This $40 Blink Camera Add-On Is A DIY No-Brainer For Home Security
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Blink is one of the most affordable names in home security. If you have already ordered the latest Blink Outdoor 4 Camera, you might already be impressed. The prospect of having a camera with a pretty good Wi-Fi range that you can set down anywhere and forget about for two years is a tempting one. Add good picture quality and there's a lot to like in this camera, especially its versatility.
At $119.99, it's also a pretty good value in the home security space. But there's a way you can up your game with this camera for an extra $39.95 and turn this into a more respectable, and feature-filled security camera that you can still mount anywhere, but add a lot more value to the product.
Amazon sent us a floodlight mount for the Blink Outdoor 4 camera for testing purposes. We've been testing it for about a week and this is what we've found.
Lights, Camera, Mounting!
The Blink Outdoor 4 camera can already be mounted anywhere you want it to go, but this adds two floodlights and a more respectable mount to the equation. To install, you slide off the back plastic plate, and mount that wherever you want the camera to go. On the front of the light is a USB-C cable and a mounting bracket that fits in the back of the camera. Just remove the rubber cap that seals the USB-C port on the back of the camera, and plug in the USB-C cable from the floodlights. The USB-C plug has extra rubber around it to fill and seal the USB-C port, keeping it water-resistant. Finally, mount the camera onto the bracket, and then slide the whole rig onto the mounting plate you already attached to the wall.
Just like that, for an extra $40, you've gone from a standalone camera to two 700-lumen floodlights that can give you a nice color picture at night. Plus, they can light up the area for you with their motion detection. The floodlights are powered by four D-cell batteries and you'll get the same two-year battery life that is promised on the Blink camera.
Of course, this brings up the same concerns as the camera itself—how can you verify that the devices will work for two years? Put simply, you really can't, unless you use it for two years. Like the Blink Outdoor 4 camera itself, even if it doesn't last the full two years, four D-cell batteries aren't that expensive to replace. As long as you get battery life measured in multiple months, this is still a good value proposition.
See in the dark
The main feature this device gives you is floodlights at night, which really improves your ability to see what's going on with the camera. The amount of illumination you get will depend on where you place the floodlights, but you can expect a solid 15-20 feet of illumination, after which it drops off quite a bit. On the reverse side, you can see much further with the night vision, just not as well.
The camera controls the lights, and just like motion detection zones, you can black out any area that you don't want to have triggered the lights. You can also set the brightness level in the app, so if you don't want to burn out your retinas, you don't have to. Overall, this adds a nice set of features to your Blink camera, but there are a couple of downsides that are worth mentioning.
Less versatile
The biggest downside to this mount is the fact that it is a mount. It implies that you won't be moving the camera around as needed. You still can (it's not hard to pop the camera off the mount) but then it misses the point of being mounted. The camera by itself is chunky enough that you can set it pretty much anywhere and leave it — on a table, on a fence, even on the ground if you want — but by attaching a mount, you are committing to leaving it in one place.
Another point worth mentioning is that Amazon released (and sent to us for testing) another accessory for the Blink Outdoor 4 camera. The Blink battery extension pack doubles the battery life from two years to an almost absurd four years, but it isn't compatible with the floodlight mount. The thicker battery pack covers up the USB-C port, so you can't attach it to the floodlight mount. Technically, you can attach it to the floodlights, but you can't connect the two so the floodlights don't work.
Aside from those two caveats, this is a bit of a no-brainer. If you already own the camera, or if you're thinking about picking one up, this accessory is only $39.95 more (as listed on Amazon) and it adds a lot of functionality to an already-pretty-good camera.