Blink Video Doorbell + Sync Module 2 | Two-way audio, HD video, motion and chime app alerts and Alexa enabled — wired or wire-free (Black)
Positive Reviews
Positive Review – 1
READ THIS BEFORE ANY OTHER REVIEW
I also had an issue with the mount and spent an hr trying to secure it with no luck. I am tech savvy so this thing shouldn’t be as hard as it is to simply mount the doorbell to the mount. I just put my return in and was just frustrated all around. Getting a new one would take almost a week. I decided to take a breath and a dab. I sat down and closely looked at the backing and the mount. YOU HAVE TO put a lot of effort into sliding the mount on. Once you closely look at how the inserts go inline it up and push REALLY HARD sliding the doorbell down. It will slide and lock into place. It shouldn’t be this hard to put on and I can see why people are leaving poor reviews. Trust me on this though and don’t give up!
UPDATE: day 2 and so far so good. I’ve realized the reason for it being so hard to put the mount on, is to make it VERY sturdy when the doorbell is attached. I’ve read a review talking about this being easy to steal and I would have to disagree. The doorbell isn’t going anywhere unless someone takes a hammer to it. The picture quality is really good, the picture I uploaded to this review doesn’t compare to the live feed view on my iPhone. This doorbell comes with an “armed” and “disarmed” mode so when you’re not wanting 100 notifications because of birds flying by your doorbell you can disarm and when you leave the house or go to sleep you can arm, I found this convenient.
UPDATE#2: It’s been over a month now and no problems whatsoever! I went out and bought a 128GB flash drive to put into the module and now my recordings are being saved straight to that. This makes life a lot easier when accessing stored clips and transferring that data to a PC. The doorbell is still nice and tight and working like a charm. For the price, you can’t really go wrong with this doorbell combo. I suggest purchasing the combo and not the stand-alone doorbell itself unless you already have a module in your home.
Positive Review – 2
Well worth the cost & perfect add on for existing Blink customers
If you are like me you are a happy existing Blink Camera user who is thinking about adding the doorbell to your existing setup. I had a blink camera setup aiming at my front door so at first, I was not too sure that I really needed the doorbell. However, for the cost, I am very glad I got one. There are a couple of things to know:
(1) If you are an existing Blink customer, you do not need a second sync module. All you need is the doorbell and you can simply add it to your existing account (as easy as adding an additional camera).
(2) If you are planning on hardwiring the blink doorbell to your existing doorbells wires. . . . you still have to use 2 AA batteries to power the camera. This did not make sense to me as I figured my hardwires would power it, but sure enough, after calling Blink support I realized I needed to put the AA batteries in the camera. The hard wire will allow your blink doorbell to ring the doorbell in your home but will not power the camera.
(3) You can turn on motion detection or just have the blink doorbell turn on when the doorbell is rung. This is a nice feature. If you want to catch anyone that comes to your door (whether they ring the bell or not, you can simply turn this feature on in the app). If you want to save battery life and are only interested in doorbell ringers you can turn motion detection off.
(4) It has two-way audio, meaning you will always hear the person at your door. . . . but you can also choose to speak to the person if you choose. For me, the audio the person at the door hears comes across as a little staticky, but that could be my phone or the fact that I am using the corner mount.
(5) It has more of a fishbowl view so it catches a wide view (meaning it can cover most of your front porch)
(6) There is no additional cost to having the Blink doorbell or camera system. Unlike other doorbell systems out there, there is no additional cost to the Blink Doorbell. The app is free, cloud storage is free, downloading images or videos is free, etc.
If you are looking to set it up with just batteries and no wiring to an existing doorbell system, setup is a breeze (will take two minutes). If you are looking to hardwire it, it is still pretty easy. I am not a handyman and what I know about electricity will shock you (get my joke) but even I was able to hardwire it. Get the doorbell, you will be glad you did. Hope this review helped.
Positive Review – 3
Good For The Cost
This is a hard camera to mount. It requires you to mount the bracket in place very tight before trying to attach it. It requires a lot of force then slides down in place. The first one I received was impossible and seem the latch was broken. But Blink directly reached out to me and sent another one quickly. It went on and looks good, but as I said requires a lot of downforces. Needs to be a better design.
Positive Review – 4
Will not attach to the backplate
Everything was fine with this except it wouldn’t attach to the back cover that attaches to your wall. Kind of a big deal I think. Very poor design to say the least. Come on Blink redo it and fix this.
ADDENDUM: I sent this back and left this review, I was contacted by Blink’s service department who offered to send me another on them to see if it would work better. I agreed and received it two days later. Set it up and was successful in mounting it! I am very happy with this product and now have 6 cameras and this doorbell at my house, very happy with all of them. Fantastic customer service to boot, can’t ask for more than that.
Positive Review – 5
Will not mount unless the surface is perfectly flat!
If you have siding stay away from this doorbell. The backplate is flimsy. Even with a mounting block, the doorbell doesn’t “click” into place. I had to shim the back until it worked. Horrible mounting process. They need to release a fix for this backplate and send a new one to anyone who purchased this product.
Update from 1 to 4 stars. Blink support reached out and sent me a mounting wedge at no cost. The wedge is rigid, gives you a nice flat surface, and makes the mounting process much easier. As far as how the doorbell itself works, it’s doing a good job just like the other Blink cameras I have.
Negative Reviews
Negative Review – 1
Potential to be great, but not yet.
A few years ago I was excited to see that BLINK had a doorbell announced at CES so I committed to a multi-camera setup. After it became apparent it wasn’t being released, I purchased a RING doorbell and subscription plan begrudgingly. The minute I saw the pre-order for this, I instantly grabbed one. Excited to have everything in one ecosystem, the anticipating and re-excitement from years ago was there. During the waiting period, I realized someone pointed out, which at the time was NOT listed on the pre-order page, that you need a Sync-2 module to save the footage/rings. I had a spare but it could have been annoying. Fast forward to today when I received it. It looks beautiful and is a slim profile but the mounting bracket is an absolute joke. 2 shallow screws and no thumbnail screw to lock the device in, this could easily be ripped out of the wall within 2 seconds. Combine that with the amount of pressure needed to lock this device into place, there’s no doubt in my mind that after a year of changing the batteries some of these small clips/brackets on the plate will indeed snap. The image quality is way too HDR and totally blown out by the sun and bright daylight in the sky, creating darkness on the face of whoever rings the bell which surprise, kind of defeats the purpose. Lastly, the fact that Amazon did NOT have the mount was the cherry on top. The email they sent later allowed us to order the corner mount free of charge, but inside the blink app it states that it should come with a couple of different mounting plate options which it did not. So all in all, I prefer the Blink ecosystem to most and physically this doorbell is great but for something in R&D for 3+ years you definitely dropped the ball on the easiest pieces of the puzzle, especially for a company that owns RING which has an excellent mounting package in the box.
Negative Review – 2
Design defects must be fixed before putting your orders in
In my opinion, this is a good product but the reason for 1 star is because of the simple design defect and waiting about 1 month for the release of this product. I love blink products but this is something that must be addressed because I see I’m not the only one having this issue. The waterproof seal is a defect either it’s too thick or the seal is too hard and won’t compress enough to allow you to put the back end onto the product. Sadly that’s the only fix or blink that sends a new seal. In my opinion, it’s such a simple defect hopefully someone from blink sees my review and tries to correct this somehow. I’m a tech enthusiast and love all of Blink’s products but just hate to see the product fail because of a simple flaw after it took a while to test this for consumers. I will later change it until there’s an update in design and there is a fix for this
Negative Review – 3
Not recommended.
I’ve been a Blink customer since the beginning. I have every iteration of their products and was excited to see them offer a doorbell. That excitement wore off quickly after I installed their doorbell and soon turned to disappointment. Here are my issues with the doorbell:
1. Short battery life. Even though it’s connected to my 24VAC doorbell transformer, it still runs on battery power. I have burned through the first set of lithium AAs in less than 3 weeks of use.
2. I had to purchase their angled mount ($8) separately because my doorbell button is low and the doorbell camera was cutting off the heads of tall people.
3. Notifications. This is my biggest beef. Right now, if someone rings the bell, you get a standard notification on your phone. You can also set your Alexa devices to make a voice announcement that the doorbell was rung. That’s it. You don’t get automatic live video of the doorbell camera on the app or Echo Shows, Spots, etc. You don’t know who’s there. I suspect this is a hardware limitation of the Blink system. When a Blink camera is recording, you can’t pull up a live video feed. I’m doubtful that this critical feature will ever be added.
Negative Review – 4
Impossible to mount
I thought I’d have a problem with the technical setup, but I assumed mounting it would be a cinch. I had it backward. I did call tech support to help with setup, but that turned out to be easy. The mounting instruction video makes it look so easy — press, slide it down, and it’s on. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that video and tried, over and over again, to get it to click on. I was ready to hit it with a hammer to see if that might make it snap into place, but the guy on tech support advised against it. I really wish I could have gotten it mounted because I liked everything else about it. I’d say it has a definite design flaw.
Negative Review – 5
READ before returning camera due to difficulty of the camera mount bracket
I returned my initial camera for a couple of reasons. I was issued a refund. However, after several days (and maybe because of my background and I own multiple Blink cameras and my review – I was contacted by Blink and given another Blink Doorbell camera to test and evaluate. Here is my first tip at eliminating some of the frustration of mounting the camera.
Before you start drilling holes in your home to mount the camera – or ready to return the camera because you can’t get it to snap into the back-plate while in your hand or remove it once it is mounted. Do yourself a favor and test-mount the back-plate on a scrap piece of 2″ x 4″, plywood, etc (any piece of scrap wood will work as long as IT IS FLAT). Doing this will let you test and see the ease of mounting and dismounting of this camera using the supplied tool. Hey, if you can’t get it to mount on a flat board that you can flip around here and there – why in the heck would you want to drill holes in your home’s door frame or brick and not be able to mount it? That’s only going to make you more aggravated – which is what I did with the first camera that I returned.
I did the TEST-MOUNT myself. And, in doing so – I think I have found what I call “the niche” for mounting and dismounting the camera. Once it seems flush with the back-plate – push the camera upward until you hear a tiny “click”. That is the clip at the bottom locking in. Use the supplied tool to unlock and repeat this again until you feel comfortable with mounting this on your door frame.
NOTE – In my opinion, Blink offers one of the best customer support sites I have encountered. If you have an issue – call them. Over the past 2 years, I have had to call them from time to time. They have helped me with warranty issues and answered my questions
