Key Takeaways
- The Blink Outdoor 4 offers affordable, wireless outdoor security cameras for home use.
- The camera captures 1080p video, has a battery life of up to two years, and is easy to install.
- The app experience is unintuitive and the camera may not always record, making it less reliable as a functioning piece of equipment.
We’re living in a golden era of home security, complete with remotely-monitored alarm systems, motion-detecting doorbell cameras, and a huge variety of outdoor security cameras to choose from. Whereas exterior security cameras were once only found on the outside of luxury homes, hard-wired into a central system, companies like Blink are now making affordable and wireless security cameras for the home. Amazon acquired Blink in 2017 and the companies have since released a focused slate of home security devices. The Blink Outdoor 4 is among the latest of these, and is the company’s latest outdoor, battery-operated, wireless security camera.
Affordable, with compromises
Blink Outdoor 4
The Blink Outdoor 4 is the latest generation outdoor camera from the Amazon-owned company. This battery powered security camera is a budget friendly alternative to hard-wired camera systems.
- Easy to install
- Affordable
- 1080p video
- Local storage option
- Subpar app and UI
- Scratches easily
- Would be easy to steal or remove
- Limited temperature resilience
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Price, availability, and specs
Blink is an Amazon-owned company, so the Blink Outdoor 4 is readily available on Amazon’s website. It can also be found at Best Buy, Target, and a number of other retailers. The Outdoor 4’s pricing is a little hard to pin down, as Blinks sells the camera both individually and as part of a few different bundles. A cursory Amazon search shows availability of three-, four-, six-, and eight-packs, all with varying price points. Good deals can be readily found on the higher volume bundles. In any case, expect to pay roughly $70-$90 per camera.
The Blink Outdoor 4 is a battery-operated camera, and comes with two non-rechargeable lithium metal AA batteries. The company claims this provides “battery life of up to two years, based on default settings.” The camera captures video in 1080p at up to 30 frames per second. The Outdoor 4 works via a wireless relay that must be plugged in inside your home, through which it can also store clips on a USB drive. Using this relay, the camera functions via 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi connection. The camera’s operating temperature is -4 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
What I liked about the Blink Outdoor 4
Simple installation and operation
The Blink Outdoor 4 is an incredibly simple camera, and it took me a little over five minutes to get it up and running out of the box, and a couple of minutes more to drill the mount into my fence post. It doesn’t have a lot of features, it doesn’t have a lot of settings to go through, it’s just a really straight forward outdoor security camera. I only needed to use the Blink Home Monitor app to walk me through the setup process.
It took me a little over five minutes to get the Blink Outdoor 4 up and running out of the box, and a couple of minutes more to drill the mount into my fence post.
The Blink Outdoor 4 is incredibly cheap compared to ‘real’ hardwired outdoor camera systems. While some trade-offs are expected at this price point, I like how relatively cheaply I can get a multi-camera system installed around my home. The availability was also a huge plus, as I could buy additional cameras if needed online, or at Home Depot, Lowes, or Target.
![Blink Outdoor 4 VS Blink Outdoor 3](https://static1.pocketlintimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/wm/2024/02/blink-outdoor-4-vs-blink-outdoor-3.jpg)
Related
Blink Outdoor 4 vs Blink Outdoor 3: What’s the difference?
Blink’s latest Outdoor 4 camera has some handy new features, but is it worth getting over the Blink Outdoor 3? We take a closer look.
What I didn’t like about the Blink Outdoor 4
You get what you pay for in both software and hardware
This is an incredibly bare-bones camera, and the day-to-day experience feels as cheap as the product. I had many frustrations while testing this unit, and much of it made me think, “I don’t know what I was expecting,” given the price point. For starters, the app experience was very frustrating. It’s completely unintuitive for the user to understand if the camera is on and recording clips or simply on and recording nothing. Once I ‘armed’ the camera, it began to record clips to the USB drive I had placed in the Wi-Fi relay module. I quickly realized that the camera is not always recording, so I can’t scroll back to a moment where it may have started recording later than I’d like, leaving it up to the camera to see whether it actually caught everything I would need in a safety-related situation.
I had many frustrations while testing this unit, and much of it made me think, ‘I don’t know what I was expecting,’ given the price point.
Often, when I navigated to the live view in the app, it was slow to respond and took a while to start showing. Then it would stop showing a live feed within just a few seconds. It would pause itself and show a play button as though it couldn’t fathom that I might want to watch the live view for longer intervals. On a day when I was expecting a FedEx package that I knew I had to sign for, I had hoped to keep an eye on the feed for the truck to arrive, as I had placed the camera at the front of my home. Well, I was completely unable to do that as it kept timing it out, rendering it useless to me in that moment.
Should you buy the Blink Outdoor 4?
The answer to this for me is very straightforward. If you cannot or do not want to spring for a full-blown hard-wired outdoor camera system, then this is the budget approach that simply gets the job done. At $70-$90 per camera, the Blink Outdoor 4 is perhaps worth more as a deterrent to would-be criminals, than its actual value as a functioning piece of equipment.
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