Wyze vs. Blink: Comparing Budget Wireless Video Doorbells

Speaker 1: Wireless video doorbells are finally getting more affordable. I'm talking under a hundred bucks. So we're testing models from wise and blink to find out which one ring a ding dings and which one ring a ding don't. We've got the wise video doorbell pro and the blink video, or be we're gonna be testing their setup performance and overall smarts. But first let's take a look at their basic specs. Speaker 1: Wise costs. 90 [00:00:30] bucks comes with chime and says it has up to six months of battery life. It has a one to one aspect ratio with 150 degree by 150 degree field of view. It's got 1440 by 14, 40 resolution night vision, two way talk and a $2 per month cam plus subscription. That adds a lot more smarts. Blink costs. Only 50 bucks. Doesn't come with a chime, but says it has up to two years of battery life. Hold on. Am I reading that right? That's what it says on Amazon, but double a battery. Is it that [00:01:00] okay. Two years through battery life. And I'll explain why that is a little bit later. It has 27 to 16 aspect ratio, weird with 135 degree horizontal field of view. Add that to 10 ADP resolution night vision, two way talk and a $3 per month subscription plan that adds cloud storage for your clips. Speaker 1: All right. So right off the bat, blink is almost half the price of wise, but wise is a lot more feature rich. Now some of you wise guys might be saying, Hey, didn't wise release [00:01:30] a $50 video doorbell like two years ago. That's way more comparable in features to the blink one. Well, yes, but it's not wireless. So it's not in this video. Sorry. So which one of these devices is winning so far? I think it depends on what you actually, you want outta your video doorbell, but I'd argue that wise is kind of edging ahead just in terms of pure value. Who cares? What I think though, let's actually test these things out. They both can be wired, but they also both have battery power, which means you don't have to mess with wiring if you don't want to. In fact wise advertises on the website that [00:02:00] you can install it in 30 seconds or less, that ease of install does make me wonder though how easy it would be to uninstall these things. I mean, by somebody just walking up and pulling 'em off and we have actually seen that before with devices like Google nests, video doorbell. So let's put these ones to the test, Speaker 2: Trees, Speaker 3: Nothing, Speaker 4: Nothing that was insane and the easy, Speaker 3: Ooh, just snap [00:02:30] it right off. Speaker 1: Turns out even with an extra screw on Wise's doorbell. These things are both pretty easy to swipe. Not just the cost of convenience, I guess. All right. We know the specs on these doorbells in theory, but let's see them in action. How do the cameras, the notifications and the other features actually perform first off, we're gonna see how well these cameras capture the text on an eye exam poster at various distances blinks up first. Okay. So blink gives a pretty crisp and clear [00:03:00] image, but that narrow vertical field of view means everything below line six. Isn't even visible bummer. Now crisp steps back to about five or six feet. And you can just make out line seven, not too bad, crisp moves back again to like 12 feet. And we can decode line four, but not much below it. And the last two positions much farther out. Speaker 1: We really can only make out that one giant E on the first line. Now for wise right away. I just wanna point out how much fuller the picture of the wise doorbell is. You just get a lot of vertical coverage, which means [00:03:30] you don't have cutoff heads or packages. If they're too close to the camera lens that said, I don't love the fish I aesthetic of the whole thing. The warping means that you can see all the lines, but there are only clearly readable up to 10. When you're close Chris steps back to six feet now, and things get a little bit more pixelated. You can make out line five, but not much below it back to 12 feet. And we're down to line two or three farther out. We can make out the giant E on the top line, but at the farthest distance, I can't even make that one out. Speaker 1: So the vision test is pretty neck and [00:04:00] neck here wise gives you a much better picture up close, but blink has better vision at a distance. This is a pretty close one. So why don't we test them out in a more real world scenario, we're going to simulate a package delivery and a package theft running each test twice with both doorbells to see how they respond. Let's start with wise. Okay. So we get the doorbell notification and open the app. And Chris has already gone. Of course, because of that nice field of view, I can still see the package and the clip was saved and that shows, yep. [00:04:30] There's Chris dropping off the parcel. Okay. He's coming back to steal it now. And, uh, the notification opens the app, but not the live feed. So by the time I pull it up, he's long gone again, though, the clip is saved. Speaker 1: When we repeat the test, we get largely the same results. The notifications show up on time, but the feed is slow enough that I wouldn't be able to intervene with two way talk or something, but the clips do get saved and all of them are labeled as person clips too. Let's check out blink. So blink motion notification comes in just [00:05:00] ahead of CRISPR ringing the doorbell, which is a teeny bit faster than wise is, uh, but it's the same deal with Chris already being basically gone. By the time I pull up the feed, the clip does get saved, but it kind of cuts off after Chris turns to go. When Chris comes back to steal the package, I'm hoping that faster motion alert pays off and I can stop him. Okay, I get the notification and he's basically already gone. The clip is saved, but man, that delay kind of puts a hitch in me stopping the porch piracy as it happens, we run the [00:05:30] test again with similar results, but I wanna point out two things first, why this field of view means that you can easily see that a package has been left on the doorstep, which is nice. Speaker 1: Number two, despite blinks, nice clarity here under the shaded porch with a bright background, Chris is almost reduced to a silhouette Wise's dynamic range makes a big difference here and actually identifying a porch pirate or any visitor would be a lot easier with wise. At the end of the day, both video doorbells send timely alerts and record clips. You want them to record, [00:06:00] but neither of them is fast enough to let you intervene. If someone's stealing your packages. That said, I think why this field of view and dynamic range actually give it the edge in this test because I could actually tell that a package had been left and I could better identify the thief, trying to get away with a crime, not on my watch. So we've tested performance, but what about other general smarts? Well wise gets the hat tip again because of its cheaper subscription. Speaker 1: And it's better out of the box smarts. One big limitation with blank two is that you can't pull up a [00:06:30] live view from the video doorbell, unless motion or a button, press prompt the device to begin recording. It's kind of a weird constraint, honest, and it means that you won't be able to check in on your front steps for other reasons like being able to see the accumulation of snow, if you're out of town or something like that, I'm pretty sure this approach is why blink advertises that two year battery life, which is currently pulling at okay. And the device kind of gets around it by taking a mid res snapshot every hour to update its thumbnail in the app. But I don't think that really accomplishes the same thing. [00:07:00] Now you can also check in on the live view. If you buy an extra device, the blink sync module two man say that five times fast for 35 bucks, which sort of defeats the Uber cheap purpose of this thing. Speaker 1: For many, the inability to check in live and at will is really gonna be a deal breaker. Why gets a another big point for coming with a chime with a blink doorbell? You can wire to your existing chime or use an echo smart speaker or display as an interior chime. But I like that wise just closes the loop itself and guarantees [00:07:30] that you don't have to buy anything extra to get the same old doorbell experience you want. So which cheap wireless video doorbell really is the best. Uh, ultimately you'll probably have to decide for yourself according to your own needs. Nah, I'm just kidding. Why is definitely the better value and most people should buy that one. The field of view, better dynamic range, smarter features and included chime really make it a solid budget option for anyone in the market for a wireless video doorbell. Speaker 1: Thanks for watching. If [00:08:00] you enjoyed the video, be sure to like and subscribe to CNET for more. If you're interested in buying either one of these products, check out the links below, and if you didn't like that, I said ring ITing don't at the beginning of the video, don't at me, we've got some alternate takes just for you. We're testing models from wise and blink. It's chime time. We're testing models from wise and to find out which one goes, ding, do like king Kong to find out if wise can keep its eyes on the prize or to find out if blink, blinks [00:08:30] To find out which one rings the bell and which one burns Speaker 5: The hell Speaker 1: To find out which ding is king and which do is to find which buzzer deserves the buzz and which deserves the bat to find out which one ring a ding dings and which one ring a ding don't.