Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam review: Decidedly unambitious

Price When Reviewed

$79.99

Best Prices Today: Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam

Ring finally has a pan/tilt security camera: the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam. It’s an indoor-only model, obviously, but it delivers a wider field of view than you’ll get with the Ring Pan-Tilt Mount for the Ring Stick Up Cam that was introduced a little over two years ago.

I generally liked that clever product, but I knocked it for not being able to automatically sweep a room, for not allowing the user to set waypoints, and for its not being able to automatically track a person moving within its field of view. But hey, that gadget was designed to retrofit an existing camera, so I suppose Ring had limitations to deal with. But that leads me to wonder why the all-new Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam doesn’t have those features either.

The Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam is also stuck in the past with 1080p resolution. And while it has a privacy shutter that blocks its lens and mutes its onboard microphone, you must touch the camera and physically open and close it. Several competing cameras, including the Arlo Essential Indoor and the Psync Camera Genie S, have privacy mechanisms that can be operated from within their respective apps.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

It increasingly feels like Ring is building new products for people who are already in its ecosystem and are looking to add to or upgrade what they already have, versus making cutting-edge products—or low-priced ones—that will attract first-time users.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best home security cameras.

In truth, that’s long been the trouble with the smart home market in general: Once you settle on one platform, you can’t go far outside it without juggling multiple apps—or just starting all over again. It’s a problem Matter is supposed to solve—except there is no Matter standard for security cameras. It’s coming, but we don’t know when.

But I digress. Let’s get down to brass tacks, starting with a look at what this camera offers.

Specifications

• Motorized pan/tilt indoor camera
• Powered by AC adapter and 10-ft USB-C cable
• 2.4GHz Wi-Fi
• Flat surface, wall, or ceiling mount options
• Video resolution: 1080p
• Color and B&W night vision
• 143-degree stationary field of view (diagonal)
• 360-degree pan
• 169-degree tilt
• Manual privacy shutter
• Two-way audio with noise cancellation
• Customizable motion with person detection
• Onboard siren and on-camera voice notifications when a person is detected
• Cloud storage for video recordings (Ring Protect subscription required)
• Local storage option (with a Ring Alarm Pro and subscription)
• Available in four colors: white, black, starlight, charcoal, and blush

Installation and setup

I’ve set up so many Ring products now that I’ve probably lost my objectivity on the subject, but I had this camera set up in just a few minutes—at least the initial setup on a flat surface. Mounting it to the wall and then to the ceiling took a bit longer. The app guides you through each step, and a voice emanating from the camera confirms when you’re finished.

Ring’s installation instructions recommend setting up the camera within 10 feet of your router, which tells me the camera has very poor Wi-Fi range. It could also be Ring being extremely conservative. Whatever the case, I didn’t experience any problems with range; then again, I’m using a Ring Alarm Pro system with an integrated Eero Wi-Fi 6 router, to which I’ve added two Eero Wi-Fi access points. If you buy one of these cameras and experience connectivity problems, you can check its received signal strength (RSSI) in the Device Health section of the Ring app.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Mounting the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam to your ceiling lets you make the most of its pan/tilt feature, provided its cord can reach an outlet and you can hide said cord in your attic. You can also set the camera on any flat surface, and Ring provides a plastic mount if you’d rather attach it to a wall. But if you mount it to the wall, spinning it 360 degrees will just give you a good view of the wall it’s attached to. A ceiling mount will let the camera see virtually every square inch of the room it’s installed in.

While this is strictly an indoor camera without any weatherization features, it can be installed in front of a window, looking out at your yard. You’ll need to change a setting in the app, which will turn off its infrared night vision, so the light doesn’t reflect in the window. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it will allow you to monitor both your inside and outside spaces.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

As with all Ring cameras, you can create independent motion zones (up to three in this case) where movement will trigger a push notification (and start recording, if you have a Ring Protect subscription. Recordings can run as long as motion is detected, up to 120 seconds.) Movement outside of those zones will be ignored. You can use an in-app slider to customize how sensitive the camera is to motion.

In addition to motion-triggered recordings, you can configure the camera to capture a snapshot of the scene in front of it every 3 minutes, every minute, every 30 seconds, or every 15 seconds. You can play these snapshots back from the camera’s timeline view, stop-motion style.

With Smart Alerts, you can configure the camera to record a clip when any motion is detected, only when a person is detected, or to not record at all. The same settings are available for alerts, and the two settings are independent of each other. In other words, you can get motion-triggered recordings but no alerts and vice versa.

You can also restrict motion detection to a schedule; e.g., only during the day, only at night, or during any custom time. Finally, you can “snooze” motion alerts for between 30 minutes and 12 hours, after which the alerts will resume, or you can disable motion alerts altogether.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

A Smart Responses feature lets you toggle an on-camera recording in a cheeky female voice that warns people when they’re being recorded: ““Hi! You are currently being recorded.”

Linking to other Ring products

Ring manufactures a limited range of smart lighting products in addition to security cameras, doorbells, and home security systems, and you can link these devices together so that events on one will trigger actions on the others. If any camera detects motion, for instance, you can program your Ring video doorbell and/or any or all of your other Ring cameras to record as well.

By the same token, you can program the system so that any motion detection triggers a Ring smart light to turn on, or you can have the motion sensors in Ring lights or stand-alone motion sensors trigger cameras and/or other lights. All of this is very easy to accomplish in the Ring app.

Using the camera

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

However you install the camera, its motor will pan its full 360 degrees in about 9 seconds and tilt over its 169-degree arc in about 4 seconds, with about 1.5 seconds of lag after you press the on-screen button in the app. You can program a “home” location that the camera will eventually return to after any pan or tilt operation, but there’s no way to send it there with a button press—you just have to wait for it to move on its own.

Four on-screen buttons enable you to operate the pan-tilt motor. These appear at the bottom of the live view when your phone is in portrait mode, but this shrinks the camera’s feed by about two thirds. It’s much better to rotate your camera to portrait mode and then click the full-screen button, so that the four controls are overlaid on your feed.

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

In either mode, you can also bring up a Quick Controls panel to trigger other Ring devices on your network: turn lights on and off, start and stop recording on other cameras, sound alarms on devices that have them, and so on.

It bears repeating, however, that the camera is virtually useless without a Ring Protect subscription, because you’ll only get push notifications and no recordings without one. If someone moves in front of the camera, and then moves out of its line of sight, you won’t be able to see them in your live view without panning and tilting (which a clever intruder would be able to outmaneuver).

Ring Protect subscriptions start at $5 per month or $50 per year for a single Ring camera or doorbell or the basic digital features for a Ring Alarm system. A $10/$100 subscription covers all your Ring cameras and doorbells. Owners of either of Ring’s home security systems will want the $20/200 plan that covers all those products plus professional monitoring. Subscriptions are not at all uncommon in this space, annoying as they might be.

Should you buy the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam?

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

Michael Brown/Foundry

The Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam’s limited resolution aside, it captures crisp video with good detail and color saturation—at least during daylight hours. Its infrared night vision is also excellent. Lacking an integrated spotlight, however, its color night vision—which uses a combination of its IR and ambient light sensors—is nothing to write home about.

Motion and person detection worked flawlessly, and the camera’s pan/tilt motor operates smoothly and quietly. But it earns demerits for capturing higher-resolution video, for not having programmable waypoints, and for lacking the ability to automatically track a person moving around the room.

If you’re already ensconced in the Ring ecosystem, this new camera delivers capabilities that are otherwise available only with a $100 Ring Stick Up Cam Plug-In and a $45 Ring Pan Tilt Mount. If you’re shopping for your first indoor security camera, you’ll want to shop around before settling for this one.