Ring Outdoor Cam Pro Review

Design and installation

• USB-C and PoE variants
• Simple installation
• Works with the Ring app

Although the internals may have been upgraded, the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro has a very similar look and feel to other Ring cameras. The main difference here is that this camera has no battery-powered option, so if you don’t want a cable, then you’ll need to go for the 2K Ring Outdoor Cam Plus.

If you’re not worried about wires, then you can buy the standard version that I had on review, which plugs into an outdoor socket. There’s plenty of cable, so you should be able to find a socket nearby.

Alternatively, there’s a Power over Ethernet (PoE) version, which lets you run data and power over one camera. It’s nice to see this more ‘pro’ version camera available.

Mounting options include mounting the camera to a wall or to an overhang. It’s easy to screw the mount into place, and there’s a good amount of adjustment in the stand to point the camera where you want it.

Features

• Requires a Ring subscription for advanced features
• Radar-based motion detection
• Integrates with the Ring Alarm

Connecting via Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6 with 2.4GHz and 5GHz), the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro can easily be joined to the Ring app, which is home for all of the company’s products. 

A complimentary trial of Ring Home is provided; however, a subscription is required if you want to keep the cloud storage and advanced features.

Ring Home Basic, priced at £4.99 per month or £49.99 annually for a single device, is expensive for a single device. If you’ve got two or more devices, Ring Home Standard is much better value at £7.99 per month or £79.99 per year.

At the top is Ring Home Premium is available at £15.99 per month or £159.99 annually. This adds 24/7 video recording on supported devices in addition to AI-powered Smart Video Search.

Whichever plan you go for, the Ring app and ecosystem is mature, easy to use and comprehensive.

From the app you can tap the camera’s thumbnail and view the live view, where you can have a two-way talk with anyone that you spot on the feed. By default, live views are saved to the cloud.

For the most part, the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro’s job is to monitor automatically and record. There are plenty of options to reduce the number of alerts that you get, including Bird’s Eye Zones, which uses Radar to limit the camera’s detection range.

This is a brilliant feature, as radar gives you a detection range up to 9.5m. Using this feature means that you can point the camera at a busy area, such as a street, but ignore any motion that takes place outside of your front garden.

In addition, you can use standard motion zones, set regular motion sensitivity and set smart alerts. For the latter you can choose your combination of whether to not notify, record or ignore people, vehicles and all other motion.

It doesn’t take long to set the camera up so that it only records and sends alerts for genuinely important events, much more so than with the competition.

Footage is recorded to the cloud, and you can find it by scrolling through the handy timeline, which can be filtered by event type and date. Pay for the higher Ring subscription and you get AI powered Video Search, which lets you type in what you’re looking for and you get all the related videos. It’s quite brilliant and this feature makes finding older videos a lot easier.

Of course, there’s integration with the Ring Alarm, and the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro can have its mode set based on the alarm mode, such as turning the camera off when you’re at home, but turning it on when you set the alarm and go out.

Performance

• Very sharp daytime footage
• Can shoot colour and night
• Clean IR footage

The big change with the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro is that it can record in 4K, the first Ring camera to do so. This has been a long time coming. The Arlo Ultra 4K camera, for example, launched all the way back in 2019!

It has been worth waiting for, with the combination of the high resolution and 140-degree field of view capturing a lot of what’s going on.

During the day, the footage from the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro is as good as you’ll get from any camera. Sharp footage throughout the frame and highly detailed images make it easy to see exactly what’s going on.

As it gets dark, the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro can keep shooting in full colour, provided there’s enough ambient light. The generally level of detail remains good, although motion blur is more evident, and you don’t get quite as sharp images as you do with the dual-camera Eufy EufyCam S4.

Once it’s properly dark, the Ring Outdoor Cam Pro doesn’t have a spotlight, so it shoots using IR in black and white. Footage remains very good, although the image is a touch softer than during the daylight; although you can still clearly see what’s going on.

Should you buy it?