Blink Security Camera System Review - Inexpensive no fee multi camera surveillance

Buy it on Amazon - lon.tv/ve56x (affiliate link) - Blink is an affordable home security camera system that's easy to set up and does not have any monthly service fees. See more home security: lon.tv/security and subscribe! lon.tv/s -- index below:
VIDEO INDEX:
00:47 - Hardware overview and price
01:25 - How it works
01:52 - Camera and sample video output
02:08 - Audio sample
02:16 - Outdoor use
02:40 - Indoor cameras use illuminator vs. night vision
03:23 - Blink server free video storage
03:52 - AA batteries and battery life
05:14 - Mobile app overview
05:21 - Live Monitoring
06:00 - Arming the system
06:11 - Disabling motion detection on an individual camera
06:21 - Capturing a motion event with push alert
06:55 - Responsiveness vs. Ring doorbell
07:12 - Camera configuration screen
07:29 - Temperature sensor and alerts
07:59 - Video capture length, sensitivity and retriggering
08:57 - Adjusting or turning off illumination light
09:21 - Quality of motion detection
10:26 - Arming the system on a schedule
10:46 - Amazon Alexa support
11:04 - IFTTT integration
12:45 - Arming with IFTTT and Apple Watch
12:52 - Conclusion and final thoughts
I have looked at a lot of security systems and few are at a point where I can recommend them. Some are decent but require a monthly fee to get full functionality, others are just painful to set up and don't work all that well.
This one really surprised me. Very affordable cameras, easy to set up, no significant limitations to cloud server storage, and works via AA batteries with months/years of battery life depending on how you have it all set up.
The low price has few compromises although the cameras do not have night vision built in. They instead employ an ultrabright LED "illuminator" and a very sensitive sensor that works well enough. But in low light situations the camera reduces the shutter speed so images might be blurry especially if the subjects are moving around.
I am eager to check out their upcoming outdoor camera with night vision. I ordered one and will do a followup when it comes out.
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[@runningrabbit04]

I love how you disclose your interaction with the product/company. thank you for being honest! keep up the good work, love what I see!

[@matturbanski8496]

I would like to say that what you presented answered all of my questions I ordered mine from Amazon I read the reviews but didn't get all of answers I needed thank you for making everything clear.

[@carmennooner2027]

Excellent! And better yet, I understood it all!!! Just moved into an Active Senior Adult apartment complex and they built in a great deal of security as far as smoke alarms and lots of sprinklers in every room. Doors only have one lock though, and we aren't allowed to install more. This looks perfect for evening hours as well as our occasional two day get aways. Cost is ideal for a couple of fixed income folks too. Thank you so much for putting this up. Going to check it out, like today!

[@LonSeidman]

Awesome!

[@jeanie2404]

Thanks guy, FABULOUS, was your input on this system. I just bought it!!

[@neurobioboy]

Thanks for your work, even if I live in France, I can have nice review of a lot of interesting stuffs, and that's because of you! Thanks for your videos! And I really like your honesty at the beginning of each video with the disclaimer. That is great!

[@Hakeem597]

I have 3 of these and I am overseas and can watch my home from anywhere! They also have an outdoor camera as well!!!!

[@CaptainJim]

Great video, ordered from Amazon. Thanks, Jim

[@LonSeidman]

Thanks!

[@DuncanCunningham]

Looking forward to seeing the night camera review.

[@chrispistocco]

Great Video!

[@feldmanjared]

Would love to see some other home security options, specifically for outdoor use.

[@1252PFC]

great video and you added extra stuff regarding the app.. thanks. curious how this compares to largest cam company - Swann?

[@astyfoo]

I'd picked the Arlo system myself which works very similarly, but does have night vision via infrared and is outdoor friendly. I'd mainly bought it because it supported a web app, but it requires FLASH to use so basically it's no better than not having a web app. Blink definitely seems to win on price, maybe you can do a comparison of a couple similar cams?

[@HughD]

Lon, thanks for the review. I kinda figured you'd like it. They're a great buy, very reliable and fit well with those of us who don't have money to burn. They don't have to be your only security cameras, but an affordable supplement. Blink's new outdoor camera works great, too. By the way, the sync modules are so cheap if you buy one bundled with another camera it's worth having a second one. That way you can put your outside cameras on one and your indoor cameras on the other as you'll probably want them armed with a different set of conditions.. You can't set up different arming for different cameras so that's a bit of a workaround. My inside cameras are off unless I'm gone and my outside cameras armed at night and when I'm expecting a Lon-induced UPS shipment!!! Oh, you can tape over the blue light if you want to The new XT has a switch that allows you to just turn it off if you want. Thanks again, Lon. This review won't cost me anything as I already have several.

[@LonSeidman]

Awesome thanks! I thought you were the one who suggested this and I couldn't find the initial comment/email. Thanks for the tip I am going to be buying a bunch more of these cameras soon, already ordered the outdoor one.

[@gselby8107]

Another winner Lon, thanks. 2 questions... 1, so over a year later, are you still happy with this camera. And 2, I searched your YT page for the outdoor version (XT?) and couldn't find your review. Do you have a link? Thanks.

[@Hydrogenagent]

looking for something with all this, but more cams... I have tons of land and properties and would like to find package deals and be able to direct wire it all or use wireless too.

[@stevepse]

You had mentioned that you were going to try the Blink XT outdoors camera. Have you had a chance to review it? Did not see a followup

[@Razor2048]

I always find those types of cameras to be nearly useless when they are running on battery. Many battery powered cameras in the past have done this, such as the vuezone, arlo (non pro), and many others, ans they often have a fine print of the battery life based on around 2-5 minutes of recording per day. The problem with this, is that you now have to find a location that you want to monitor but that also only had 2-5 minutes of activity per day. Those 2 categories have very little overlap, but since they don't put that info front and center, a lot of people get sucked into the big print and buy it and then find out soon after that it is not very useful for their needs. Another thing to consider is that limited length clips are not very useful, From my experience, cameras that do this, take a while to retrigger, thus you often end up missing things. When using an arlo camera, there was one person who was parking near the side of the house, and then dumped medical waste onto the sidewalk. and then drove off. The arlo caught the person parallel parking and sitting in their car for a little while, but missed them dumping the trash. My traditional IP camera that records 24/7 caught it though. The whole cloud reliant camera thing is horribly inefficient and wasteful, why use up valuable WAN throughput and data and local and remote resources view a delayed and overly compressed video stream, when the camera is on your network, you should be able to access it directly and view a stream that does not need a high level of compression.

[@rapaddictsupreme]

You seem pretty long winded lol

[@johnbaker1039]

Lon, did you ever do the follow up on the outdoor camera?

[@AlexVega]

Lon did you ever do the review of the outdoor cam?

[@cactustweeter2890]

Can you view the recorded footage from a desktop computer, or is it only accessible through the mobile app?

[@friedrice5292]

Hello Lon. Just came across your video on Blink home security camera. I am in the process of getting a home wireless camera security system without paying recording monthly fee. Do you have any recommendation video on that topic? If so, i would love to see it. Thank you in advance.

[@ericbazinga]

Hey Lon, did you hear about the new update for 8bitDo controllers? You can use them with the Nintendo Switch now! It'd be really cool if you showcased that in a weekly wrap-up or something.

[@LonSeidman]

Yes! I might do something on that very soon.

[@n1kkri]

If the company should go under do you think its possible to view the camera with universal camera apps like "tiny cam pro" ? I have a few other cameras that only talk about using the supplied app but I have been able to find the IP address of the camera and view them directly. With the "sync" module in between the camera and the app I wonder if this would ever let me see the cameras IP address.

[@yuprulesing]

I wish the videos could be stored to the "hub", it has a USB port but it's for "future use". Hopefully the future use is for local store instead of the limited cloud storage.

[@LonSeidman]

Me too - I am hoping they add that as an option so it could work locally.

[@HeraldStephens]

there's one major flaw with this system. I've been using it since it first came out and they've been promising since then some sort of siren add-on. Without it, this system becomes useless at night. Due to battery saving modes built into the Android system, I don't receive motion capture alert notifications until the morning when I wake my phone. I could get robbed through the night and not know a thing until I wake up in the morning.

[@OOO-pc3nb]

Can you place it in a window to record outside?

[@jamescouch5067]

I need help...I just got my Blink home security and it works great on my android smartphone using google. The problem is GOOGLE will not let me download the app into my laptop or desktop. So how do I get around this

[@thedayhayfilms]

Do you recommend this or the wyze?

[@clifffrazee]

Hey Lon, did you ever get the Blink XT cameras to do the follow up review on?

[@gr2065]

I was wondering the same thing?

[@Phamtom009]

It would be perfect if it has some local storage capabilities. I'm always paranoid companies going out of business. How great would it be if there was a microSD slot on the sync module?

[@LonSeidman]

I think there's the potential for that - the sync module does have an inactive USB port that my guess is there for local storage. I hope to they make use of it!

[@MRrwmac]

Lon, Thanks for the review!! I don't like that it won't record to a local device/system. Since it doesn't, how will you incorporate this into the surveillance module of your Synology system?

[@LonSeidman]

This unfortunately won't integrate with the Synology system. I hope they'll do something with the local USB port on the sync module in the future.

[@im2crafty]

I have a tenvis, u can remotely move it

[@DM72513]

If I could save the footage to my Windows 10 Plex Server I'd buy a dozen.

[@Hydrogenagent]

wireless is cool, but still... how can you change it if your gone for a long time. You lose that cam!

[@Eman-bz1te]

That’s blink then. Unfortunately amazon brought blink and now they have their own subscription :(

[@Hydrogenagent]

hey, hit me up, i wanna get into tech security reviews online, i love this stuff.

[@furrane]

Those are simple to use but not a really great value for money. If you're serious about home security, they are too limited in fonctionalities, you can't store more than 2H of footage (which is basically nothing), you're at the mercy of the company if they decide to make it not free anymore or go out of buisness, the resolution would be ok in the early 2000's and so on ... And if you're not serious about home security, well why would you buy security cameras in the first place. I recommend using a stronger, more versatile, alternative here if you want security. You want to be able to store the video locally, so only YOU have access to it and YOU can decide how much storage to use for it. Also you want a decent resolution that would be very important if the footage is presented as a piece of evidence ( which is, in fine, the purpose of security cameras ) and of course you want something you can screw to your wall ( at the moment, those camera are just an easy equipement a robber would steal which is kind of ironic ). *In short* : if you want home security, do it right, might cost more, but it will serve you, whereas this toy might be fun to play around but is really not suited for serious home security.

[@LonSeidman]

I looked at Synology's solution here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Y5_Sd2htbZqhqdU - But not every consumer has the budget or technical wherewithall to make it work. This is the best of the cloud based alternatives I've looked at so far.

[@furrane]

You're absolutely right Lon, it would cost more. Although I always look to the best value when I buy stuff (that's one of the reason i'm subscribed here ;)), in my opinion the characteristics of this video surveillance system are not worth the money. I won't enumerate again the features you want in such a system but in one word, for surveillance you want something extremely stable. The simple fact that this is cloud stored by default is not good in the long run. Two hours of stored footage is not enough : more times than you would think, people don't realize they've been robbed until much later when they see something's missing. of course that won't be a problem if you're checking constantly your phone for motion alert but honestly I'd rather have the peace of mind to know that my system logged every movement in the past 2 years so I can go on with my life rather than having to check my phone everyday for it. Again this is more of an opinion, I like to tinker with things, I even built a video surveillance with a raspberry pi as a project once (now it evolved into a baby monitor), but I, personally, chose not to cut corners on sensible stuff like video surveillance. Think of it this way, what's 300$ or even 500$ if it allow you to identify someone would broke into your house and stole 3000$ of equipement ? I understand why people would go for cheap and easy solution, but I really think you can't overlook performance and stability for a videosurveillance system.

[@furrane]

Well cloud storage is good but only if coupled with on site storage too (the more places you store the data, the more secure it is, that's a general rule you can apply to any data, not just video recordings). The issue here, with the specific product of the video, is that you are forced into this specific company cloud storage (ideally you want to be able to choose your cloud service) which brings a few issues : - They can decide after they sold a couple, well let's make it a monthly fee, in which case either you pay or the product you paid for is now worthless. - If they go out of buisness and decide to no longer support their product, once again you're left with worthless product. - You are forced to trust them with highly sensible data : in the wrong hands, those recording are very valuable. - Your data is stored only in one place (you can manually decide to download recording though) and that's a lack of stability. Redundancy is key here. And yes, as far as recordings length, even with the tweaking of movement detection and clip duration, 2H might cover maybe a week, and as far as I am concerned this is not ideal for a security system. If you'd like to setup a home security camera system, I won't recommend a specific model but I can give you hints : - Higher resolution is better, night vision is a requirement, but don't break the bank buying ultra fancy cameras : go for good value. - Choose a solution that allow you to store the data on hard drives : it can be on your NAS if you have one (if you don't, they're really nice, think about it =) ) or via a specific surveillance camera hardware, allowing you to be flexible and decide how much storage you want to invest. This, in my opinion, is mandatory. - Find a reliable cloud storage service and pair your security system with it. - Finally, beware that there is two routes on this : either DIY (cheap but can be extremely time consuming and have security holes) or Ready-to-go solutions (Expensive but in general pretty secure), unless you got good knowledge about this stuff and are willing to spend time to make it work, I suggest you go for the latter, but keeping the previous points in mind. - And of course, read about home surveillance, the better informed you are, the better you can determine what solution you need. Hope this helps.

[@Hydrogenagent]

dont like the light on the cam, that shit gets your shit broken, better to have night vision and light sensors... they should include other lighting with motion and include vehicle add on and online video storage and offline on a dvr and sd card saving it to all and ability to change options and ability to hook up to security systems and alert police if there are broken windows of busted doors.

[@tamaramathis3577]

So basically if someone breaks into your houseand your wife is home alone with the intruder it doesn't alert the Police but you can watch your wife get raped or killedwell that's great I would love to have a security system that nobody monitors but myself so that nobody calls the police for me

[@tamaramathis3577]

cameras are great in everything but they are reactive not proactive and I think I'll go ahead and stick with a monthly bill where I pay people to monitor my home that away the police are notified as well as myselfso I have protection also the cameras you put in yourself give you no money back on your homeowners insurance the great this seems like a great thingcameras that are just in your home so that you can watch your house that's creepy you're a weirdo

[@hutisputis1]

this system is 100% junk, they fail in 60 days, I am in the IT field and should have done more research, plus Blink customer service is a joke.