Ultimate Battery Doorbell Showdown 2022 || Ring, Eufy, Nest, Blink, and 360.

May 21, 2022

I’ve been using and testing these 6 battery powered video doorbells for the last 7 months and I’m finally ready to give my recommendations and tell you why I think the most important aspects of a video doorbell are completely different from a normal security camera.

Battery powered video doorbells are a weird thing to be an expert on, but over the last 3 years I’ve used and tested close to 20 video doorbells and I feel like at this point I have a pretty good idea of what to expect and which features are most important.  In this video we’re going to test out the newest battery doorbells from Blink, Ring, Google Nest, 360 and Eufy and put them up against the winner from my last doorbell video to see exactly how much better these things have gotten in the last 2 years, spoiler alert, my old reliable Eufy 2K doorbell finished last in almost every category.

But before we jump into testing I want to thank the sponsor of this video, HolidayCoro.com. If you’ve  ever thought about putting on a light show for Halloween, Christmas, or any other Holiday needs HolidayCoro.com has everything you need to get started with the hobby including individual controllers and components as well as ready to run kits. One thing I can tell you for sure is that waiting until October to buy your supplies for your Christmas light show is not a good plan, and now is the right time to buy to ensure the best price, availability, and customer support. Check out HolidayCoro.com using the link in the description to support this channel.

Let’s take a look at the doorbells we’ll be testing, going from least to most expensive.


First is the Blink Video Doorbell which costs $84 when packaged with a Sync Module 2, or just $49 by itself as an addon to your existing blink system.

Next for $139 is the 360 battery video doorbell and WiFi chime.

Then for $179 is the Google Nest Video Doorbell.

After that for $199 bundled with the homebase or $139 by itself is the doorbell that I’ve been using on my house for the last 2 years, the Eufy 2K Battery doorbell.

Then for $219 is the Ring Video Doorbell 4, which is the most recent revision of their popular lineup.

And last, the most expensive doorbell that I tested is the new Eufy Dual Doorbell which costs $259 when packaged with the Home Base or $199 as an addon if you already use Eufy Cameras.

In this video I’m going to test every aspect of these battery powered video doorbells, but I’m going to do it in the order of the features that I would deem most important after 3 years of experience using video doorbells, which may be a little different than what you would expect.

The number one complaint I hear about battery powered video doorbells is that it takes them too long to start recording when motion happens. To evaluate this functionality I ran multiple tests during the day, and at night, both with porch light illumination and using the doorbell’s built in infrared night vision.

Starting with daytime testing the Ring Video Doorbell 4 finished first in every trial, but with a big asterisk next to the win. The Ring Video Doorbell 4 includes something called color pre-roll, which is a significantly lower resolution video stream that shows the events that occurred before the high resolution stream turns on. As you can see the pre-roll is low enough resolution that it’s only useful for determining where someone came from, and definitely isn’t useful for identifying people.

If we exclude the Ring pre-roll from the rankings then the Google Nest doorbell did the best, consistently capturing almost the entire motion event. After that was the Blink doorbell, then the 360doorbell and then the Eufy Dual. 5 th place is when the Ring high resolution stream turned on, and coming in last every time during the day was the Eufy 2K Doorbell.

During the night tests using porch light illumination the results were similar with the Ring Pre-Roll technically finishing first slightly ahead of the Google Nest doorbell and Blink Doorbell. After that the
360 doorbell and Eufy dual performed similarly and the Ring high resolution footage started recording at about the same time as the Eufy 2K doorbell, which was pretty far into the motion event.

Infrared tests were performed with no porch lights and only a single doorbell at once. In these tests the Google Nest and Blink Doorbells were still the first to start recording, but the 2K doorbell did better in these conditions which is consistent with the results from my last video. During infrared testing the 360 doorbell and Eufy dual performed the worst and were the last to turn on.

Overall for motion detection and recording the Google Nest Doorbell came in first place, the Blink Video Doorbell in second, and I’m going to give the Ring Video Doorbell 4 3 rd place because the pre-roll feature does work, and none of the other brands started recording as consistently early as these three.

The second most important consideration for a video doorbell is being able to see your entire porch area. Product pages generally list vertical and horizontal field of view, but with different aspect ratios and fish eye lenses it’s hard to figure out what the video is actually going to look like.

I used the live view to mark the horizontal and vertical limits of each camera, doorbells that can see more lines on the ground have higher vertical field of view and cameras that can see more lines on the wall have a higher horizontal field of view. This test was where the Eufy Dual Camera really shines, and mounted at a standard height around 4 feet the Eufy Dual can see objects placed directly under it due  to it’s second downward facing camera, which also helps eliminate a potential blind spot directly next to the door.

The google nest doorbell also has a pretty impressive vertical field of view due to the fact that it records in portrait orientation instead of landscape, but as you can imagine that comes with a loss of horizontal field of view, where the nest ranked in last place.

Conversely the blink camera had the best horizontal field of view but by far the worst vertical.

In my opinion, vertical field of view is more important for a video doorbell because it lets you keep a better eye on your packages, and a low horizontal field of view can be more easily compensated for using an angle bracket mount.

That said, the Eufy Dual is the clear winner in this category, and while it is the first of its kind on the market I wouldn’t be surprised if dual cameras become a new trend.

Moving on, based on my usage over the last 3 years the next most important feature is 2 way talk. Whether you’re answering a neighbor, or talking to a delivery person, being able to reliably carry on a conversation reliably when you’re away from the house is one of the best uses for these doorbells, and even though they all claim to have this feature, they are definitely not all equal.

To give you an idea of the overall experience and delay I’ve got sync’ed video from both sides of the conversation, and I’m going to play the audio from the doorbell side out of the left speaker, and the audio from the app side out of the right speaker.

As you can see the Ring Video Doorbell 4 and Google Nest cameras were in a league of their own when it came to 2 way talk with clear audio on both sides and very low delay. The only other passible performance came from the Eufy Dual, which was usable but not perfect, while the 360, Eufy 2K and Blink were probably not good enough to be able to consistently rely on.

The next thing I’m going to cover is battery life, which is important from a convenience standpoint, but not necessarily functionality. I’ve had 5 of these doorbells installed since October 2021, but I’ve only had the Eufy Dual installed for about a month because Eufy wouldn’t send me an early review unit unless I was doing a dedicated video, and I don’t those on my channel so I had to wait to buy it on Amazon like everyone else.

Anyways, in my testing the shortest battery life was consistently the nest doorbell which lasted between 33 and 35 days between recharges, then the Ring Doorbell made it between 50 and 58 days, the Eufy 2K was between 60 and 71 days, and the 360 lasted a very respectable 83 days before needing a recharge.  If you hate charging batteries the Blink doorbell is the one for you because not only does it use disposable lithium AA batteries instead of rechargeable ones, but it also lasted 131 days before needing a battery replacement on my front door which is a relatively high traffic area. The Ring doorbell also gets a nod here because it uses a removable battery pack, so you can always just have an extra charge pack laying around to switch out when you need to.

As I said, I only have 28 days of battery usage data for the Eufy Dual, but I recharged all the doorbells when I installed the Eufy Dual and the battery drain trend looks similar to the Eufy 2K, so I would expect around 2-3 months of battery life from the Eufy Dual.

To me, motion detection, field of view, 2 way talk and battery life are significantly more important than any other feature, but there’s still a lot of other things to talk about so lets do some rapid fire:

Daytime video quality goes to the google nest doorbell, followed by the ring, and then the Eufy 2K.

Nighttime video quality using porch lighting also had the google nest and ring in the top two spots, this time followed by the 360 doorbell.

All of the battery doorbells had more motion blur than I would like during infrared testing, but the Google nest was still the best followed by the Eufy 2K and then the 360 doorbell.

App features

All of the apps have options to change things like motion sensitivity, recording duration and retrigger time, which will significantly effect both their performance and battery life.

All the apps include motion zones to tell the camera where it should be looking for motion and what to ignore The 360 doorbell also has privacy zones if your local laws require you to block out portions of your neighbor’s property.

All of the apps make at least some attempt to work with your Amazon Echo or Google Home devices, but with varying success. Here’s a quick comparison of the live view speed when requesting to see the doorbell cameras on google home, and the same comparison on Amazon Echo.

But with this, I have say that in 3 years of owning video doorbells I’ve never once used live view on demand.

A more useful related feature is the ability to announce doorbell rings on Echo and Google Home devices, and automatically bring up the live view.

The only device that I could get to both automatically announce and show on the google home was expectedly the google nest doorbell, but Amazon echo integrations went much better.

Ring, which is owned by Amazon pulled up live video automatically 8 seconds after the initial doorbell press and allowed for fluent 2 way talk with the Echo Show, but surprisingly the Blink doorbell which is also owned by Amazon notified on the echo, but didn’t automatically bring up the live feed. Also surprisingly the google nest doorbell performed just as well as the Ring doorbell bringing up the live stream in 8 seconds also with clear and responsive live 2 way audio. The 360 doorbell also pulled a live stream, but the 2 way talk was unfortunately garbled and unusable.

For some reason even though the Eufy doorbells show up in the Amazon Echo app and said that live notifications were enabled, neither of them announced nor loaded the live stream for doorbell presses.

All the doorbells except the Blink support person only notifications and I found that they mostly worked well except that the Ring doorbell could apparently see UPS and USPS drivers inside their trucks when they drove by the house, which triggered a notification even when they didn’t stop.

My normal advice is to never buy a camera without person detection, but for me the Blink doorbell actually worked surprisingly well even without a person detection algorithm, and I almost never got false alerts from the Blink doorbell’s motion detection but your milage my vary.

In addition to person only notifications the Nest, Eufy and 360 doorbells also claim to support familiar face recognition but in practice the google nest was the only one that worked and even though the 360 doorbell allowed me to classify faces it wasn’t able to actually recognize when one of those faces was in a video clip, while the Eufy Dual never even gave me the option to classify faces and always just said no valid faces detected.

As for notification speed, the Blink and 360 doorbells were consistently the first to notify me on my phone, due to the fact that they are text only notifications while the Ring, Eufy Dual, and 2K include a thumbnail and high resolution image while the Google Nest doorbell includes a short video of the event.

So tallying up the scores the best performing doorbell is the hands down the Google Nest Doorbell, however you’re going to need to recharge it once a month and it also requires that $6 monthly subscription and after adjusting the price to include 2 years of subscription fees the Google Nest Doorbell is actually the most expensive option.

The Ring Video Doorbell 4 finished in second place while having almost double the battery life, and half the monthly fee. The pre-roll feature worked well and is a welcome addition that anyone who has ever been frustrated with a battery doorbell can appreciate. Unfortunately, adjusting the price to include 2 years of subscription fees makes it the second most expensive option in this test.

The Eufy Dual Cam does exactly what it was designed to do and shows you your entire doorway and porch, but unfortunately the app experience was buggy, the video quality was lacking, and the price is
still pretty high. If you already have a eufy homebase and local recording with no subscriptions is  important to you then the Dual Camera is worth looking at, but overall it’s not as good as good as the Nest or Ring doorbells.

 

Last, the Blink doorbell does what Blink always does: They provide a just good enough experience for a rock bottom price. For just $50 you can add the Blink doorbell into your existing sync module 2 and
record locally onto a USB drive with no subscription fees. The Blink doorbell had by far the best battery life, and did a great job recording entire events. The actual video recorded by the Blink isn’t high quality, but it’s passible, and the same can be said for the rest of the features in the Blink app, which aren’t fancy but get the job done.

So gun to my head, which doorbell would I recommend? It’s gotta be the Ring Video Doorbell 4 which has a great feature set and rock solid performance for significantly less money than the Google Nest. If you’re on a tight budget you can’t go wrong with the Blink Doorbell, as long as you’re aware of its shortcomings relating to 2 way talk and Amazon Echo integration. I may revisit the Eufy Dual Cam in a few months after they get the bugs worked out, but right now I’m not sure it’s worth the price.

Thank you so much to all of my patrons over at patreon for your continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links in the description. If you joyed this video please hit that thumbs up button and consider subscribing and as always, thanks for watching the hook up.

🔔 Top Recommendation || Ring Video Doorbell 4 🔔
(AmazonUS): https://amzn.to/3lBCV6R
(AmazonUK): https://amzn.to/3yMD1QX
🔔 Budget Pick || Blink Video Doorbell 🔔
(AmazonUS): https://amzn.to/3wGk1kz
(AmazonUK): https://amzn.to/3PvRFCa
🔔 Most Potential || Eufy Dual 🔔
(AmazonUS): https://amzn.to/38Ela40
Other doorbells tested:
Botslab 360 X3: https://amzn.to/3lw0sGo
Eufy 2K Doorbell: https://amzn.to/3Np97qb
*As an Amazon Affiliate I earn a commission on qualifying purchases at no cost to you*
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