Ring Battery Doorbell Pro Review: A Little Large and (Mostly) in Charge

Pros

• HD+ resolution is clear
• Highly customizable and accurate detection settings
• Very competent battery life
• Clear two-way audio
• Great video history and sharing

Cons

• App will take newcomers some time to learn
• Battery case lacks durability
• Some issues with package detection

The new Ring Battery Doorbell Pro is an effort to combine the security camera features Ring has developed in the past several years into one high-end video doorbell. That’s an effective array of cam capabilities, especially for those who want to adjust and enable every facet of the doorbell. In other cases, it weighs the doorbell down, which costs a hefty $230, and beginners will need to spend time with the app to understand everything it does.

The $230 video doorbell comes with the latest Ring tech, offering speedy and mostly accurate results with ways to capture all kinds of activity. I wish the design was a bit more sturdy — it remains largely unchanged from previous Ring construction — but it’s still a serious doorbell contender, especially when paired with a Ring subscription plan.

Below, I’ll dive into how the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro works, what I liked and the drawbacks and issues I noticed.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Design and durability

Take a look at our past Ring Doorbell reviews including the Ring Video Doorbell 4, and you’ll see they look quite similar except for some differences in size. The Battery Doorbell Pro follows suit with the black-and-sliver design and the pop-off battery case (held on by a small screw when active), that’s also home to the touch doorbell.

This design, while not making any massive updates to Ring’s methods, has a solid, serviceable construction, except when it comes to that plastic battery case, which has a somewhat flimsy feel.

This compares unfavorably to the solid construction of doorbells from Google Nest or Arlo, which feel like they could take more of a beating. The trade-off is that you don’t need to dismount the doorbell every time you have to charge it, but by the time you’ve unscrewed the Ring battery case and maneuvered the battery out of the bottom, there’s not much difference.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Installation

Ring’s Battery Doorbell Pro mount (offered in a wedge style to angle appropriately when beside a door) is designed for stability, and offers a variety of screw options for wood, drilling into masonry, and so on. The doorbell itself then attaches using four additional screws along the battery case. It’s a rock-solid design, but it will take longer to install than the average doorbell. Note that the size of the doorbell, roughly 5 inches high by 2.5 inches wide, is larger than many doorbells and may barely fit on some door trim, so users should measure carefully.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Camera features and quality

The Battery Doorbell Pro uses a large camera lens with a 150-degree field of view, both vertical and horizontal. That creates a sizable square of detail that’s best used to view a full front yard. The “HD+” resolution of 1536p is an interesting compromise between 1080p and 2K. Functionally, it looks like very, very good HD video that makes it easier to see the details on people’s faces or packages. I don’t miss 2K resolution at all, especially since video doorbells tend to focus on objects near at hand. Color night vision also works well to add extra detail in the evening.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Motion and object detection

Ring has packed all the motion detection options it has into this doorbell. Motion detection, now enhanced with 3D, is only the start: There’s also the Bird’s Eye View, which tracked people as they made their way across our testing yard after a little tweaking of the doorbell’s overhead map. Detection is speedy and it passed the “dogwalker” test, where the doorbell ignored people walking their dogs on the sidewalk nearby and focused motion detection only on the front of the home.

With a Ring subscription, you can also access person and package detection for a more customized event history. I found these features to be hit or miss at first: Sometimes the doorbell would only recognize a person, not a package, even if the person was carrying a package and left it behind. Likewise, it sometimes failed to alert when a package was missing, only notifying that a new person had come to the door — not a great showing for preventing porch pirates.

In our test video, note that Ring’s footage starts blurry and only enhances when an object is recognized. It’s likely a side effect of the recording backtracking to include more detail, although streaming quality could also be an issue. This delayed resolution showed in all of our tests and I was unable to improve it, but if you run into this issue lowering the resolution may help at a cost. In this particular example, Ring was quick to notice a person at the door but forgot entirely about a package.

Object detection improved when I sat down and customized both motion detection zones and package recognition zones, then turned up the sensitivity for detection. This helped, but the doorbell still occasionally struggled to identify packages and people when both were captured together, something that other brands like Nest have little trouble with.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: App settings and controls

The Ring app works hard to fit as many features as it can for its newer devices, giving you options to control sensitivity, choose the automatically recorded live view or adjust zones. 

Two points: First, while the app does what it can to make the many features accessible, new users will take time to learn the Battery Doorbell Pro, and it may be uphill work for those without general app experience. Expect to spend several sessions learning the ins and outs of doorbell’s settings.

Second, some of the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro features were turned off by default on our test model. I had to head in and manually enable HDR, color night vision and other key capabilities for the doorbell to get the most from it.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Two-way audio and Quick Replies

Ring’s two-way audio is engineered for clarity, and it’s some of the best I’ve seen (or uh, heard). The mic excelled at picking out voices, even when people were 10-15 feet away from the doorbell and turned the other way. The speaker was clear and loud enough that audibility wasn’t a problem at all; that includes chirpy Quick Replies you can set for pre-recorded messages given after a customizable amount of time. There’s nothing to worry about clarity and volume here.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Battery life

Ring reports its doorbell batteries are rated between 6 and 12 months, although enabling all the extra features and turning up the sensitive may drain it faster. With all features turned on and amped up, I spent several days testing the cam with frequent experiments and activations. By the end, the battery life was down to around 90%. That’s right in the zone for lasting several months with normal activations, about average for today’s video doorbells and higher than models like the Nest Doorbell battery model, which tends to top out at three months.

Ring Battery Doorbell Pro: Subscriptions and video storage

A Ring Protect plan, which starts at $5 per month, adds person and package alerts, rich notifications, the ability to store video events in the cloud for 180 days, and home/away modes to easily arm or disarm the doorbell according to your schedule. With all that, I consider a Protect plan more or less mandatory to get full use of the doorbell, so this isn’t a model for those looking to dodge subscriptions.

Ring’s video-sharing options for captured events are particularly good. When viewed in the doorbell’s timeline, every event has an option to save it, send it to the Ring community (an option for more humorous videos, perhaps), or send the link via email or text for future downloads. Those are more options than most video storage services provide, but you will have to accept that every event will be automatically saved into Ring’s cloud. Ring doesn’t have local storage unless you purchase a higher-tier plan with Ring Edge and use a Ring Alarm Pro security system.

Final thoughts on the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro

The Ring Battery Doorbell Pro is a master at keeping an eye on the front of your house, with excellent visual and audio clarity. The incredible number of features provides a mountain of customization to work with and some of the best cloud video-sharing options I’ve seen. The extra-large field of view and HD+ resolution add noticeable value, which is important when a video doorbell is as expensive as this one.

I found the latest Ring doorbell struggled when it came to certain features, such as correctly identifying people vs. packages, which required extra work with detection zones and still wasn’t entirely satisfactory. I also wish that Ring would update its design, now long in the tooth, with a more durable battery case that didn’t feel like it could be forced off.

• Features: 9
• Usability: 7
• Design: 6
• Performance: 7
• Overall score: 7.25

Why you should trust CNET

Our reviews run through every aspect of the latest smart devices so you know exactly what to expect. Testing video doorbells is similar to testing home security cameras: We put audio, visual and app features through their paces, testing the quality of each from a variety of distances and conditions. We mimic basic package delivery (or theft) to see how the model responds and how quick it is. We also learn a lot about design and installation during the setup process. See our full guide on how we test security cams for more.