Blink Home Monitor 4+

First, I see a ton of not so great reviews. I knew exactly what I was getting when we purchased multiple cameras for our home indoor/outdoor and the doorbell. The price point for this system and what it has to offer is amazing for what you get. It’s not a top notch system by any means, but it doesn’t the job and the video quality is great in my opinion. If you want something seamless without any learning curve and high dollar user friendly, then you should look into more expensive systems that give you that.
We utilize the indoor blink mini for a toddler room, a indoor blink camera for a nursery camera, 3 outdoor cameras, and the blink doorbell. We also have the plus yearly subscription. The system automatically arms every night and turns off in the morning with a schedule I set. And I can easily arm the system while we are away from our home. The talk feature through he app is great, way better than I expected honestly. Yes you have to replace batteries in battery operated cameras, batteries are not in short supply at my home therefore this does not bother us. The image quality on the app and the overall live stream is perfect for what we need. I also have great things to say about the motion detection notifications that come to my phone and my husbands phone.

Update 6/2/22: an automatic SW update a couple days ago seemed to have vastly improved some of the situations I described below. So I feel obliged to update my review as well. Most notably, the USB access without the cloud subscription is working flawlessly for a couple days now. Before, it will record for only a second, or shows no picture at all, or fail to let me access the recording, everyday. Now, it’s reliable and reasonably quick to let me review all the recordings. And the SW just seems much less buggy going from one use to another. So, together with the great hardware, I now consider this a good product worth recommending. — End update.

It takes quite a long time between the motion trigger (which is only seconds after actual motion ) and the ability to see with the camera, either through real-time view or waiting for the recording to be ready for view. It feels like half a min to a minute, so most likely I’ll miss whatever triggered the camera unless it’s somebody ringing the doorbell. After the initial cloud access expired, I’m supposed to be able to use my local drive and view the clips the same way. But it was even slower, and so far with only 30% success rate, some attempts causing the system to fault out in different ways. In today’s world, this is unacceptably buggy, for a software of this complexity. And it makes the whole product sub-par, even though I think the cameras and their installation are great.

I love the blink app and my blink devices. It took a while to get the right router settings for them but now that it’s configured properly, everything works great. I have the doorbell and the floodlight camera. A few things that still bother me and why I have 4 instead of 5 stars:

1. Toggling the motion sensor in the app for the floodlight camera on the Home Screen on the device itself doesn’t actually work, even when toggled off (using … > Motion Detection toggle) it still gets activated by motion. I had to go to … > Device Settings > Motion Settings > Motion Detection which just seems like a bug in the app that should be fixed.

2. The app becomes unresponsive to any other input while it’s trying to resolve a particular request. For example, you tap on a notification and that app opens trying to load whatever notification thingy you tapped on and sometimes this takes a long time. E.g., a doorbell motion notification. If you get impatient and try to do anything else in the app it doesn’t really work, presumably because it is still trying to fulfill the initial request. App should be programmed to either a) load requests faster, or, b) give the user an option to abandon the slow-loading request, or c) just abandon the slow loading request as soon as something else is requested.