As smart home security cameras become more and more common, you'd think their prices would start coming down. However, most new cameras still retail for $200 or more, and that's just for one camera that monitors one area of your home. Blink's approach is different: much like smart light bulbs, a Blink system connects multiple smart cameras via a hub and makes all of them controllable via a mobile app.

For just $169, you get two cameras you can place throughout your home, which is a great deal considering you'll pay more for just one camera from competitors. While the Blink system has most security cameras beat in price, some caveats are worth considering before taking the plunge.

Design: More for your money

Every Blink system starts with a hub and one or more cameras. One camera and a hub costs $99, but there are two-, three-, and five-camera bundles to choose from. After starting your system, additional cameras are just $75 per unit. I tested a system that came with a hub and two separate cameras, all of which came in small, square boxes to reflect their small, square shapes.

The hub is slightly smaller than the cameras and is just a simple white square with micro USB and Ethernet ports on one edge. Because you can connect the hub via Ethernet or Wi-Fi, you can place it anywhere in your home. I was delighted by this because I already have plenty of things connected to my router. The micro USB port is for power, so you'll need an outlet for it to work.

Once plugged in, the hub's small blue light comes on, and eventually the green light right below it comes on as well, signaling the hub is ready to pair with a camera. The cameras are also white squares, but they have slim, transparent edges that stick out and help them stand up on their sides. Each camera comes with a small stand if you want to adjust the angle of the camera's POV, or you can just set the camera up on a shelf or on a table and let it be.

This design is different from most home security cameras I've tried. Most companies make cameras that look like modern vases or minimalistic, decorative tchotchkes. While that's all well and good, Blink's bare-bones design makes it easier to place the cameras nearly anywhere in your home (only the hub requires a connected power source). And, since the squares are relatively thin, you can hide them halfway behind objects as long as the black circular lens can see outward into the room. Of course, no matter what you do, a Blink camera will always look like a camera.

Each Blink camera runs on two AA batteries, which is both a blessing and a curse. Batteries are included in the box, and camera placement isn't limited by proximity to a power outlet. But you will have to replace the batteries eventually. Blink claims the batteries will last a year before you need to change them and, considering the cameras don't continuously record (they only capture and save video when motion is detected), that could well be the case. The company also recently pushed out an update for all of its systems that maximizes energy efficiency and bumps up camera battery life to two years.

Putting multiple cameras throughout my home felt safer than just having one camera in a centralized foyer or living room. Cameras like the $199 Canary cam, the $199 Netatmo Welcome, and even the $70 Ezviz Mini are primarily one-device systems, and adding another camera into the mix immediately doubles the cost. Even though Blink systems get more expensive as they get bigger (the three-camera system is $229 and the five-camera system is $349), you'll still spend less overall to cover more ground in your home.

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Valentina Palladino

Features: A bit lacking

After setup, the Blink system can be left alone to monitor your home, just like most security cameras. In the app, you can choose when to "arm" the cameras, which means they will be on alert for movement within their field of view. You can arm them manually when you go out and disarm them right as you get back, or you can use the app's scheduler to set certain times and days for automatic arming and disarming. I love scheduling features on security cameras (and surprisingly, not all of them have it) because they let me use my routine to dictate when the cameras should be looking for motion.

The scheduler lets you set multiple start times for armed and disarmed periods on as many days of the week as you want. Each time one of those periods starts, the Blink system sends an alert to your smartphone letting you know it was "successful." All of your cameras follow the same schedule, so you can't set different schedules for different cameras. Too bad: I wanted to arm my living room camera at night while leaving my bedroom camera disarmed.

When a camera is armed and motion is detected, you immediately get a smartphone alert. The camera's blue light turns on, so you clearly know when it's recording and when it's just sitting idly (that also means anyone with common sense can see when the camera is recording, too). Cameras record clips from five to 10 seconds in length, and you can watch clips in the app. Ten seconds isn't much, but at least you can see the start of the motion and its source.

Cameras record multiple clips if motion lasts longer than 10 seconds, with some lag time between the initial clip and the followup clip. That means you may miss some action in between. For example, if a camera captures the moments a burglar enters your home, in the lag time between the first clip and the second clip, that burglar could move to a different part of your home, leaving you with an empty, uninformative live stream of your living room. While all you really need is that first clip to know if someone illegally entered your home, the moments after that could be crucial in proving further crimes were committed.

If the system is armed, you continue to receive smartphone alerts as long as the movement occurs, which can be annoying. Every time I came home while the system was armed, my phone blew up with an alert every 10 seconds to let me know that I was in my own apartment. Unlike the Canary camera, Blink can't recognize household members and disarm itself, so I always had to go into the app and disarm the system just to get the alerts to stop.

Blink cameras only detect and alert you to motion, but they do record audio, so all your clips will have sound. They also only record video in 720p, whereas most competitors give you options up to 1080p. But both the video and audio quality of recorded clips are good enough for you to see what's happening in your home, even if some details are blurred.

Because a 10-second video clip is not large, you can save any clip you want to your smartphone by finding it in the app's Clip folder. If you need to access a clip via cellular data and not Wi-Fi, Blink estimates a 5-second clip will use about 750KB of data. When I transferred a saved 10-second video to my computer, the file was about 1.1MB. All your clips are also saved on Blink's servers, which will continue to save up to 7,200 seconds of video (or 720 10-second clips). Once that limit is reached, Blink automatically deletes the oldest video clips, freeing up more space for new ones. That's all free as well, as Blink doesn't have any tiered subscription service.

Blink's simple, no-frills system makes setting up easy, but, unlike other home security cameras, it doesn't have many extra features. Blink has neither an alarm, nor can it link you to the contact information of local authorities the way a Canary camera can. I like both of these features in a security camera, even as I hope to never have to use them. Blink doesn't recognize faces like Netatmo's Welcome, either, and it doesn't let you outline specific detection zones in each camera's field of view. In a way, you get what you pay for. Blink's pricing is a great deal, but in turn it's a basic camera system that doesn't allow for much customization or flexibility.

When most security cameras want to see in the dark, they use a combination of infrared lights or subtle LEDs that don't overtly shine out onto people in the room. Not Blink. Instead, each camera has a super-bright LED that turns on immediately when it has to record motion in low-light. The Blink nearly blinded me when I walked into my living room early one morning while the system was armed. If I were a burglar, I would have known instantly that someone was watching me. No other security camera I've used does this. Thankfully, the app lets you go into the individual camera's preferences and set the light's intensity to low, medium, or high.

I wasn't able to test Blink's new Alexa integration feature, which allows you to arm, disarm, and get information about your system via voice controls. If you have an Alexa-enabled device like the Amazon Echo, you can ask Alexa to change the status of your Blink system or even ask it when and where the last video clip was recorded. If you don't use the scheduler in the app, this could be another convenient way to arm and disarm the system as you're leaving home.