Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro Review

A great upgrade to the original, the new Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro is easier to fit and comes with excellent radar-based 3D Motion Detection built in. Offering greater control over the floodlight, too, the security light turns on and off when you want it to. Higher-resolution video would have been welcome, but the quality of Full HD video is about as good as you can get. You’ll need a subscription to get the most out of this camera, but Ring Protect is cheap, particularly if you end up with multiple cameras and doorbells.

Introduction

Combining security lights with a security camera, the original Ring Floodlight Cam was a great all-round product. Today, the company is back with the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, which adds 3D Motion Detection, advanced pre-roll, and a smart new design that makes it easier to install. There’s also a cheaper version available – Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Plus – that comes without 3D Motion Detection but is otherwise identical.

For anyone looking to boost external security, and particularly for those with a Ring Protect subscription, this camera is a great addition to the home.

Design and installation

• Much easier to install than the old model
• Built for wall or eaves installation
• Very flexible floodlights

While the previous Ring Floodlight Cam was a decent security camera, it was a pain to install. As a result of its super-slim mounting base, trying to get all of the cables inside and screw the unit together was an act that required as much luck as it did skill.

With the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, these problems are gone. First, the mounting plate is much easier to install, with a new connector block for the incoming mains power. Cleverly, Ring has positioned the mounting holes in the same place as the old model, so you can swap out the old for the new one without hassle.

While the old Floodlight Cam was designed to be wall-mounted only, the new camera can be put on a wall or it can be eaves-mounted. 

Next, the main camera and lights now have a much deeper mount, which makes accessing the cables far easier. For this, you just need to screw the camera and lights’ power cables into the mount.

For safety, the mount has a clip to which you can attach the camera’s strap. This stops the delicate camera and lights from plummeting to their demise as you’re try to fit the unit. Finally, you just clip the unit together and use the provided nuts to screw everything into place. I found that the cables tucked inside neatly enough.

Ring has done a great job of making the new camera look a bit more modern, with its elliptical lights looking particularly smart. Both the camera and the lights are mounted on adjustable arms, so you can position everything where you want it.

Most importantly, the camera offers greater flexibility here, so if you do ceiling mount it then you can point the camera where you need it far more easily.

Once physically in place, you can use the app to connect the camera to your Wi-Fi network and to the Ring app. Before you put your ladder away, it’s worth using the live view to correctly set up the camera, so it’s pointing at the area you want.

Features

• 3D Motion Detection is impressive
• Requires a subscription for the main features
• More control over the lights

The radar-based 3D Motion Detection was first introduced with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2, and makes its second appearance here. Using this tech, you plot where the camera is located on Google Maps, and then set the threshold of where you want motion to be detected; motion that starts outside of this distance is ignored.

When an event occurs, Birds Eye View plots on a map overlay the path that the person (or object) took. It’s a handy tool, and tweakable, so you can fine-tune where motion is picked up, even if the camera faces a busy road.

Combined with standard activity zones, it’s quite easy to ensure that your camera only pings you an alert when there’s motion that will be of interest to you.

Ring fine-tunes this further by offering a few extra options, too, including scheduling when you receive motion alerts, so you can have them turned off at certain times of the day. With geofencing, you can snooze the camera when you’re at home, and turn on notifications when you go out automatically – although the camera will still record if you have a Ring Protect subscription.

The subscription is worth paying for, with Ring Protect costing from just £2.50 a month for 30 days of cloud history and Person detection, where the camera will only alert you when it spots a human. You don’t get other object detection types with the camera, unlike with the Nest Cam (outdoor or indoor, battery), which can detect people, animals and vehicles.

Ring gets even more powerful when you have multiple devices, as you can link the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro with other cameras in your system, getting them to record when the floodlight picks up motion.

Even better, if you have a Ring Alarm, you can change the mode of this camera (and any others) based on the alarm state. Admittedly, since this is an external camera, I’d leave it recording at all times, only disabling internal cameras when your alarm is turned off or set to Home mode. However, what Ring has successfully done is build an ecosystem of products that work nicely together.

For multiple cameras, Ring Protect Plus costs £8 a month (£80 a year) for cloud storage for every camera, plus some upgrades for the alarm system. There’s no other system that comes close to delivering the overall experience of Ring.

From the app, you can fire up the live view, which allows you to engage in two-way talk with anyone you can see. There’s even a 105dB siren that you can turn on to really let someone know that you’re watching them. This siren can be linked to go off with the Ring Alarm, too, which is neat.

Footage is recorded to the cloud, with Advanced Pre-roll. Here, the camera constantly shoots six seconds of video to internal memory. When there’s an event, this six seconds of footage is appended to the main recording, so you can see what happened just before. In practice, it means that you never miss the start of an event.

The live view allows you to see a timeline of events, which you can scroll back through. There are filters to select a date, and the type of event (people, motion and live views). Yet, this timeline is fiddly to scroll through for anything other than the last few events.

There’s an Event History page from where you can scroll through all events, but this lacks thumbnails, so it can be time-consuming to find the one you want. I’ve said it before, but this is the one part of the app that Ring could overhaul to make it easier to use. All video can be downloaded to your phone for preservation.

Of course, there’s also the floodlight, which can be timed to turn on and off when you want it, or you can leave it set to the default option, where it will turn on if it detects motion when it’s dark outside. With this model, you can adjust which segments of the PIR sensor turn the light on and off, helping you avoid instances where a neighbour walking past triggers your camera.

You can’t replace the bulbs in the floodlight, but the LED lights are rated for a long time, and it’s likely that you’ll want to replace the camera before the lights stop working.

Alexa is supported, and you can stream the camera’s live feed to a compatible smart display, such as the Echo Show 10. There’s no Google Assistant support, however.

Video quality

• Sharp and detailed
• Shoots in colour at night

There’s a 1080p sensor on the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, combined with a 140-degree (horizontal) lens, which captures a good amount of the outside world. In general, video quality is impressive, with images that are well exposed but not over-sharpened. Depending on where you put the camera, you’ll get different views. My camera was mounted high on the ceiling of the porch of a Victorian Terrace, with the camera looking down on people. As such, it doesn’t always capture faces well.

A higher resolution would have been nice on this wired product, as we saw with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2, and the Arlo Floodlight, which shoots much sharper video.

At night, the camera has IR lights to allow it to view in darkness, but it can also shoot in colour, particularly when the 2000-lumen lights turn on. It’s worth adjusting the lights so that they’re not reflecting off anything. As you can see from the sample below, before adjusting my lights, the image is sharp and in full colour, but the lights are reflecting off the front wall, so the camera wasn’t able to capture anything behind me.

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Final thoughts

A decent upgrade on the original Floodlight Cam, the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro packs new technology into an easier-to-install body. You’ll need the Ring subscription to get the most out of it, but it isn’t expensive – and Ring Protect makes even more sense when you buy more cameras, a doorbell and even the alarm system. I’d go as far as to say that Ring has the widest product set available, making it a great choice for whole-home security.

If you’re after just a single camera and don’t want to wire something in place, the Ring Floodlight Cam is a good alternative. Otherwise, check out my guide to the best outdoor security cameras for other alternatives.

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