Ring Battery Doorbell Review

The Ring Battery Doorbell is Ring's most affordable battery-powered doorbell camera that can be mounted in a variety of ways to capture the best view of your entryway. It features a very large field of view to ensure you don't miss anything and utilizes Ring's user-friendly app interface. Unfortunately, its picture quality is lackluster at best.

Video Quality

When it comes to video quality, the Ring Battery Doorbell leaves a lot to be desired. The fisheye lens of the Ring heavily distorts the overall image quality, particularly with clarity and color accuracy.

Day Quality Night Quality

Although it captures footage in 1440p resolution, the footage I captured is so pixelated that I could not even determine the colors on our color accuracy chart and could only partially read the second line on the letter chart. When it comes to nighttime video quality, the Ring delivered similarly poor and unclear results, although the exposure performance isn't as bad as the overall clarity concerns I have. The massive 150-degree horizontal and vertical field of view of the Ring is great but ultimately a moot feature because of its lousy image quality.

Monitoring Performance

Although the Ring Battery Doorbell does not feature facial recognition, it didn't miss anything in our subject recognition testing. To manage motion zones, the Ring app allows for creating up to three separate motion zones. I like that each of the motion zones has up to eight points that you can drag and drop to size according to your preference.

The Ring is pretty limited in features, but it does have the ability to identify motion and distinguish between a person, a vehicle, and a package. It also features two-way audio, allowing you to hear what's happening around the camera and transmit audio from the camera through its built-in speaker.

Ease of Use

The Ring Battery Doorbell can be powered by either the built-in rechargeable battery or a hard-wired connection. Our testing revealed that the Ring is quite efficient, only draining the battery by roughly 1% a day while in use with constant motion.

Ring doesn't specify an expected battery life for the Battery Doorbell, but based on our testing, you could expect approximately three months before needing to recharge. Based on the performance of other battery-capable cameras we tested, I think the battery life of this camera is pretty good and lasts longer than many others.

Ring has been around for a while now, and their app is proof of that. The home screen on the Ring app offers a snapshot of the most recent event as the camera's thumbnail. What sets it apart from the Eufy app is that the Ring app provides a timer in the lower left corner of the thumbnail to tell you how old that thumbnail is. Ring also offers the ability to swap your system view from list to grid style. The Grid view is great if you have several cameras in your system. It provides a smaller thumbnail for each camera, allowing you to see up to 10 cameras on screen at a time.

The Ring app is good, but it is not free of annoyances. Once you click a camera thumbnail on the home screen, it takes you to a larger thumbnail with an event history timeline underneath. The event history feature is nice because it allows you to filter by events and by date using the calendar. However, you don't actually gain access to the live view until you press play on the thumbnail, which is annoying. Aside from not offering a live view on the camera thumbnails, the Ring app is excellent. It has a clean and intuitive layout that's easily customizable.

Should You Buy the Ring Battery Doorbell?

If you're already in the Ring product family, the Ring Battery Doorbell warrants consideration, but delivers far from clear video quality and has worse video quality overall when compared to other cameras in our lineup. The Ring app is user-friendly, and the doorbell's FOV is massive, though it causes awful distortion. The Ring Battery Doorbell can be used without a monthly subscription, but keep in mind that it only allows you to receive notifications, view live camera footage, and utilize two-way audio features. It does not allow you to go back and review anything without subscribing to one of their monthly service tiers. At the end of the day, it's not the best doorbell security camera out there, but it gets the job done. If you don't already have other Ring products, there are more capable cameras out there you should consider.

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