It looks like Ring may have posted the info page for the new Video Doorbell 3 and 3 Plus a little too early to its site. The discovery was made by Dave Zatz of the Zatz Not Funny site. Ring apparently discovered the error but the page was cached, so we can still take a peek at what the new wireless video doorbell has to offer. The verdict? Well, it hasn’t departed from its predecessor much.
The biggest addition to the new Ring Video Doorbell 3 is that it can now be used with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band Wi-Fi, which is a great upgrade.
The Video Doorbell three will also include an additional “near” motion zone. This new zone will detect areas 5 to 15 feet in front of your home. Ring says on the now-deleted page that this new zone is intended to reduce irrelevant motion notifications from further away.
The doorbell will also be easier to install with a redesigned faceplate and mounting bracket. While all of this may seem exciting to Ring, the slight changes probably aren’t going to encourage current Ring Doorbell users to upgrade.
The information on the Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus was a little more interesting. The Video Doorbell 3 Plus has all of the new features mentioned above, plus it has what Ring is calling Pre-Roll technology. This feature records an additional four seconds of video before a motion event is triggered. While this sounds like it may be helpful to possibly get additional footage of a burglar or package thief, hold on. The extra footage is recorded in black and white and in low resolution to conserve the camera’s battery life. Chances are, you’re probably not going to be able to get much extra information out of this fuzzy four seconds. While several wired doorbells already have a similar feature, on the page Ring states this is, “a first-to-market feature for battery-powered doorbells and unique exclusively to Ring.”
Overall, if the deleted page covered the extent of Ring Video Doorbell 3 and 3 Plus’ features, the new products are pretty underwhelming. After all of the security problems the company has been having recently, you would thinkit would have focused on new features to protect and wow their customers. Recently Ring did make two-factor authentication mandatory on its app and allowed customers to control what is shared with third-party services. While this is a step in the right direction, we’re not sure it’s enough to assure new users that Ring is the video doorbell they want.
