Ring Outdoor Cam Plus

Introduction

After steadfastly sticking to a Full HD resolution for most of its product line-up, Ring suddenly introduced a free upgrade to 2K for many of its existing cameras. Now, with 2K more readily available on the system, the company is launching the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus.

A revamped and updated version of the popular outdoor range, the new camera offers better image quality, but still comes in at less than £100.

Design and Installation

• Wall or bookshelf mount
• Swappable battery

The Ring Outdoor Cam Plus uses the same cylinder design as many of the company’s other cameras, and it’s visually most similar to the Ring Indoor Cam. The main difference here, of course, is that the camera is fully weatherproof for use outside.

As with the Indoor Cam, the Outdoor Cam Plus has a clever stand. The default position is with the camera in bookshelf mode, standing upright; the stand can be switched to the back as a wall mount.

I think for the majority of installations, the wall mount option is the one that will be used. 

A couple of screws are all you need to put the camera in position, with a bit of tilt available to angle the camera down to face the area you want to monitor.

As with many other Ring cameras and doorbells, my review sample is powered by Ring’s Quick Release Battery pack (there’s also a powered option available, or you can buy the battery model with a solar panel).

On my battery model, the battery is housed in the bottom of the camera. To gain access you have to remove the screw, then twist the bottom cap to remove and gain access to the battery, so you can remove it to charge it.

Features

• 2K video quality
• Full colour night vision
• Integrates with Ring Home

The Ring app is home to the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus, with a quick set-up routine used to connect the camera to Wi-Fi and run through the initial wizard, which helps configure motion detection zones, privacy zones and more.

There’s a free trial of Ring Home included, but you’ll need a subscription to get the main features and cloud storage. Ring Home Basic is quite expensive for one device (£4.99 a month or £49.99 a year), but is much better value if you have multiple devices you want covered, as Ring Home Standard covers them all for £7.99 a month (or £79.99 a year).

Pay £15.99 a month (£159.99 a year) for Ring Home Premium and you get 24/7 video recording on supported devices plus AI-powered Smart Video Search.

Whichever plan you go for, Ring’s app is mature, smart and easy-to-use, and home to the company’s entire range of products, including the brilliant Ring Alarm.

At its most basic, the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus lets you tap the thumbnail and dive into the live view, where you can see what’s going on at any particular moment. There’s two-way talk enabled for chatting with anyone you can see.

As a security camera, the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus’ main job is to notify you of important events only. For this, there are many customisable options, but just be warned that this camera doesn’t have Ring’s radar-powered 3D Motion Detection, and has standard motion detection only.

There are controls for motion sensitivity and you can draw zones that you want to watch for activity, but point this camera at a busy outdoor area and you’re likely to get a lot more recordings and notifications than you may want.

If you do need to place a camera somewhere busy, then the Ring Stick-Up Cam Pro may be a better choice for you, as you can use 3D Motion Detection to reduce the detection range.

For most spaces, the standard motion detection in the Outdoor Cam Plus will do a good enough job. With a Ring Home subscription, you can use smart alerts to choose if you want to record or get notified about your choice of people, vehicles and all other motion.

Alerts can be scheduled, so you only get them when you want them. And, for those with a Ring Alarm, you can choose the camera’s mode based on the alarm’s mode. I have the Ring Alarm in my garden office, and have the back garden camera and office camera turn off automatically when I disable the alarm.

Video is recorded to the cloud, and it’s accessible in multiple ways. For recent alerts, quickly scrolling through the timeline is useful, and you can also filter this by date and, if you have Ring Home Basic or Premium, filtered by event type.

With Ring Home Premium you get the new Ring Smart Video Search, which is brilliant. Just type in what you’re looking for and it’ll find matching clips. I searched for ‘someone watering the lawn’ and got all the recent hits, so I could work out when the plants were last watered. This search is so good, it’s almost worth the upgrade to Ring Premium. Clips can be viewed on your phone or downloaded to be saved forever.

Performance

• Clean daylight footage
• Can shoot in colour at night
• Night images can lose some detail

I had the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus installed on my garden office for a few weeks, so I could test it under multiple weather conditions. Its HDR footage is clear during the day and it handled the direct sunlight well.

If I’m being critical, I’d say that the image is sharper towards the front of the frame, and a bit softer towards the rear. But, colours and exposure are spot on, and there’s more detail in the picture thanks to the 2K resolution, rather than 1080p.

At night, if there’s enough light, the camera can record in full colour. How successful this is depends on the level of lighting available. With my kitchen lights on, the Ring Outdoor Cam Plus could record in full colour, but the main image was a touch blurry. I think that the more expensive Ring Stick Up Cam Pro did a better job, despite its lower resolution.

A camera with spotlights and more resolution, such as the eufyCam S3 Pro can shoot even better video.

If you don’t have a security light or there’s not much ambient light, then it might be better to switch to the IR mode, which shoots in black and white, but I found it gave me a more detailed picture at night than the full colour mode did.

Should you buy it?

FAQs