Amazon's New Blink Indoor Camera Setup & Review
The new Blink Indoor Camera is a cheap alternative to the Nest Indoor with lots of missing features.
The 2020 Blink camera Indoor has a tiny footprint at just 71mm by 71mm and weighing at 48 grams. The glossy plastic won’t be to everyone’s taste but it’s fairly discreet when placed somewhere in the living room like a shelf.
In the box, you get a tool that will help you unscrew the back cover, you could easily use a coin to do the same thing. The including wall mount bracket clicks into place through the hole.
Setting up the Blink Camera
You need to add batteries to the camera, it takes two double-A - Amazon says that you can get 2 years of battery life from this, I can’t see that happening though.
The Blink camera requires a separate device called the Sync Module 2, which communicates with the camera and your home Wi-Fi network.
You can also plug in up to 64GB of USB storage for the purpose of backing up your videos locally. You have to keep the Sync Module 2 powered otherwise your camera will not work.
Now I’ll show you the setup process from start to finish, You’ll need a smartphone for this I’m using an Android but iOS devices will work fine too - Download the Blink app from your app Store. I’ve already had an existing Blink camera, so I’ll go ahead and add a new device.
I will need to add a Blink wireless camera system first, I now need to scan in the QR Code from the back of the Sync Module. The next step is to create a new system, name it something like ‘Home’.
I’ve already created a system, so I’ll select the existing system name - there’s something to note, only one sync module can be included in a system, if you have two sync modules, you will need to create 2 separate systems, this is a limitation with the wireless system setup.
On the next step, it shows that your sync module should have a steady green light and a blinking blue light, if it doesn’t you will need to factory reset the module using the reset button on the side. Tap, ‘Discover Device’ and the blink app will attempt to connect to the sync module, this part can take some time, bare that in mind.
The sync module has been successfully added to your app, we now need to add the camera, what happens when you add a memory stick to the sync module? When you add USB storage to the sync module, the app should notify you that a local storage device has been detected. You can then make sure that clips are backed up every day. It’s a shame that you cannot edit the frequency of the backup.
Now I’ll add the Wireless Indoor camera itself, to do this I’ll follow the same steps as the sync module, tap on the plus sign at the top right of the home screen of Blink, choose Blink wireless camera. You need to now scan the QR code which is behind the back cover of the Wireless camera, use the tool provided to get the back cover off.
Now you’re all set up. The Blink camera has an impressive speaker built into the camera, you can use the blink app two have a two-way conversation. The speaker is loud enough to make anyone jump out of their skin.
The live view of the blink camera app is lacking unlike the nest camera app, you can’t view the live camera feed continuously without pressing the prompt every 30 seconds.
This is probably due to the limited storage capacity and because it will drain the batteries quicker. But it’s the same with any of the wired blink cameras.
The Image Quality
In this video I tested the night mode of the Blink wireless camera, with the Infrared intensity set to low, you see there’s ghosting all around the image, this is due to the infrared light bouncing back onto the camera lens, to mitigate this, make sure that there aren’t any surfaces in front of the camera lens.
During my testing I found the motion detection to be very reliable, Blink gives you many controls in the app to fine-tune the notifications to your needs.
The picture quality is pretty good, but not amazing - it’s lacking any high dynamic range which means that some parts of the image can look washed out - for example in these three image settings, it’s very hard to see the title of the magazine I’m holding because the light is directly above.
