Ring Pan Tilt Review

The Ring Pan Tilt camera is a hard-wired indoor security camera with pan/tilt capabilities, giving you a smooth 360-degree 1080p video, and is available in five different colors. Despite its lack of high-end features, I truly like this camera for its clarity, panning and tilting abilities, and thoughtful features like a privacy shield for when your camera isn't in use.

Video Quality

For a 1080p camera in this price range, the Ring Pan Tilt captured clear and useful images packed with a decent level of detail. The Snellen Chart was readable down into the fifth line during the day and at nighttime.

As far as color accuracy is concerned, my main gripe is with some light banding around the edges of the color boxes, which is darker than I would like. The overall daytime image quality is a little dark, but nothing terrible besides overexposure of the sky. The nighttime results were also a little dark but had a good amount of contrast, enabling me to make out facial details.

Monitoring Performance

We test the subject recognition of each camera at different distances to see how consistent they are at capturing motion and notifying the user. Our assessment of monitoring performance also involves creating motion zones with the app used to manage the camera and take note of any features that help enhance monitoring.

The Ring Pan Tilt has a pretty simple feature set, allowing it to detect motion, people, and vehicles and utilize two-way audio capability. It does not have facial recognition, but it was able to recognize motion at all five distances that we tested. Motion zone management on the Pan Tilt allows you to create up to three individual motion zones and define them with eight drag-and-drop points. This camera doesn't have many bells and whistles, but I found it to be great at capturing motion.

Ease of Use

It was easy to navigate the Ring app, except for a few points. First, the home screen doesn't show a live view of the camera. Though, it does show a thumbnail of the last motion event and provides a timer in the lower left-hand corner to tell you how long ago the captured image was, which is nice. Even after clicking on the thumbnail of the camera, it takes an additional click on the play button to access the live view. That said, I love the clean, intuitive layout of the Ring app, and the features are mostly easy to find and utilize.

The Ring Pan Tilt can also pan 360 degrees horizontally and tilt 169 degrees vertically, allowing you to find the perfect angle in almost any circumstance. It requires a hard-wired connection to power it and is not capable of using batteries. It also has a unique feature, a manual privacy cover that you can cover the lens with, and that will turn the camera off until you decide you need it again.

Should You Buy the Ring Pan Tilt?

The indoor-only Ring Pan Tilt camera captures crisp and clear images with the ability to pan and tilt to find whatever you're keeping an eye on. Keep in mind, though, that without a paid subscription to Ring Home, you'll only be able to see live view when motion events are triggered. Accessing the camera in the app without the subscription will only show you an image of the last captured motion event. If you're fine with a monthly subscription, you'll gain access to all that the Pan Tilt has to offer. Otherwise, I suggest looking into something else that has the capabilities you need without the monthly subscription.

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