The rumors were true: Ring announced two new video doorbells, the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and the Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus, which look like its predecessor, but come with a few new features that will make it easier to connect to your home network, see people as they approach your house, and cut down on false alerts.
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Ring Video Doorbell 3: Price and availability
The Ring Video Doorbell 3 will cost $199 — the same as the current Ring Video Doorbell 2 — while the Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus will cost $229. Both are available for pre-order on Ring.com and Amazon.com and will ship on April 8 in the U.S. Both are available in silver and black or dark bronze and black.
Ring is also selling a second-generation Ring Chime ($29.99) and Chime Pro ($49.99), the latter of which includes not just a Wi-Fi extender, but a built-in nightlight.
Ring Video Doorbell 3: New features
The Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus have the same design as the Ring Video Doorbell 2, as well as the same 1080p camera resolution and field of view. However, both of the new models will have dual-band 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi, which should help with video transmission.
We've seen from experience that the places you'd want to install a video doorbell aren't always in a place with a strong Wi-Fi signal. While Ring does sell a Wi-Fi extender Chime Pro (which it's also updating), having a better radio in the video doorbell itself would help.
Both new video doorbells have a new "near" motion zone that works from 5 to 15 feet in front of your door. The biggest annoyance with any video doorbell is a false alert — getting a notification that someone's out front, when in reality the video doorbell saw a car drive by. If you live on a busy street, you often have to dial down the motion sensitivity pretty far. Hopefully, this new up-close motion zone will go a long way in eliminating this hassle.
The Ring Video Doorbell 3 Plus will have an additional feature called Pre-Roll, which will let owners see up to four seconds of video prior to a motion event. With many video doorbells and security cameras, there's usually a gap of a second of two between the time the camera detects motion and the time it starts recording. As a result, you don't often get footage of a person when they first appear in-frame.
Both Arlo and August's video doorbells continually buffer video, so that when someone is detected, the camera can add in those extra seconds from before when the person appeared. However, both the Arlo and August cameras are hard-wired, whereas the Video Doorbell 3 Plus can be either battery-powered or hard-wired.
We're curious to see how Ring is able to implement this feature without a homeowner needing to recharge the camera's battery every week.
Both cameras come with 30 days of Ring Protect, which lets you save and download up to 60 days of videos; after the 30 days are up, subscriptions start at $3/month or $30/year.
