I’m a huge fan of the indoor Blink Mini cameras; I use them less for surveillance and more to benefit my laziness. Even when I’ve thought about outdoor cameras, it’s been for monitoring the progress of my garden remotely rather than security—but then the very day my Blink Outdoor 4 arrived, someone down the street had their house broken into overnight, and I have to admit, I was shaken by the irony.
I’ve always been skeptical about the usefulness of security cameras. I’ve had a Ring doorbell for years and its main purpose is to alert me to the mail arriving. I’ve never thought the video quality offered by these consumer cameras was going to be worthwhile in the event of my car being stolen. Since I only had one Blink outdoor camera to play with, I had to make a strategic decision about where to place it—so I chose the very end of my driveway, just before people enter my backyard. It gave me a clear view of about thirty feet of driveway, inhibited less by the viewing distance of the camera than the obstructions in my yard.
What I like about the Blink 4
Almost immediately, I found myself tickled by checking into the camera, despite my previous disinterest in surveillance. That this particular corner most often sees the action of cats, squirrels, and birds only delighted me more. The camera’s resolution is surprisingly good, both in daytime with color and in the dark with night vision. The sound synced pretty well to the video, and was about as clear as it is on my Ring. It picks up noise within eight feet of the camera, which means you only get a snippet of any conversation as people walk by. As friends left a party the night after I installed the camera, I realized I was happier to not hear the whole conversation. Even though I’d mentioned the camera at dinner and I didn’t hear anything untoward, it felt like eavesdropping, because it was.
From a functional standpoint, I liked that the entire camera can be installed using two screws (included in the box). In fact, when I struggled to reach the garage overhead, I realized even one screw was fine in a pinch.
The Blink offers a robust amount of control over the cameras, especially concerning sensitivity. Not only can you set a general sensitivity for motion and activity, you can choose portions of the camera view to exclude from motion alerts. Other cameras offer this as well, but Blink’s grid-view was so granular it begged to be tested. I excluded a tiny corner of the field where squirrels tend to climb up a fence, and the constant alerts I’d been getting for activity were gone. As soon as I added the area back in, the sensitivity returned. It was impressive.
The Blink comes with a 30-day trial to Blink Plus. With it, you can store clips from your cameras in the cloud. One Blink device would cost me $3 a month, and multiple cameras would cost me $10. This is about a dollar cheaper to comparable Ring plans, as well as offerings from other security cameras.
What I’d change about the Blink 4
I use a lot of tech, so I can confidently fiddle around with settings, but a beginner would benefit from a quick start guide. Namely, it bothered me that the device was unarmed by default. Since the entire point of an outdoor camera is to capture motion, it should be on from the get go. Still, the app is intuitive and has a decent UI, which allows you to toggle deeper into settings with ease, and to change settings on the fly.
I’d also like to see Blink add a battery indicator here. Changing the battery on devices like these is a pain since it requires uninstalling them, and even though it doesn’t happen often, it’s easier to predict with a battery life progress bar. Monitoring the battery life on the camera is made less precise by simply offering “ok” or “low,” as the Blink does, versus a graphic of how charged the battery is. Still, not a dealbreaker.
While the hub that was required for the outdoor camera installed flawlessly (it’s not required for my indoor minis), it’s worth noting I struggled to pair the outdoor camera to my existing home in the Blink app. To remedy, I simply created a new home called “outside,” and was able to easily toggle between it and my original “home” where my indoor cameras live. If I’d persisted, I might have succeeded in pairing it to my original home eventually, but since cameras don’t interact, it felt unnecessary.
Lastly, though a common problem for security cameras, I was never able to find that sweet spot of sensitivity where the camera captures a person but not a bird. Sure, people pay a lot of money these days for cameras just to take pictures of birds, but it’d be nice to only be alerted when a human was walking through my property.
What I didn’t like about the Blink 4
The Blink comes in parts: The first has to be disassembled to insert batteries, then reassembled and physically snapped together. There weren’t instructions for this. I was able to figure it out, but with instructions, it would have only taken a moment, and I wouldn’t have spent ten minutes trying to figure out where one of the plastic parts was meant to go. (It turned out to be a handy modern plastic screwdriver, but by the time I realized it, I’d used a quarter to unscrew the battery cover instead.)
This is a problem with many security cameras, but the small black camera stuck out like a sore thumb anywhere I tried to put it. It might be nice to offer it in a more neutral or white version for houses with lighter paint colors. Everyone will notice this camera on my house, whether they’re looking for one or not, which begs the question how effective any of these cameras really are. Held in by two small screws, it would not take much to simply knock it off the wall.
Even snapping the camera onto the base wasn’t intuitive: I snapped it on and then had to pull it back off when I realized you needed it detached to actually install the camera. It also meant struggling to snap the camera head onto the base while balancing on a ladder once I had installed the base where I wanted it. I asked other people who’d gotten a camera if theirs came with instructions, and they had not. There are certainly videos showing how to put it all together, so if you took a moment to Google rather than muddle through, you’d be fine.
My biggest issue with the Blink 4, though, is its responsiveness. When my Ring alerts me to someone at my door, I immediately flip over to the live video on my phone in case I want to interact with that person. (I rarely do.) However, each time the Blink alerted me, it would fail to bring up the live video, even though it showed both my wifi connection and the connection to my Blink hub were excellent. Thirty seconds later, I could access the clip from my library, but its not the same. I could always bring up live video outside of an alert with little lag time, but that’s not when it counts. If its meant to help give me security, I’d like that delay fixed.
Is the Blink 4 security camera worth it?
At $119, you get crisp, clear video and decent enough audio. You can, at any time, get an idea of who is in your yard, and what’s going on in that yard. If you set your expectations at that level, the camera is delightful, and I could see myself getting a number of these just to be able to keep an eye on all corners of the yard for a pet or simple yard watching. For serious security-phobes, the lagtime for live video and the ease with which one can see and disable this camera might give pause. For an amatuer, a little more care could be given to instructions and a quick start guide, but ultimately, this security camera is a solid deal.