Ring Indoor Cam (1st Gen) by Amazon | Compact plug-in HD Indoor Security Camera with Two-Way Talk, Wifi, Works with Alexa | alternative to CCTV system | 30-day free trial of Ring Protect

I got this ring camera to be a security camera in the house while I'm away, alerting me when people are in a certain room. For that purpose, this little camera is very well priced, has good clear video quality and night vision, which is just about perfect.Setup was easy. Plug it in, load up the RING app and scan the QR code. The code itself is a little small on the camera itself, but it did scan after a few attempts. then it all just set itself up automatically, updated and reported when it was ready for action.The video quality is above average. You can't see the pores in people's skin, or the hairs on a gnat's leg, but you can certainly make people out, and using pinch-unpinch to zoom in on certain area when viewing on the phone. Clarity when zoomed it pretty good, even in low light and IR mode, with little speckling, showing that the sensor is, in fact, relatively good (at least on the 2021 model). Even holding things up to the camera, it's hard to make out specific details. Like, if someone holds up a document with average size writing, you can barely make out the words.The angle of the lens is very wide, giving a pronounced fisheye effect. That's great for covering up to 170 to 175 degrees, but makes the camera less useful if you just need it to focus in on a corridor or one patch of ground. The resolution across the central patch of the image is too low for that, so you'd need another camera with tighter focus lens.The configuration is a tad opaque in places, but if you've set up security systems, or a ring doorbell, it's all very familiar. The same zones and settings.The only bugbear I have is that, unlike the ring doorbell, the indoor camera triggers upon lighting changes as clouds go by. At least three or four times a day, a cloud will go past the sun and I'll get an alarm. The only way to solve this is to turn the sensitivity to minimum, but that means it may not be as sensitive to people or movement as it could be. I'd expect the camera to be better at excluding whole-scene brightening/darkening!The main feature that I think is missing is a "tripwire" feature, whereby it will set off an actual siren in the doorbells. The camera itself has a siren in it, but that'll instantly tell anyone intruding where the camera is. I'd rather have the camera set off a siren in the chime doorbell which is MUCH louder. You can *SORT OF* emulate this by having the indoor camera cause the chime to ring like there's someone at the door, *tinkle tinkle* but certainly no scary Woo-woo siren.On the flip-side you can manually set off a siren in the camera if you need to scare someone off, which is okay, I suppose, but that means you need to get the alert which means leaving your phone with audible alerts on all night while you're sleeping, which is terrible if you get emails, SMS or social media pings overnight.On the whole, it's a great device with nice features. I might take out the extended ring recording thing, but I'm not sure it's worth $8 a month when I can buy an ONVIF camera for $50 and have it upload to a RasPi for $20, making every year after year 1 free compared to the camera. Even professional quality systems can cost as low as $200. Perhaps Amazon should consider dropping the rate by $1 to $2 a month to make it more competitive compared to dedicated security systems.

OK, so, I got this bundled with an echo 8, it was a nice wee bonus.First, I probably wouldn't have "bought" this. It is a bit of a gimmick. However, I'll be honest and say the picture is great and there are occasional connection issues, but I think that relates more to my wi-fi than the cam. If you're subject to power-cuts however... you probably will need to acclimatise to pairing it again. It's more irritating than annoying.Some people asked if you can use it through a window. Well, yes, and no. Mines faces out a window. I have quite a panoramic view, and whilst it's not the human eye, it can be very relaxing watching the world go by. I did notice it was difficult at night, due to the infra red, which makes window viewing near impossible, but you can turn off IR in the app, and, to be honest, it looks pretty good. I also cover up the little blue light to reduce reflection.So this is the problem. I also have a Ring doorbell. There's no issue with multiple devices. But... the doorbell is battery operated. It stops broadcasting after a few minutes to save battery life. This is a good thing. But the indoor cam runs off the mains. I'm only going to run out of power when the UK does. I can cope with a cam that's on for more than 5 minutes. Again this is more irritating than annoying, because it reconnects easily... but...There is no logical reason why this cam times out after a few minutes. I'm sure an update would rectify this. If Amazon/Ring would address this, it'd be perfect.All I would say though is, please don't buy this as a security camera. Motion detection is reasonable, but not perfect. It's a nice toy, and works very well as such. But be aware it has its limitations. Pretty much, it "usually" works, but can be temperamental.All in all though, I like it. Would I pay full price for it? Possibly. I think it's better as part of a deal with something you really want. But I do like it a lot so it wouldn't be a bad purchase. If it didn't cut out after a few minutes, I think I probably would. But it feels like it's got a nag screen, like "you're not watching me, I'm in the huff" and I don't need technology to be my ex-wife.If they sort that out with an update, I'd definitely recommend it. For now though, I'd advise anyone interested to see what deals it gets bundled with. As much as I'd like to, I can't really advise someone to buy this at top dollar price, because, it falls short on what other cams can offer, even though it is much better in other aspects. So nearly brilliant.