I purchased the Blink Outdoor 4 cameras with the intention of using them within my home. I know that they are outdoor cameras, but the wireless feature and small form factor was what sold me on these.

_The Good_

Video Quality: The video quality depends on several factors. These include the settings within the app, and the speed of your home network and internet connection. If you are looking for great video quality, make sure that you have good internet service for download AND upload. Both are important here.

Night Vision: The night vision infrared is capable of seeing people in very low light conditions. However, if it is pitch black at night, the video quality is poor. These are not high end cameras for infrared night vision use. Will get the job done, but if you are looking out for details for that random person in your backyard, then try another product.

Sounds Quality: This goes back to what quality settings you choose in the app, and the network performance in your home. Much like the video quality mentioned above.

Phone App: The app is very simplistic to use for anyone who are familiar with smart home applications on their mobile devices. Keep in mind, THERE IS NO COMPUTER PROGRAM OR WEBSITE that you can use to work with your system in any way. This is exclusively through an app from the Apple Store or Google Play Store. The trade off is that the app does include several detailed features on how to customize you camera system. Although, it would be nice to have the option to control the system via program or app on a computer.

_The Bad_

Battery Life: If you prefer to have your cameras at a high resolution/quality, this will drastically reduce the battery life from the talked about "2 years" to down to just a month depending on the cameras activity level. This could be as little as a couple of weeks. They do offer an expansion that increases the battery capacity from 2 to 4. However, this does not do anything but double the battery life of what was already short. The camera does have the option to be powered (not charged) via USB C connection that solves this issue. However, this defeats the purpose of being wireless, and removed the water resistance of the device. Essentially, making the device a wired, indoor camera.

Subscription vs. Local Storage: Like any home automation/monitoring system, there will be a subscription fee. However, if you choose to opt out of the paid subscription, you will have no ability to record and store your videos in the cloud for ease of access. There is the option to record them locally, but the system is buggy. This includes corrupt video files, and not recording when it needs to. Further, you will lose much of the cameras functionality. Please see the blink website for details on the subscription versus free.

_The Ugly_

Poor Connection:
ISP Connection Speed: 500mb Download / 30mb Upload
Router: High End $300 plus router.
Apartment Size: 900 Square Feet

The connection to the home network and to the Sync Module is poor to practically non-existent at times. While using these devices in my home, the connection was good for about 2 weeks. Then one of the cameras began to show offline. Trying to access the camera gave me "could not connect" and/or "Camera is busy". Note: I had these connected via my 2.4Ghz network as instructed by Blink and within 25 to 30 feet of my router.
I had to power cycle the camera by removing the batteries. This did not work. Removed the camera from the system and performed a reset. This worked for a time. A few days later, both devices went offline and I had to perform the same steps. The system worked a few more days, and then happened again. I am a Computer Hardware and Network Technician. I took it upon myself to look at the network via my router's user interface and ran several tests, as well as testing all other devices both wired/wireless, and stationary/mobile. All other devices worked fine. No errors pulled from the logs for the network connectivity or for an individual device. I checked with my ISP, and they detected nothing wrong with my modem or connection outside of the home. Looking at the logs on my router, I did see that 2 MAC addresses were showing incorrect credentials. Confirmed that these MAC addresses belonged to the cameras. So it seemed that, for some reason, the cameras would "lose the networks credentials". Confirmed that the routers network security was in line with Blink requirements.

Customer Service:
I then had to call Technical Support after the above. The entire time that spoke with customer service, they had me perform the basic network troubleshoot of rebooting my router, granting them permission to my Blink Account, power cycling the cameras, et cetera. The entire time I explained that it is not my network that is the issue. Everything else on the network is working fine. The rep continued saying that "I see multiple network connectivity errors. It has to be your network." I mentioned that nothing on my network, router, modem, and ISP is testing in the negative. The representative, in my opinion, ignored any information that I provided and kept blaming my home network. I had tested this same system with another router/location with the same results.
The result was that they would send me a replacement for ONE of the cameras. I did not request a replacement. I simply wanted to speak with someone about the information that I found out, and see if there was some way to get the cameras that I already owned back online.

It seems that this network connectivity issue is also affecting several others. Please see other reviews for this product here, and on Amazon.

Luckily for me, I only wanted these cameras to watch my new dog when I was away from home. If you are in need of serious home protection, please look elsewhere for the sake of protection of you and your loved ones. They deserve the best, and this is not it.

The Blink Outdoor 4 is a 4th generation battery-powered smart security camera that leverages the lifespan of Lithium AA batteries, camera technology and Wi-Fi with an app and cloud-based server infrastructure to provide an ingeniously simple Security system that extended to many devices beyond this one simple outdoor wireless system.

The system comes with the Outdoor 4 camera, 2 AA sized lithium batteries, a sync module, a power block and cable for the sync module, a mount and right-angle adapter that also doubles as a screwdriver (to loosens the screw for the Battery compartment) a set of mounting screws and a quick start guide.

The key features of this 4th generation camera are:

- Two-Year battery life - Runs for up to two years on two included AA lithium batteries.
- Day + Night HD View – See more of what’s happening with a wider field of view (143 degrees), low-light image sensor, and infrared night vision.
- Two-way Audio – Hear and speak to people and pets with crisp audio.
- Enhanced Motion Detection - Catch events quickly with dual-zone motion detection alerts.
- Person Detection – Know when a person is detected with embedded computer vision (CV) as part of an optional Blink Subscription Plan (sold separately – but this kit has a 30-day free trial with no credit card needed included.
- The device works with Amazon Alexa (Blink was acquired by Amazon in 2017).
- The sync module contains a USB-A type port that can be used with a flash drive (up to 256 GB - not included) to store data locally and you can avoid the monthly subscription for cloud storage – but you also lose some benefits – such as real time viewing of the cameras.

I am impressed with the Blink Outdoor 4 system. Set up is quick and easy and can be done very quickly via the use of QR codes. This follows a typical process of downloading the associated app from your app store, creating an account, and then adding your sync module followed up by the camera to the system. Each sync module can have up to 10 devices attached though it. The system having a sync module does a few things – it “camera battery life, saves clips without a subscription, improves convenience for scheduling, and arms a group of devices at once.” The downside is the need to have an always-on Wi-Fi connection (2.4 GHz Wi-Fi internet connection with at least 2 MB per second of upload speed (from your network to the internet) for the system to be used. This is good in a home use situation but is less advantageous when using the system with an RV or camping trailer setup where one may not have access to such capabilities. I am glad to see that this system can run in a subscription free mode, however you do lose a lot of capability doing so – such as real-time viewing and the two-way audio capability.

Overall, this is a great design for security cameras and there are plenty of YouTube videos I have seen that can help you get the most out of your system.

Pros: Functionality, local storage option

Cons: Always on Wi-Fi connection needed

I was hopeful that these battery-powered wi-fi cameras would be just what I was looking for but, alas, it was not to be. I'm sharing the things I learned in the hope that I can save someone else some time.

First, you must tie your Blink account to Amazon in order to have cloud storage via a subscription. This may not be a problem for some but I didn't like having to do this. Second, you must use 2-factor authentication. While this is great extra security, it makes it nearly impossible to share with other family members. (But I admit that I didn't try very hard to solve this because of the rest of my experience with the cameras. Read on.)

Setup was a bit clunky as the Sync Module needed to be reset multiple times before it would connect. There were no instructions or pictures on how to open the cameras or attach the cameras to the mount. This could be an issue for some people.

The camera resolution & picture quality were good but distorted to get a 143° field of view. Not a huge issue for me but you should expect some distortion.

The most important expectation that I have is "people detection". They tell you that people detection works best when the camera is able to see a person cross the camera's field of view rather than approach it directly. This is very true! The camera could not detect a person walking up stairs, across a deck and to the door. The stairs and door are directly in line with one another. The camera was mounted on the same wall as the door but about 5-6 ft away from it. The angle must have been too direct because no alert notification was generated. This was a huge failure and the primary reason for my rating.

When you change default settings you are warned that you are going to impact battery life. This is a good warning to have but the defaults were not what I wanted and there is not an estimate about how much the battery will be impacted. For example, there's a setting to set how long to the camera will record once motion is detected. The default is only 5 seconds (not long enough based on my experience with other systems). Since I was going to use this on a home that is not occupied for part of the year, anything that impacts battery-life significantly means a potential 5 hr. drive to replace batteries. It's just not a risk I'm ready to accept. (Yes, I could add battery extension packs but at this point I'm opting for scaled- back wired system.)

The Blink App features were not great either. You can look at one camera at a time only. Other systems let you see multiple cameras in real-time. When you view in real-time, you have about 20 seconds of time before you are prompted to hit the "continue" button or else it will stop displaying. These two downfalls were the last straws. I returned the cameras.

I bought the three camera set-up based on it's ability to be used without monthly subscription. I was told that would require backup on a USB flash drive. That was true although not having a subscription lessens the functionality of the system. Using the USB drive means very slow retieval of video clips and without a subsctiption there are no video thumbnails being displayed when logged into the app to identify and review video clips. My driveway camera activated when my neighbour drove into his driveway but the camera did not activate when I drove into my own driveway. Deactivating specific zones did not improve the problem. Relocating the camera also did not help. These inconveniences could probably be tolerated, but the most frustrating feature is the time stamping of the video clips by the sync module. On setup it is required that your time zone be entered. That makes sense but is conflicted with the fact that time stamps on the USB clips are recorded using only UTC time (time in Greenwich England) which in my case is different by 5 hours. If you wish to find a video clip that corresponds to a clip viewed on the app, that can't be done by searching for corresponding time stamps.