Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Cliff notes ************* It's great assuming your doorbell transformer meets Ring's voltage recommendations, your wifi signal strength is adequate, you properly configure motion detection settings/alerts and your internet connection speed is decent. Video quality is adequate but not great. It's good enough to see what is happening at your door. ************* We have a couple security cameras already but they are wired to an NVR recording box and the notifications are so slow or don't even send that I can't really rely on it for real-time notifications. For a while I've resisted the notion of paying for surveillance when I can just get a cam with built in SD storage and a nice app like the Wyze cams (which I have inside and love) but having motion and video alerts and footage that can't be stolen or storage get corrupted and a well made phone app is worth $3 a month. I also like that if I decide to add more Ring cameras I can add as many as I want with the 10 dollar plan. Take notes here Nest. As for the doorbell itself, install was straight forward. I did have to upgrade my transformer for this. I installed the Endurance pro 24v unit. It was only a few bucks more than the 14v devices which apparently are the bare minimum Ring recommend. I figured that the extra voltage gives me some headroom to add a smart thermostat if I decide to do that in the future and after discovering how much of a pain it was to access my doorbell transformer in the attic, I'm glad I only had to do this once. Make sure you locate yours before deciding on this model doorbell or the Ring 2 which would have been at least an hour or two shaved off the install time. Once I setup the motion detection zone, basically all false positive alerts are gone. I have the motion detection setting in the middle of the 5 settings. Lowering it doesn't detect the postman at the mailbox despite it being in the motion zone. Notification on my phone is instantaneous. I tested while walking up to the door and it had notified me and I had pulled up the app before I even got to the door both when connected to my home wifi and when on LTE. The remote chime installed without any issues as well. Speaking of home wifi, this seems to be a big sticking point for some owners. I used an android phone app to measure signal strength at my door and it was around -60db (the closer to 0, the stronger the signal). As a network engineer who has implemented numerous small business and commercial wifi installations, for reliable video streaming, I would say if your signal strength at the door is -65 or closer to zero, you're good. If it's higher than -65 like -70 or -75~80, I would strongly recommend investing in upgrading your home wifi with a decent mesh setup like google's wifi, Orbi or EERO mesh. This will allow you to have a wifi access point closer to your door offering a much stronger signal for the doorbell to connect to. Wifi range extenders are hit or miss. They're less expensive than upgrading to a mesh setup but those have to piggyback off your existing wireless instead of just being a part of it and is generally more trouble than it's worth for the average user to setup. The final piece of this working well is your internet speed both upload and download. If you are in a rural area with less than a 10 Mbps connection down and less than 2 Mbps upload, you will probably not have the best experience as this thing is both having to upload/stream video data to Ring's servers and your phone is having to stream/download it from their servers. Ring's video is not that high of bitrate (quality) but still needs to stream that data to their servers before you can even download/see it. If your ISP is metered, you need to be aware that the doorbell is constantly sending video footage. Mine has uploaded 600 megabytes of data in 4 days. At that rate, it will transfer about 4.5 gigs of data in a month. If your data is capped, be sure that you have the headroom to allow the doorbell to stream video footage. FYI it needs to stream this because if something is triggered, that portion of the stream is probably flagged as something you should see and it snips the motion detection part of the stream and sends it back to you. This is why you see your activity video and at first nothing happens and then you see whatever it is that triggered the motion alert. It was recording before it actually saw something move. The only real gripe I have is that sometimes when you open the app to view an event that just got recorded, the app will say that it's processing and not available to play yet.