Smart Doorbell Cameras

There's a lot of brands out there. Any particular recommendations. I'm seeing that many come with some sort of subscription. I don't want to pay a subscription for a doorbell.

Just want something that will easily interface with my wife's and my phones. No weird account creation or anything like that.

Good question. I have a Ring, and it plays nice with all of our other stuff, but I totally get not wanting a subscription.

I'm curious to hear what options are out there.

In reply to Colin Wood :

I see that has a think where they have a $5/month option and a free option, but it's really vague about what you get if you don't want to pay monthly.

In reply to Beer Baron 🍺 :

You're not paying a subscription price for a doorbell. You're paying for a smart camera, the cloud storage and monitoring, and the technology to support it.

"Free" ain't free. 

I have a Nest doorbell.  It wasn't very expensive, and interfaces well with our Google Home stuff and Nest thermostat.

You can use it for free but it will not save the video for more than 24 hours (or so?).  If you want long-term storage it's like $3 per month.

It gives pretty good images day or night.  Sound quality is not perfect, but serviceable.

Duke said:

I have a Nest doorbell.  It wasn't very expensive, and interfaces well with our Google Home stuff and Nest thermostat.

You can use it for free but it will not save the video for more than 24 hours (or so?).  If you want long-term storage it's like $3 per month.

I'm fine with that. I don't think we need storage.

The main feature we want is: when someone rings the doorbell, we can look at our phones and see if it's someone we actually want to interact with, a delivery, or someone trying to sell us something.

With the Nest, do you need to manage it with an active Google account?

We have Blink cameras with a local USB storage hub.  Doesn't interact with the doorbell but our front door camera notifies us when someone is there.  No monthly cost.

There are 5 cameras around the house.  All motion and have the ability to talk to someone.  It's fun to scare my daughter and friends with too. 😈

In reply to PMRacing :

Are you able to see real-time video on your phone?

Beer Baron 🍺 said:

In reply to PMRacing :

Are you able to see real-time video on your phone?

Realish time.  Slight delay but less than 5 seconds.

Of note with these doorbell cams.  You really don't have instant access to the camera, it will take a moment by the time you get the app up and the camera selected etc.  So, if someone doesn't linger at the door, you may not get to the door until they are already walking away, so not quite as practical as you may think.  Still useful though.

I would say, they are definitely useful for knowing when packages are being delivered.

I use reolink, I have 5 cameras set up to record to a nvr so I added the poe doorbell to the mix. No subscription and the app works fairly well. I have it set to notify only if the doorbell is rung, my phone gets a notification and I can click it to instantly bring up the video feed. They also have a wifi version if you just want to store video to a SD card in the doorbell.

Still chewing on it, but some friends are happy with their Eufy setup, which is self-contained. You can get just a doorbell and a "brain," and/or you can add other cameras. I think this is where we're headed.

No cameras here, but if I go there it'll be a Ubiquiti setup with local storage. I don't want a camera that belongs to someone else on my property - and don't kid yourself, a Ring or the like is there to benefit the megacorp that sold it to you. 

PMRacing said:

We have Blink cameras with a local USB storage hub.  Doesn't interact with the doorbell but our front door camera notifies us when someone is there.  No monthly cost.

There are 5 cameras around the house.  All motion and have the ability to talk to someone.  It's fun to scare my daughter and friends with too. 😈

Ditto, but we have the video doorbell also.

The delay is aggravating sometimes. And when I get a camera/movement notification, occasionally the system will be "busy" so I can't see what's happening for a minute. It doesn't like to multi-task. Could be our internet speed.

Beer Baron 🍺 said:

The main feature we want is: when someone rings the doorbell, we can look at our phones and see if it's someone we actually want to interact with, a delivery, or someone trying to sell us something.

With the Nest, do you need to manage it with an active Google account?

We had our Nest doorbell before we got the Google Home system... and before Google acquired Nest as a company.  So I can't answer that for sure.

However, we had a Nest phone app for interaction with the camera.  That still seems to work independently of the Google Home app, so I can only assume the Google account is not required, just available if you prefer.

In reply to Duke :

That reminds me - I'm not impressed with what's happened with Nest since they've been acquired by Google.

We got a Nest thermostat with our new A/C, and it only allows *one* account t0 be connected to it directly. Which means that only one of us (me) can use their phone to control the thermostat app.

That was sort-of the case before Google, but you could create a Nest account and share that account. Now, since it's Google, it has to be done through a Google account - so it's tied to *my* Gmail account, and I'm not sharing my all my login info with anyone.

In reply to Beer Baron 🍺 :

I had the same problem with a Nest thermostat, and although not my preferred solution, I solved it by creating a new gmail account that was used for the thermostat only and then shared that account with whomever it had to be shared.

Maybe this works for you.

In reply to 1988RedT2 :

smartphones are worse. But you're not wrong. 

I have an Amcrest doorbell camera that runs through my very own Synology Diskstation.  My hardware, my software, my monitoring, my storage.

In the grand scheme of things was not that expensive to set up and is a buy once cry once sort of item.