We've all got our own reasons for wanting a doorbell camera. >> Great. Now, none of us can watch TV. >> That's my TV. >> But which one should you get? Are you going to end up paying a bunch of money for the hardware, going through the hassle of mounting and installing the thing, and only then realize that the stupid thing turns into a pumpkin the moment your credit card strikes midnight? >> Well, you could do that. Or you could let me pay over $2,000 on what we're calling the search for the perfect doorbell. Okay, not the catchiest movie title, but if the indecipherable Spider-Man naming scheme can net2 billion a pop, I think we can make this work. We bought slash obtained 13 options from budget to bazoners, mounted them to this comically wide doorbell frame and then let them rip on the driveway at the tech house, capturing the comingings and goings of various cars, animals, and people throughout the day and night. We've sorted them into budget buckets according to their upfront cost. And now we're going to rank them according to their features, image quality, and their value over a 5-year ownership span. Spoiler alert, some of the cheapest options end up being a lot more expensive in the longer term. That's how they get you. And here's how I get you with the segue to our sponsor. The best way to learn to code because it's fun. We have a lot of video doorbells to get through. So, let's quickly run through what they have in common. They are mostly all battery operated aside from Ubiquiti's offerings. Uh, one is wired and the other is PoE, meaning that it is powered over its network cable. And that's about it. There's a shocking amount of diversity in features, even among our budget options that start at just $10 for the Orbital M52. at is a very low price, which is why they require a subscription. If you want any more than a push notification for, well, pushes. If you want live video though, that's going to cost you. You'll have to buy a cloud storage subscription. The image quality is okay, though, and their subscription is reasonably affordable, which pushes it from, let's say, F all the way up to a high D tier. But let's say for a moment that you had the budget for four orbitals. The Arlo video doorbell unfortunately continues its same mandatory subscription trend. This time offering only live video until you fork out some dough. So no push notifications. Also, it doesn't even come with a wall plug so that you can hear the chime from a common area inside your home. But its AI detection was pretty solid. both recognizing our fabricator as a person and identifying our environment as a workshop. For reference, our next doorbell clocked that same situation as a pet at the front door. Interesting. I never saw Justin. Button feel is fine, I guess. And so is the image quality, which had this cruising into a C until I saw the 5-year cost of ownership over $500. Have you gone mad, Arlo? Low D for low. What are you guys doing? Next up, we finally have our first nonsubscription bell. It also adds some features that we haven't seen yet, like two cameras, one pointing down, as well as a whole 32 gigs of onboard storage. So, you got recording live view, an included chime, and two-way voice calls through the app with no subscription. It's got a little screen to display canned messages, and even the image quality is decent. So, uh, question for me, why did I give it only a B? As crazy as it sounds, it's partly because of the lack of a subscription. >> Bro, what are you talking about, man? >> I cannot buy cloud storage, meaning that my record of a home invasion, for instance, can be destroyed by said home invader with a simple hammer. Also, the UIUX was among the worst that we encountered. Still though, it gets our coveted value king award for being the least expensive viable product over 5 years of ownership. As for the Blink Doorbell 2K Plus, this one started off on a pretty rough note. Without the additional sync module, this thing is just a brick, which is sounding pretty dangerously close to F-tier product design, but the module costs just $20 more and supports multiple Blink products. And the battery on the doorbell supposedly lasts up to 2 years. That sounds kind of perfect if you're looking for something with the same pedigree as Ring, but more wallet friendly with two-way voice and live video included. But there's a catch. Of course, there is. Recordings are paywalled. And with image quality that's only slightly better than the Havon, let's go with C minus. Now, it's time to look at our mid-tier offerings. Starting with the original, as seen on Shark Tank, the Ring doorbell. When it comes to ease of setup, it is clearly the industry standard for a reason. It was as easy as putting in a Wi-Fi password and everything else happened automatically. However, that's where the user friendliness ended. Amazon acquired Ring back in 2018, and come on guys, they got to get their billion dollars back somehow. So, this doorbell app has ads around every corner, and it even has a store. Also, that noise has got to be the most annoying noise in the world. As for the image quality, man, I feel like everything's getting kind of good enough now that I'm going to need to see them side by side. So, we'll take a look at that later. I'm going to give this a placeholder C tier for the $350 5-year ownership cost, but who knows, maybe the image quality will bump it up. Up against the Ring is the UIC31. We know them for their vacuums, and now we can evaluate them for their doorbells, which they advertise as probably the best for under $100. I do take slight issue with that because it was listed for exactly $100, not under $100. But there's been no subscription fee for their core features ever since their debut back in 2019, which has helped them build a cult following. If you want cloud backups, they do offer that at a pretty average price. Meaning that if this button's any good, not bad. This might be our first This might be our first A. However, it's an A plus. No, not a high A. I meant a plus some pretty sketchy baggage. A couple of years back, Yuthi had a scandal around easy public access to unsecured cameras and instead of engaging in good faith, they deflected and obfiscated to the point where we actually put them in our sponsor doghouse until at least 2027. With that said, they claim to have cleaned up their act and have managed to stay out of the headlines lately. So hopefully they'll be back soon enough. Next up is another no subscription bell that's priced right in line with Ring, an offering from TPLink. The Tapo 2K Plus, like Yuthi, highlights their internal storage as a key feature, except they draw the line at 512 gigs instead of just 128. That is a lot of clips of your courier delivering your durable truepec cables from ltstore.com. Then a porch pirate taking your cables from ltstore.com. Ben, your wonderful so bringing over some replacements to help you feel better. Replacements from ltstore.com. Build quality for this one is a bit of a low light though. So for the same price, it's hard to give this quite the same rating. We're going to go with um B tier. There you go, Tapo. Next, we have the doorbell light from Ubiquiti. Like the others in this price segment, it offers two-way audio, but it's a little different as it's PoE, so you actually get much more reliable streaming over a wire. And after the hassle of running said wire once, you never change a battery again. However, even though it's uh only $100, it requires a whole ecosystem of products to support it that we're going to talk about a little bit more later once we get to Ubiquiti's flagship offering. For now, I'm going to throw it in the B tier. There you go, Ubiquiti. Our last bell in the segment is another dual camera. This time from Wise, and it's going to cost you $20 more than the rest of the offerings. Why? Well, I guess part of it could be the second camera, but the more interesting feature for me is that this is the first we've seen to support both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi. That means more consistent video streaming and lower likelihood of network dropouts from my personal experience. It doesn't come with any built-in storage, but it does support up to 256 gigs via micro SD with no core features locked behind a payw wall and the option for a reasonably priced cloud backup. The button feels pretty nice. I'm putting this in the A+ tier. Again, though, I'm doing the same bit. A plus some baggage. Wise has also made headlines for undesirable reasons. And actually, that reminds me, we never even mentioned Ring's recent collaborations with law enforcement. I mean, is it possible that cameras on all the things surveillance products are just magnets for this kind of controversy? No, it's the children who are wrong. Let's take a look at their image quality. All right, Ring, got to give you credit. That looks really nice, but I think a lot of it is just kind of like misleading. It's just the contrast. The Yuthi actually has better readability of the text down the driveway. Meanwhile, the Tapo pretty rough. Ubiquity is not as good as I thought. Wow, really? Yuthi pulling out the win with Wise in second place. Well, isn't that fascinating? The dynamic range on the UV is pretty rough. I think that could push Wise into first place for me. Wow. All right. Move you up a little bit. You too. There. All right. you. Ring. I'm happy with that. Let's move on to the flagships. Now, I'm talking doorbells that cost anywhere from $150 to $300. Up first here is Yuthi. Again, for an extra 50 bucks over the last one, we're getting both 8 gigs of non- removable storage and a dual camera setup. However, this one doesn't have traditional expandable storage. Instead, it integrates into UP's Homebase ecosystem for up to 16 terabytes of additional space. There are cases where additional controller hardware and network attached storage does make sense, but I'll leave it up to you to decide if this is one of those cases. Either way, I've got to give it a B tier placement for retaining most of the key features on the friendly side of the payw wall. Next up, we've got Google's one and only doorbell. It has the most flat, modern design of the bunch, and it's going to cost you 180 bucks. And that's before the $100 annual subscription fee. It's not all bad news, though, since they don't pay while recording, live view, or two-way audio. So, uh, maybe B tier. Ooh, only 3 hours of recording history. And a 5year subscription is going to cost me almost $700. Sorry, Google. Best I can do is a C++. That's just too expensive. Not to mention, it has the lowest resolution in this price range. Swinging back to the market leader, Ring. This time, it's their more premium battery doorbell pro. It looks very similar, but the Pro badging comes with a $150 upcharge. The main difference, a quick release battery, okay, and a resolution bump from 1080p to 1536p HD plus. Otherwise, the subscription and everything else remains the same. So, see at best. I mean, same ease of use, but also $500 for 5 years of ownership. Yeah. Finally, we've got the this was the one made for Linus option, which comes from, you guessed it, Ubiquiti. I hate batteries. And the G4 Doorbell Pro uses either the included power kit/transformer combo or USBC or with a separate model. You can actually power it with PoE just like the doorbell light. This specific one though uses Wi-Fi for data, but at 5 GHz, so at least it has that going for it. And Ubiquiti products are proudly subscriptionfree. With that said, they are expensive and it's kind of hard to justify the additional hardware that you will also need unless you were already planning to use their ecosystem for other aspects of your buildout like wireless access points. The UIUX is getting pretty good though and constantly getting better and so is the product line. Ubiquity pointed out to us that this particular model is actually being phased out for something new that's being developed for Q4 2026. So, I don't know. Asterisk tier highquality product that costs the same 10 years later as it does up front, but it it is really really expensive. Now, let's look at image quality for these premium options and see if we're going to move anything around. How about Google? I mean, Google knows image quality, right? They got the Pixel. >> Google one has the lowest res camera and you could kind of tell. >> Yeah. Like, dude, you can barely even tell that this fence has vertical slats on some of the panels. Like, look at this. >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. There's just there's not a lot of resolution there. >> A cartoon, >> man. The you know what? The ring is honestly not much better. Okay, Yuthi, though. Oh, that dynamic range. Yuthi. Yuthi. The dynamic range. They all just kind of suck. I think the takeaway here is that I would not pay the extra for a more premium doorbell camera because all the cameras are just some flavor of suck. Recapping then, in our budget category, the Havon D1 is a clear winner. It's $79 allin and yeah, it's got a slightly unintuitive design and some software quirks, but for the price and with no subscription, it's pretty hard to find fault here. Moving on to our mainstream options, Wise looks like a wise way to go, at least from a financial standpoint, with our 5-year cost of ownership running us the lowest at $270. But with that said, it doesn't come with an SD card. So, it's about on par with both Yuthi and Tapo in that regard with all three of them falling significantly behind Ring in terms of total cost of ownership. Given that all of these players have had a security scandal in the past, at some point it feels a little bit pick your poison. And then Ubiquiti is in there just kind of uniquely being Ubiquity with an affordable upfront price for the doorbell, but of course all of the extra baggage that it carries. Finally, for the flagships, these are a bit tough to recommend because they don't really do more than the cheaper options we've looked at with the exception of Ubiquiti, who has a very fully featured product here with no subscriptions as far as we can tell ever. And if I'm spending more, then I want it to be in order to own my data and not have it used without my permission by Big Brother or by anyone else. So, Ubiquiti gets my coveted at aab boy of product design, meaning that uh all that's left is to say a boy to our sponsor. 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If you guys enjoyed this video and you're on the hunt for more video peripherals, why not check out the time that we spent two grand trying all the best webcams. There were a lot of them, surprisingly more even than this lineup in front of me.
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