Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro review: Your next Ring security camera

It’s safe to say that Ring, ever since the US Sharks passed up the opportunity to invest in their business, has come along in leaps and bounds. It is now one of the most used home security cameras on the market and in their ever-expanding range they have now added a wired floodlight camera — the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro.

We were sent one to check out and decided to have it installed above my garage door, where I had a plain old dumb floodlight beforehand. I am already heavily invested in the Ring ecosystem so it is no imposition for me to test it out. In my use I found a lot of clever uses for the camera but also a couple of things I thought could be improved. Read on to hear all about them.

PROS	CONS
Crystal clear video	No AI motion detection
Bright floodlight	Requires professional installation
No battery or solar panel required
3D Motion

In the box

Inside the box of the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro (yes, yet another product with a massive mouthful of a name) you will receive the light itself along with the base to attach it to the wall.  It will also include screws and wall plugs to secure it to your brick wall along with an instruction booklet.  Ring also include their “Secured by Ring”, something they always include and if you already have other Ring products you will most undoubtedly have many of.

In Australia you should be getting this installed by a qualified sparkie and the sparkie I used, although he’d never installed one of these before, did not have a single issue installing it.  I showed him the instruction booklet, he had a 1min glance at it and went straight ahead and removed my old floodlight, replacing it with this one.  

All in all, even with all the chit chat between him, me, his partner and mine he still had it installed in under 20 minutes or so.  

Setup

Ring has been at this for a while — way before Amazon bought them out for a cool US$1billion — and as such you would expect them to have the setup down to a “T”.  And they did.  There are two ways to add the new camera to your home network/Ring app — either “Add” or just scan the barcode on the instruction booklet.  

The app will then guide you through the setup process including connecting it to your home Wi-Fi — keep in mind that you will need to have Wi-Fi signal out wherever you place this so it may require some finagling of your mesh or Wi-Fi network but I didn’t have any issues — at first.  Just last night my mesh network decided it could not reach out to the front of the garage (the top floor mesh point does have to pass through a tin garage roof and the bottom floor one is a long way away). 

Even though yesterday the app was telling me that I had a “Poor Wi-Fi Connection” and it still connected quickly and produced an amazing quality picture as fast as my other Ring cameras, today it said no longer connected.  Just by moving the downstairs wired mesh point.to a more central location I was able to get the camera reconnected.  Moral of the story, make sure your Wi-Fi network is on point first. 

After adding the camera to your network and Ring app the app then walks you through setting up all of your motion zones for lights and camera and your recording options.  

Design and features

The design of the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro is as you would expect.  There is the usual bulky Ring sensor and camera located beneath two 2,000 lumen floodlights — yes that is bright. To counteract the brightness the colour is fairly warm and not overly blinding.

The camera includes a 140-degree horizontal and 80-degree vertical FOV with 1080P resolution and although I have other 1080P Ring cameras it, to me, appears to be clearer and sharper than any of the other cameras I have.  It could be newer optics as my other Ring cameras are a few years old now.

The sensor has built in radar which allow it to use features such as 3D motion and other motion detection.  The 3D motion includes a Birds Eye View to allow you to view an overhead shot of the location of your camera with any motion detected in the field of view of the camera also located on the Birds Eye View map and tracks that motion through the field.

Other features include infra-red night vision and a built in speaker, microphone and siren.  

How useful are these features?

When setting up the various motion zones you may be mistaken for a case of déjà vu.  For some reason Ring has decided that the motion zone for the camera is different to the motion zone for the light — oh and there is also a motion zone for the 3D motion detection.  Not a huge issue and some people may want it separate so those people will be happy with this option.

For this reason, Ring has separated them into Motion Settings and Light Settings.

Motion settings –

• Motion zones and sensitivity: Here you draw the motion zone onto the camera view as you would for all Ring cameras.  You can change the shape and alter it however you want it, and you can also have up to three separate zones.
• 3D motion detection: This is your birds eye view and its setup — Similar to the motion zones but you are instead setting the zone on the birds eye view image.
• Smart notifications: You can decide whether you want to receive smart notifications or not — whether you get notifications, recordings, both or neither for person motion and “other” motion.
• Motion schedules: a handy addition is the ability to avoid getting motion notifications at certain times and on certain days.

Light settings – 

• Motion activated lights: you can actually turn off the motion activated lights.  I don’t mind that idea if you have a busy street or a lot of motion going past it — you could always turn the light on for certain motion notifications after you view them.
• Motion zones for lights: Here is the second motion zone you need to set up.  The motion zones for lights is less detailed and accurate than the motion zones for recording, instead you are just deciding how far out from the sensor you want to detect motion and have the lights activated.
• Light brightness: 2 x 2,000 lumens is damn bright and for the sake of my neighbours I turned the brightness down to about 60-70% and it was plenty bright enough — I don’t live in a super dark street so I just don’t need it to be any brighter than that.

Rich notifications: Ring has rich notifications which sends a small snapshot of the object causing the motion with the notification of the motion.  They make it very easy to quickly view and to react accordingly.

The camera also includes two-way talk and a siren — neither of which is extremely loud but enough to be noticed, especially in a quiet street like mine.

Anything I didn’t like?

There is no option for local recording if you prefer that option.  Ring is all about the online recording and if you get yourself into the Ring ecosystem it is totally worth it.  The Ring Protect Plus subscription gives you video recording for ALL of your devices at your home address — no matter how many you have.  I have 10 (so far) and it costs AU$150 per year.  If I get to 20 (although I doubt I have enough places left to record to get anywhere near that) it will cost me just the same.  If you only have a few cameras, you can purchase a Ring Protect Basic account for AU$40 per year per camera.

Lights set off by bugs etc sometimes — a couple of times I had the motion triggered by bugs flying in front of the camera system.  To fix it I just dropped the motion sensitivity a bit until I no longer received any more triggers from bugs.  It still picked up cats, dogs, cars and people, but no bugs.

As mentioned above, Ring is owned by Amazon now, so there is no Google Assistant integration but there is Alexa integration which suits me fine.  You can ask Alexa to show you the camera on your Alexa-enabled display.  Maybe one day they will all get along but I’m not holding my breath.

Should you buy it?

There are a few smart floodlight cameras on the market but this is one of the more useful ones I have seen. Sure, at $379 it is not cheap but seems to be about the same price as other smart floodlights so there is nothing exciting about that.

If you are not yet in any smart security camera or doorbell ecosystem I would encourage you to have a close look at the Floodlight Cam Wired Pro — Ring has a lot of different cameras at relatively affordable prices for different purposes and different locations throughout your house. Add in their bread and butter — the smart doorbells — and you have a very mature and rich ecosystem.

If you are already in the Ring ecosystem and need a floodlight anywhere around your house then it is a no-brainer to purchase it. The quality of the video is great, even at “just” 1080P, and once set up is incredibly easy to use. The light is super bright so can light even the largest yard. At $379 though I can highly recommend the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro but don’t forget, unless you have a sparkie on tap as a friend or family member then you will need to find another $120-150 to get it installed.

You can purchase it from Ring.com, Amazon Australia or from local retailers such as Bunnings and JB Hi-Fi in black or white colours.