I’m invested in Ring, I like the cameras and the ecosystem as a whole. Yes, there’s a subscription but I’ve cut down on those and now only have one. I have a personal preference to not have cameras inside the house that record to the cloud for obvious privacy reasons, however one in the living space isn’t so much of a barrier for me. So having a single camera cover that space is ideal, but with the shape of our home, cameras either need to be able to pan, or see around corners: Enter the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera.
What is it?
The Pan-Tilt Camera allows the user to follow people through their premises within the 169 degree vertical tilt and full 360 degree pan capabilities.
From an aesthetic point of view, it’s pretty much the Ring Indoor Camera we recently reviewed on a motorised and weighted base that can — provided there’s power nearby — also be wall or ceiling mounted. This wall mount and base gives you huge flexibility in your positioning options because it is so compact.
The only potential issue for mounting options is if you’re likely to want to use the privacy shield. The problem being it is a manual shield, so if your camera is mounted high on a wall or ceiling, that’s going to prevent you from easily using it. I’d like to see this upgraded to an automated (through modes/routines) shield that can also be triggered through the app on an ad-hoc basis.
With the weight of the motorised base, plus the general build (although the privacy shield does feel a bit fragile) feels solid. In fact, when I was setting it up I dropped the camera from around 5 feet and it hasn’t suffered for it.
Setup and Features
Because we’ve reviewed a reasonable number of Ring cameras in the past, I won’t go through the setup step-by-step, but suffice to say; it’s very simple and has easy to follow instructions.
The fact you can run the pan and tilt from your phone is wonderful. The fact that this isn’t an automatic tracking of people moving through the home is a little disappointing. We know that the technology is available, even cheaper devices like the Wyze that have automated tracking on movement. Time for Ring to catch up on this front.
When you get notification of movement, and want to see what’s going on: You need to use the app to maneuver the camera. Providing you set the home position on the camera, when you stop using live stream, it will automatically return to the home position.
The feature set covers the bases
If you’ve read our reviews before, or have a Ring camera in place already; you know what to expect here. The Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam has colour night vision, it has two way talk, person recognition and it’s running at 1080p. So it ticks all the boxes, but I’d love to see the video quality improved with the next generation.
Should you buy one?
I’ve had this set up at home for a couple of weeks now and it’s been really useful. I’d argue that the cost to upgrade the optics to a higher level wouldn’t be huge, but the resulting video setp up would be; so that’s something I expect Ring to deliver soon… After all, when Internet connections are getting faster, it’s not an issue with upload speed anymore.
For my mind, the flexibility of the camera in covering larger areas with the pan and tilt, as well as the relatively low cost of AU$129.00 — despite my grumbles — is a winner in my book. This is a great starting point for anyone looking at getting internal cameras given the capacity to cover larger areas, as well as anyone already invested in Ring cameras to add to your setup.
