Amazon’s smart doorbell company Ring has unveiled two new members of its smart doorbell family.
Both the Video Doorbell 3 and Video Doorbell 3 Plus are up for pre-order now, and while the former seems like a simple upgrade for “improved motion detection and enhanced wifi”, the latter gets a new feature that Ring is clearly rather proud of: Pre-Roll.
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“Today, we are introducing a brand new feature that is the result of over two years of hard work across the Ring team,” wrote Ring’s Jamie Smirnoff in a blog post explaining the new technology. “Pre-Roll is an all-new feature that shows you the four seconds of video from before motion is detected, so you can get more context behind what triggered your Ring app notification.”
The idea is that seeing the event that triggered your camera to spring into life is potentially more important than seeing what’s happening right now. That way you can see if it’s a burglar or a fox.
So why is adding a bit more recording such a challenge? Because constant recording like this should absolutely rinse the battery, and not everyone has their doorbell connected to the mains. The solution is a three-camera system in the Ring Video Doorbell Plus, two of which will capture video at a low resolution and minimal framerate in black and white before the main camera picks things up at 1080p as per usual.
A rolling buffer means that Pre-Roll footage is constantly writing over itself to avoid filling up local memory, though Ring Protect subscribers will get footage in their cloud account as ever.
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Both the Ring Video Doorbell 3 and Video Doorbell 3 Plus are up for pre order now, with the former costing £179, and the latter setting you back £199. While the US store has the Video Doorbell reduced in price as a result of the new stock, its UK equivalent at the time of writing awkwardly still has it costing the same at £179.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
