this question on forums and, like me, only found this out after the fact. It's not a deal breaker, but it just leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Why not just come out and say it. It's simply misleading. if you go to their website, and dig, and i mean really dig, you'll find that there is a way to run it without subscription. but any motion trigger or live views will not be recorded. So what's the point of local storage? it's almost like they just want to find a way to cramp that "local storage" wording into their ad to sell you the product only to find out that it's a secondary backup on top of a pay subscription. Now onto Blink mini (junk) Blink mini on the other hand. To put it simply is junk or an opportunity wasted. the Blink Mini has a long standing bug that plagued the camera for at least 2 years, and the dev team still hasn't released a fix. The issue with Blink Mini is that it fails to trigger motion recording coming out of night vision mode when you enter the room to turn the lights on. the dev team explained that something to do with the cam goes into freeze mode when it attempts to wake itself out of night vision to do recording. for that reason, it's pretty much trash if you intend on using the Mini as any kind of indoor security cam. I originally intended to use the Mini in my garage to monitor my prized stallion. But i literately would go into my garage and walk up to the car and no motion or recording is triggered. Dev has acknowledged this issue since late 2018 and said in 2019 forum post that firmware update is coming to fix this. it is now end of 2020, i would not count on it. The only reason i kept my Mini and ordered another Outdoor cam for the garage is so that in any case when we go on vacation, i can set the Mini up in the living room to do live view. But if you're thinking about getting the Mini for motion triggered security cam indoor, forget it. don't say i didn't warn you. Software UI/UX the interface for the app is easy to use and more organized than many other similar services. clips are organized with usable filters at your disposal. the motion sensing manual dead zone configuration is helpful, although likely not too useful if you're using it outdoor, since the "motion sensor" distance (not wifi distance) is well shy of advertised 25ft. OVERALL the new Outdoor blink has a lot going for it. If they can fix their advertisement wording, or better, let us have the option to record directly to the USB Thumb drive and be able to view the recording from our devices directly from the thumbdrive. it'll then be a True local storage solution. the only reason i ditched my Simplicam is because i really wanted to have smart Cams covering my house outdoor. Been 3+ years since Simplisafe said that they would come out with an outdoor solution. But till this day, still nothing. i just got tired of waiting. When i saw the new Blink Outdoor being advertised for Black Friday, i really wanted to give it a try. i would say the barrier to entry is minimal. the Blink hardware given the discount that amazon has been giving out, is worth the shot. Without the deep discounts, i am not so sure. They just need to improve the motion sensor distance coverage, and let us really use the USB thumb drive for storage. In a sea of smart home security market today. Amazon really needs to do more to win over customers and not only that, to keep them there. If they can combine Ring with Blink, i might just ditch my Simplisafe completely and go Ring to combine their alarm system with Blink. If they can do that, i don't mind paying the $10/month subscription. But at its current state, they still have work to do to win over customers. i will update the review on the battery life