Ring Battery Video Doorbell (2024) Review: Easy to install, easy to use… for a price

Ring’s updated Battery Video Doorbell has plenty of smart features – but it’s worth remembering that many of them hide behind an ongoing subscription.

Pros	Cons
Fast motion pickup	Some smart detection features are paywalled behind a subscription
Very easy install process	Doesn’t feel like it’s quite as physically secure as older Ring doorbells
Alexa compatible	Doesn’t support other voice assistants or standards such as Thread

Score: 4/5

 

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In this review

Ring Battery Video Doorbell Specifications
Ring Battery Video Doorbell Design
Ring Battery Video Doorbell Performance
Ring Battery Video Doorbell Battery
Ring Battery Video Doorbell Conclusion

Ring is pretty much the name in video doorbells, and it’s a reputation that (by and large) the company has well earned. My general advice to people looking into picking up a smart doorbell is to at least look at what Ring is doing at a given point in time, and it’s frequently my point of comparison when testing any other smart home doorbell and camera systems.

The updated Ring Battery Video Doorbell doesn’t radically redefine what Ring does, but it does have some appeal given its easier setup and wider vertical field of view.

Note for this review: While I have tested the Ring Battery Video Doorbell extensively over the past few weeks, I’m not sharing any images from it in this review.

That’s quite deliberate, because I value my personal privacy – it’s installed at my home – and the privacy of people who have visited during that period, whether they’re friends, family, couriers or anyone else.

It’s also why I’m not doing a video review of this particular product, because about all I could show off would be it picking me up in my home office if I installed it there – which very much isn’t the point of the Ring Battery Video Doorbell.

Design/Installation

Ring has had a lot of doorbells over the years, and it can be a little confusing picking between them, especially as the actual design of most of them is very similar. With full disclosure, the doorbell I replaced the 2024 Ring Battery Video Doorbell with… was also a Ring doorbell that looked nearly identical, with a silver faceplate beneath a black camera lens, nearly the same as any other Ring doorbell. I say nearly, because there is an option for a “Venetian Bronze” finish plate instead if silver’s not your style.

What has changed markedly is the install process, with Ring claiming that it’s possible to install a Ring doorbell from start to finish in around five minutes. That’s largely because Ring’s done away with the custom screws and screwdrivers that it used to supply to secure the Ring Doorbell itself from theft.

Instead there’s now a drop-in latch arrangement that relies on a specifically shaped orange tool to pop the Ring Battery Video Doorbell off its backing plate when you need to recharge its batteries. I've not gone at it deliberately with a flathead screwdriver, but I do have concerns that it's arguably a little more able to be stolen than older models -- though I guess for the entry level model, maybe the cost is now so low that thieves might not bother?

While it’s sold as the Ring Battery Video Doorbell, it does include terminals that could be used for hardwiring it into place, though that is the kind of work that you absolutely must get done by a qualified electrician if desired. I’ve tested the Ring Battery Video Doorbell purely as a battery doorbell for the purposes of this review.

Did it take me five minutes as promised?

 

Not quite, though I did have to remove the existing doorbell as part of the exercise. Then again, I also already had a Ring account and app ready to go, which new buyers would need to incorporate into the setup routine.

From there it’s a simple enough matter of scanning in the QR code on the back of the camera, setting it into your home’s 2.4Ghz WiFi – no support for 5Ghz, sadly – and then popping it into place. Maybe not quite five minutes work, but it’s certainly faster than prior Ring installs have been.

Performance

 

 

The primary function of a smart doorbell is home security and alerts, and here the Ring Battery Video Doorbell performs largely as expected, and, honestly, not in a hugely different way to the older Ring doorbell it replaced. The new pitched features here are around the “head to toe” view thanks to a 150° horizontal and vertical camera angle.

It’s certainly a shift in focus, but at least for my particular setup I can’t say it made a huge difference in detection or visibility of incoming couriers or returning family members – or even when the annoying cat over the road comes sniffing. That could vary depending on your precise setup location, because for me there’s a fairly long view down my driveway, but if you placed it such that people were likely to turn a corner and “appear” in view, then that top to toe view could be much more useful.

The same is true for the colour night sight view, which again works quite well, but is going to be almost entirely circumstantial as to its utility. Do I need to know every time a possum wanders through my carport? Probably not, but the Ring Battery Video Doorbell picked them up every time it happened. Video quality on the Ring Battery Video Doorbell isn’t the highest in Ring’s available current set at 1440x1440, with Pro and Plus Ring cameras upping that to 1536p, but for home consumer use, it’s honestly sufficient.

Ring Battery Video Camera (Googly Eyes Variant) is shocked by what it has seen.

Motion detection works well too, with the expected ability to set both motion and privacy zones in play, so you can define the areas where the Ring should (or shouldn’t) be looking. For my purposes I want to cover my property, but not spy on my neighbours, and it’s very easy within the app to make those changes so it’s looking at my carport but not into their garage.

However, this does bring with it the one fly in the ointment for some that’s also the basis of Ring’s business model. Like many of its competitors, if you want to use the Ring Doorbell just as a basic video doorbell, you 100% can do so, but in order to get access to any kind of recording history, video downloading, person or package alerts, you need a Ring Protect subscription.

These run to $4.95/month or $49.95/year for a single doorbell or other camera, or $15/month or $150 year for an unlimited number of Ring doorbells and cameras on a single property. You do get a 30 day free trial with a new Ring Doorbell, but that does mean you can get rather used to it working in a certain style only to find after a month that it’s just serving basic notifications, and if you miss an event because you can’t answer the Ring at the time, there’s no way to view who it was or what was left.

This is, in my view, something of a balancing act.

Person/Package detection is undeniably just an algorithm, and charging extra for those feels a little mean, but the reality of online cloud storage is that it does have some level of cost to expect.

Amazon, Ring’s parent company does of course have one of the largest cloud setups in the world through AWS, so it could perhaps cut customers a break and maybe offer a smaller window of backup – a day or so – while leaving the full fat 180 day video history as a paid perk. Then again, maybe the fact that they don’t is why Amazon is worth so much as a company these days…

That aside, being an Amazon product the Ring Video doorbell also integrates neatly with Amazon’s Alexa assistant, so if you’ve got a house full of Amazon Echo Show devices or Fire TV sticks they can be used for controlling and seeing the Ring Doorbell’s video output with a voice command. If you’re more of a Siri or Google Assistant/Gemini household… not so much so.

Battery

The Ring Battery Video Doorbell sits at the entry level point of Amazon’s Ring doorbell business, and one of the ways that it’s differentiated from the Pro products is with the use of an integrated battery, rather than a removable one. That does mean down the track if the battery dies out you’d need to buy an entire new unit and not just a new battery, though you could perhaps sidestep that with direct wiring.

Ring doesn’t specify an estimated battery life for the Ring Battery Video Doorbell, but over a month’s usage I’ve seen it drop from a 100% charged battery down to 85% with what I’d call moderate levels of comings, goings and deliveries to track. That bodes well for only having to recharge it maybe once or twice a year.

Ring Battery Video Doorbell: Alex’s Verdict

The issue of security and privacy around video doorbells is, I know, a contentious one. If what you want from a video doorbell is local and secure storage only because you don’t want any data of that kind in the cloud, then none of the Ring video doorbells is going to be right for you.

Conversely, there’s definitely a crowd of people who crave simplicity and want data not stored on premises so there’s more of a permanent record. If that’s you and you’re looking for a solid and reliable video doorbell, the Ring Battery Video Doorbell is recommended. It’s worth keeping in mind the ongoing subscription costs, however, because those will mount up over time.

Also read:
Arlo Pro 5 2K Review
Wyze Cam v3 Pro and Wyze Cam Pan Review

Ring Battery Video Doorbell 2024: Pricing and availability

The Ring Battery Video Doorbell retails in Australia for $149.

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