The iPhone 13 Pro features a new camera capable of focusing closer than ever before—less than an inch away. This opens a whole new dimension for iPhone photographers, but it’s not without surprises. Let’s take a tour of what this lens unlocks, some clever details you might miss in its implementation, why its “automatic” nature can catch you off guard, and much more. At the end, we have a special surprise for you — especially those not using an iPhone 13 Pro.
The Wonderful World of Macro
So what is ‘Macro’, anyway? “Extreme closeup photography” is a mouthful, so photographers needed a shorter name. You’d think ‘micro’. You’d think anything but macro, since that actually means ‘big.’ Well, ‘macro’ came from an article written in 1899 about high magnification photography. The author called anything magnified more than 10× “photo-micrography,” and anything less was “photo-macrography.”
122 years later, we’re still stuck with that term. Sorry.
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If you’re a beginner photographer, you might ask, “What’s so special about a macro lens? I already have a zoom.” Well, all lenses have a minimum focus distance, the closest a lens can get to its subject and still focus on it. It’s a principle that applies to any lens; if you bring your finger close to your eye, you’ll struggle to focus at a certain point.
The iPhone 13 Pro’s telephoto “zoom” lens has a minimum distance 60cm (about two feet). Let’s take a photo of my Apple Watch’s crown from that distance.
Now we’ll just crop and blow up the crown in our favorite image editor…
Not great. Let’s repeat the experiment with the wide angle lens of the iPhone, which can focus at 15 cm, about six inches.
As you can see, while a telephoto lens works great at taking photos from afar, it slightly underperforms against a wide angle lens that can get up-close. Now let’s use a macro capable lens at 2cm, less than an inch.
Wow. I can see every detail of every scuff and scratch. I need to take better care of my stuff.
Macro lenses let you see ordinary objects in a completely new way. You can get lost in the feather of a peacock…
Peek through the eye of a needle…
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The page of a book becomes a landscape of fibers stained with ink…
This lens is like a window to a hidden world, and that’s why we’re excited to have this power on a phone we carry around all day. But macro photography on iPhone isn’t technically new. For years you’ve been able to buy lens add-ons (“secondary lenses“) which act like reading-glasses. These dongles cost anywhere from $10 to $125, but even the most expensive ones can’t match the real thing.
On a technical level, the problem is that these lenses reduce the depth of field— how much of your image is in focus. The closer you focus, the slimmer that in-focus area gets. Adding another lens on top of this makes it even slimmer. You can deal with this problem on regular cameras; adjusting the aperture increases the depth of field. Unfortunately, all iPhones have fixed apertures, so there’s nothing you can do.
Compare the true macro lens on the left to a lens attachment on the right:
Left: iPhone 13 Pro. Right: iPhone XR with a Macro Attachment.
Too much blur and too little depth interfere with macro shots. When you take a photo of a bumblebee, you usually want the whole bee in focus, not just the top-left corner of its eyebrow hairs. This is such an issue with extremely small subjects that advanced macro photographers go out of their way to increase depth of field through techniques like focus stacking.
The next problem are the slight imperfections in lenses. The colors in light refract differently when passing through glass, causing what is known as chromatic aberration. These create subtle color shifts and fringes along edges. If such imperfections exist on built-in lenses, iOS can automatically remove them because it know about these lens characteristics. It just can’t do that for accessories.
On top of that, from a purely practical perspective, it’s annoying to carry around dongles that you need to attach and detach from dedicated mounting hardware on your phone. There’s the old saying, “The best camera is the one you have with you,” and the same is true of lenses.
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The Gotchas
While macro on the iPhone 13 Pro is a huge leap forward, it’s not without surprises.
If you push it to its limit and try shooting from an inch away, you’ll find it tricky to find a good angle because suddenly the iPhone itself casts a shadow on your subject. On top of that there’s that shallow depth of field at the absolute minimum distance. So don’t feel like you have to focus at the absolute minimum. An extra inch can make a big difference.
Another challenge is that macro is only available on the ultra wide lens. This isn’t a popular lens for everyday photography because of how it warps subjects. This is the full photo of my watch from earlier.
The first party camera defaults to cropping the image as if it were shot with the wide-angle camera. The question is whether most users will notice that it isn’t a “true” 4k image — it took the shot, zoomed in on it, and cut the rest off!
Believe it or not, Apple has pulled off silent cropping for years. If you tried to focus on something too close for the telephoto lens to handle, or the scene just requires more light, the iPhone quietly switches over to the wide angle lens and crops it to make the image look like a telephoto shot.
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This is a very clever feature, because explaining minimum focus distance and lens properties is for blog posts like this, not a Camera app on an iPhone that lets people take photos. Photographers might disagree, and that’s fine: Apple’s designers and engineers don’t build the camera app for 1% of photographers. They build it for everybody on the planet.
This brings us to this year’s annual iPhone controversy: the jarring transition to macro.
What are we seeing here? The wipe-transition and jumping around is caused by the Camera app switching lenses, much like we saw with the telephoto lens earlier. Your ‘main’ iPhone camera can’t really focus all that close, but the new macro-capable ultra-wide camera can. Once Camera detects that you’re not able to get the shot with the selected camera, it swaps in the camera that can.
That isn’t great, but we think the backlash is a bit much. Let’s take a detour to explain what Apple is going for.
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A long time ago, anyone who wanted to drive a car had to know a little bit about shifting gears. We call that ‘manual transmission’ now. That changed with the automatic transmission, which freed drivers to think about driving in a more abstract sense: press the gas pedal, go faster. The automatic transmission is an abstraction.
Now imagine you spent your entire life driving an automatic transmission in an area without any hills, so you’ve never heard your car change gears while applying the gas. One day you take a road trip to San Francisco. The first time your car climbs one of those steep hills, it shifts into a lower gear, and your engine makes a very loud sound. It would feel a bit jarring. “Why is my engine freaking out?” But after a while, you’d get used to it.
Let’s go back to talking about cameras and human vision. At a distance, objects shift less when you move. Objects up close shift a lot more.
Via Wikipedia
If you’re trying to take a macro shot, by its very nature, your subject is close to the camera. When you switch lenses, an inch feels huge at that distance. Sometimes iOS masks the switcheroo by repositioning the new image to overlap the old one, and translating the new vantage point into position. Look closely at the seam at the bottom of this video…
This effect helps smooth things out, but doesn’t seem to happen all the time. If they work out the kinks, it’s possible that our brains will just get used to this transition like we’re used to the sound of our cars changing gears.
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Some folks are complaining about the very nature of automatically switching lenses, and we get that. While testing these features in the first party camera, there were a few times I fought with the system to get the composition I wanted. I’m sure that’ll improve with updates, but I don’t envy Apple’s position. They could build a system that works 99.9% of the time, more than enough for the billion people using the app, but it will never be 100% perfect until it’s psychic.
That brings us to our niche. We aren’t constrained the same way as Apple’s camera. We build Halide, and we built it to give advanced photographers full control over their camera, rather than abstractions. When you press the 3✕ button, you always get the zoom lens. No switcheroo here.
Using the macro mode on iPhone made us think — what can we do as a camera app to make macro photography absolutely fantastic on iPhone for the less casual user? We quickly figured it out: we had to build a dedicated Macro Mode into Halide. Surprise: we used it to capture all of our macro photos in the post. Double surprise: This is actually a launch announcement!
Introducing Halide 2.5’s Macro Mode
Today, we’re launching Halide 2.5. It’s a big update with one of the coolest features we’ve ever packed into the app. We were close to just calling it Mark III, as with our huge update last year — it’s just that significant.
What makes Halide 2.5’s Macro Mode so special? For one, it brings Macro capabilities to all iPhones. Let’s dig in.
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A Tour of Macro Mode
Unlike the built-in camera, we decided to really make Macro photography a deliberate ‘mode.’ Of course the ultra-wide camera in Halide will still automatically focus on very-close subjects, but a separate mode unlocks some very powerful tools and processing specific to macro.
To start, tap the “AF” button to switch from auto focus to manual focus. Since Macro is often best done with the focus fixed to a close subject or with some adjustment, Macro Mode lives in the manual focus controls. To then enter Macro Mode, tap the the flower icon — the universal symbol for macro. Ours is a tulip, because our designer is Dutch. They’re funny like that.
Entering Macro Mode, smart things start to happen in Halide. To begin, Halide examines your available cameras and switches to whichever one has the shortest minimum focus distance. Then it locks focus at that nearest point. You can tap anywhere on screen to adjust focus; unlike our standard camera mode, we configure the focus system to only search for objects very close to you.
If you’d rather adjust focus by hand, we increase the swipe-distance of our focus dial so you can make granular adjustments down to the millimeter. To nail that focus point, Focus Peaking draws an outline around the sharpest areas of your image. You can set it to automatically trigger when adjusting focus, or you can turn it on and off.
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As we mentioned before, you usually want to crop macro shots. But if you just try to blow up your image in an editor, as we showed earlier, you’ll end up with a blurry or pixelated result. Not great.
We knew we could do better, so we’ve packed the science of super resolution into a feature we call Neural Macro. We trained a neural network to upscale images in a way that produces much sharper, smoother results than what you typically get in an editor. It’s available on all iPhone with a neural engine— anything made in 2017 or later— and it produces full 4k resolution JPEGs at either 2× or 3× magnification.
The results are incredible; here are two unedited photos taken with the fairly humble iPhone 12 mini, which has no macro lens:
This Neural Macro stuff sounds advanced and cool, but we understand that some of our users are purists. A mode like this does alter your image. We respect choices: If you change your mind about the cropped and enhanced version later, the crop is only saved as an edit in your camera roll. You can always go back to the un-cropped version by opening it up in the iOS Photos app, tapping “Edit” and “Revert.”
Oh, what about RAW files? RAW files are RAW, and we respect that. They are left untouched and unprocessed. That means that shooting in pure RAW will just give you the extra control of Macro Mode, but none of the fancy Neural Macro technology. In RAW+JPG mode, you get the best of both worlds, with an unprocessed RAW file and a Neural Macro enhanced JPEG shot.
That’s Macro Mode. Even if you don’t have the iPhone 13 Pro, you can now take cool Macro shots. This photo was shot on an iPhone 12 Pro:
But you can also use Macro Mode with the iPhone 13 Pro’s macro-capable lens, and those results are mind-blowing. Your macro camera becomes almost like a microscope:
These images show paper fibers in a book, cells on a leaf — like a microscope. All taken with iPhone 13 Pro + Halide Macro Mode
Suffice to say we absolutely cannot wait to see what kind of shots our users will take with this — iPhone 13 Pro or not. We think it’ll enable photography of a whole unseen universe around us.
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This wraps up a really big update that supports the latest and greatest. We packed a lot of quality features into this update for iOS 15, iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro. Overall, we’re super happy with the APIs Apple launched to support the new hardware.
All those goodies are out now, with Macro Mode — available to all Halide users, including the folks who bought Halide 1.0 over four years ago. When we introduced Halide Mark II last year, we gave that huge upgrade away for free for our existing users, with a year of free updates to boot. To those early supporters, this is a gentle reminder that this is the last month of free feature upgrades. While your Halide Mark II app will continue to work and keep all its features, if you’d like to keep receiving major updates like this, you should check out our renewal options inside Settings. We’re even running a sale!
As photographers, we find the iPhone 13 Pro’s new macro capabilities an absolute joy. From a value perspective, this camera outperforms bulky lens accessories that cost over $100, and you’ll never leave it at home in a sock drawer. With this new Macro Mode in Halide, we hope many users discover the simple pleasure of photographing the little things around us.
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We’re not nearly done yet: We are still deep in our research on the iPhone 13 Pro camera. Check in soon to see our full report, including how the 3× zoom stacks up. Stay tuned.
In the mean time, we’d love to see what you’re doing with Halide’s Macro Mode. Tag your photos #ShotWithHalide for a chance to be featured on our Instagram. Til next time!
Data quality has perhaps never been more important. And a year from now, then a year beyond that, it will likely be even more important than it is now.
The reason: AI, and in particular, generative AI.
Given its potential benefits, including exponentially increased efficiency and more widespread use of data to inform decisions, enterprise interest in generative AI is exploding. But for enterprises to benefit from generative AI, the data used to inform models and applications needs to be high-quality. The data must be accurate for the generative AI outputs to be accurate.
Meanwhile, generative AI models and applications require massive amounts of data to understand how to respond to a user’s query. Their outputs aren’t based on individual data points, but instead on aggregations of data. So, even if the data used to train a model or application is high-quality, if there’s not enough of it, the model or application will be prone to deliver an incorrect output called an AI hallucination.
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With so much data needed to reduce the likelihood of hallucinations, data pipelines need to be automated. Therefore, with data pipelines automated and humans unable to monitor every data point or data set at every step of the pipeline, it’s imperative that the data be high-quality from the start and there be checks on outputs at the end, according to David Menninger, an analyst at ISG’s Ventana Research.
Otherwise, not only inaccuracies, but also biased and potentially offensive outputs could result.
As we’re deploying more and more generative AI, if you’re not paying attention to data quality, you run the risks of toxicity, of bias. You’ve got to curate your data before training the models, and you have to do some postprocessing to ensure the quality of the results. David MenningerAnalyst, ISG’s Ventana Research
“Data quality affects all types of analytics, but now, as we’re deploying more and more generative AI, if you’re not paying attention to data quality, you run the risks of toxicity, of bias,” Menninger said. “You’ve got to curate your data before training the models, and you have to do some postprocessing to ensure the quality of the results.”
“We’re actually seeing it more than expected,” he said.
Likewise, Madhukar Kumar, chief marketing officer at data platform provider SingleStore, said he is seeing increased emphasis on data quality. And it goes beyond just accuracy, he noted. Security is an important aspect of data quality. So is the ability to explain decisions and outcomes.
“The reason you need clean data is because GenAI has become so common that it’s everywhere,” Kumar said. “That is why it has become supremely important.”
However, ensuring data quality to get the benefits of AI isn’t simple. Nor are the consequences of bad data quality.
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The rise of GenAI
The reason interest in generative AI is exploding — the “why” behind generative AI being everywhere and requiring that data quality become a priority — is that it has transformative potential in the enterprise.
Data-driven decisions have proven to be more effective than those not informed by data. As a result, organizations have long wanted to get data in the hands of more employees to enable them to get in on the decision-making process.
But despite the desire to broaden analytics use, only about a quarter of employees within most organizations use data and analytics as part of their workflow. And that has been the case for years, perhaps dating back to the start of the 21st century.
The culprit is complexity. Analytics and data management platforms are intricate. They largely require coding to prepare and query data, and data literacy training to analyze and interpret it.
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Vendors have attempted to simplify the use of their tools with low-code/no-code capabilities and natural language processing features, but to little avail. Low-code/no-code capabilities don’t enable deep exploration, and the NLP capabilities developed by data management and analytics vendors have limited vocabularies and still require data literacy training to use.
Generative AI lowers the barriers that have held back wider analytics use. Large language models have vocabularies as large as any dictionary and therefore enable true natural language interactions that reduce the need for coding skills. In addition, LLMs can infer intent, further enabling NLP.
When generative AI is combined with an enterprise’s proprietary data, suddenly any employee with a smartphone and proper clearance can work with data and use analytics to inform decisions.
“With generative AI, for the first time, we have the opportunity to use natural language processing broadly in various software applications,” Menninger said. “That … makes technology available to a larger portion of the enterprise. Not everybody knows how to use a piece of software. You don’t have to know how to use the software; you just have to know how to ask a question.”
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Generative AI chatbots — tools that enable users to ask questions using natural language and get responses in natural language — are not foolproof, Menninger added.
“But they’re a huge improvement,” he said. “Software becomes easier to use. More people use it. You get more value from it.”
Meanwhile, data management and analytics processes — integrating and preparing data to make it consumable; developing data pipelines; building reports, dashboards and models — require tedious, time-consuming work by data experts. Even more tedious is documenting all that work.
Generative AI changes that as well. NLP reduces coding requirements by enabling developers to write commands in natural language that generative AI can translate to code. In addition, generative AI can be trained to carry out certain repetitive tasks on its own, such as writing code, creating data pipelines and documenting work.
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“There are a lot of tasks humans do,” Abhyankar said. “People are overworked, and if you ask them what they are able to do versus what they’d like to be able to do, most will say they want to do five or 10 times more. One benefit of good data with AI on top of it is that it becomes a lever and a tool to help the human being be potentially multiple times more efficient than they are.”
Eventually, generative AI could wind up being as transformational for knowledge workers as the industrial revolution was for manual laborers, he said. Just as an excavator is multiple times more efficient at digging a hole than a construction worker with a shovel, AI-powered tools have the potential to make knowledge workers multiple times more efficient.
Donald Farmer, founder and principal of TreeHive Strategy, likewise noted that one of the main potential benefits of effective AI is efficiency.
“It enables enterprises to scale their processes with greater confidence,” he said.
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However, the data used to train the AI applications that enable almost anyone within an organization to ask questions of their data and use the responses to inform decisions had better be right. Similarly, the data used to train the applications that take on time-consuming, repetitive tasks that dominate data experts’ time had better be right.
The need for data quality
Data quality has always been important. It didn’t just become important in November 2022 when OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT — which represented a significant improvement in LLM capabilities — initiated an explosion of interest in developing AI models and applications.
Bad data has long led to misinformed decisions, while good data has always led to informed decisions.
But the scale and speed of decision-making were different before generative AI. So were the checks and balances. As a result, both the benefits of good data quality and consequences of bad data quality were different.
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Until the onset of self-service analytics spurred by vendors such as Tableau and Qlik some 15 years ago, data management and analytics were isolated to teams of IT professionals working in concert with data analysts. Consumers — the analysts — usually had to submit a request to data stewards, who would then take the request and develop a report or dashboard that could be analyzed to inform a decision.
The process could often take months and at least took days. And even when the report or dashboard was developed, it often had to be redone multiple times as the end user realized the question they asked wasn’t quite right or the resulting data product led to follow-up questions.
During the development process, IT teams worked closely with the data used to inform the reports and dashboards they built. They were hands-on, and they had time to make sure the data was accurate.
Self-service analytics altered the paradigm, removing some of the control from centralized IT departments and enabling end users with the proper skills and training to work with data on their own. In response, enterprises developed data governance frameworks to both set limits on what self-service users could do with data — to protect against self-service users going too far — and also give the business users freedom to explore within certain parameters.
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The speed and scale of data management and analytics-based decision-making increased, but it was still limited to a group of trained users who, with their expertise, were usually able to recognize when something seemed off in the data and not hastily take actions.
Now, just as generative AI changes who within an organization can work with data and what experts can do with it, it changes the speed and scale of data-informed decisions and actions. To feed that speed and scale with good data, automated processes — overseen by humans who can intervene when necessary — are required, according to Farmer.
“It puts an emphasis on processes that can be automated, identifying data-cleaning processes that require less expertise than before,” Farmer said. “That’s where it’s changing. We’re trying to do things at much greater scale, and you just can’t have a human in the loop at that scale. Whether the process can be audited is very important.”
Abhyankar compared the past and present to the difference between a small, Michelin-starred gourmet restaurant and a fast-food chain.
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The chef at the small restaurant, each day, can shop for the ingredients of every dish and then oversee the kitchen as each dish gets made. At a chain, the scale of what needs to be bought and the speed with which the food needs to be made make it impossible for a chef to oversee every detail. Instead, a process ensures no bad meat or produce makes it into meals served to consumers.
“[Data quality] is really important in a world where you’re going from hand-created dashboards and reports to a world where you want AI to do [analysis] at scale,” Abhyankar said. “But you can’t scale unless you have a system in place so [the AI application] can be precise and personalized to serve many more people with many more insights on the fly. To do that, the data quality simply has to be there.”
Benefits and consequences
The whole reason enterprise interest is rising in developing AI models and applications and using AI to inform decisions and automate processes — all of which need high-quality data as a foundation — is the potential benefits.
The construction worker who now has an excavator to dig a hole rather than a shovel can be multiple times more efficient. And in concert with a few others at the controls of excavators, they can dig the foundation for a new building perhaps a hundred times faster than they could by hand.
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A construction worker with a cement mixer can follow up and pour the foundation multiple times faster than if they had to mix the cement and pour it by hand. Next, the girders can be moved into place by cranes rather than carried by humans, and so on.
It adds up to an exponentially more efficient construction process.
The same is true of AI in the enterprise. Just as construction teams can rely on the engines and controls in excavators, cement mixers, cranes and other vehicles that scale the construction process, if the data fueling AI models and applications is trustworthy, organizations can confidently scale business processes with AI, according to Farmer.
And scale in the business world — being able to do exponentially more without having to expand staff — means growth.
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“Data quality enables enterprises to scale their processes with greater confidence,” he said. “It enables them to build fine-grained processes like hyperpersonalization with greater confidence. Next-best offers, recommendation engines, things that can be highly optimized for an individual — that sort of thing becomes very possible.”
Beyond retail, another common example is fraud detection, according to Menninger. Detecting fraud amid millions of transactions can be nearly impossible. AI models can check all those transactions, while not even teams of humans have the capacity to look at them all, much less find patterns and relationships between them.
“If accurate data is being fed into the models to detect fraud, and you can improve the detection even just slightly, that ends up having a large impact,” Menninger said.
But just as the potential benefits of good-quality data at the core of AI are greater than good data without AI, the consequences of bad data at the core of AI are greater than the consequences of bad data without AI. The speed and scale that AI models and applications enable result in the broader and faster spread of fallout from poor decisions and actions.
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Back when IT teams controlled their organizations’ data and when a limited number of self-service users contributed to decisions, the main risk of bad data was lack of trust in data-informed decisions and the resulting loss of efficiencies, according to MicroStrategy’s Abhyankar. In rare cases, it could lead to something more severe, but there was usually time for someone to step in and stop something from happening before it spread.
Now, the potential exists to not only scale previous problems, but also create new ones.
If AI models and applications are running processes and making decisions without someone checking them before actions are taken, it could lead to significant ethical problems such as baselessly denying an applicant a credit card or mortgage. Similarly, if a human uses AI outputs to make decisions, but the output is misinformed, it could result in serious ethical issues.
“You scale the previous problems,” Abhyankar said. “But it’s actually worse than that. In scenarios where the AI is making decisions, you’re making bad decisions at scale. If you run into ethical problems, it’s catastrophically bad for an organization. But even when AI is just delivering information to a human being, you’re scaling the problems.”
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Farmer noted that AI doesn’t deliver outputs based on single data points. AI models and applications are statistical, looking at broad swaths of data to inform their actions. As long as most of the data used to train a model or application is correct, the model or application will be useful.
“If a data set is poor quality, you’ll get poor results,” Farmer said. “But if one piece of data is wrong, it’s not going to make much difference to the AI because it’s looking at statistics as a whole.”
That is, unless it’s that fine-grained decision about an individual such as whether to approve a mortgage application. In that case, if the data is wrong, it can lead to serious ethical consequences. Even more catastrophically, in a healthcare scenario, bad data could lead to the difference between life and death.
“If we’re using AI to make decisions about individuals — are we going to give someone a mortgage — then having high-quality individual data becomes extremely important, because then we have given this system over,” Farmer said. “If we’re talking about AI making fine-grained decisions, then the data has to be very high-quality.”
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Ensuring data quality
With data quality so critical to the success of AI, as well as reaping the benefits of broader use of technologies and exponentially increased efficiency, the obvious question is how enterprises can ensure good data goes into models and applications so that good outputs result.
There is, unfortunately, no simple solution — no fail-safe.
Data quality is difficult. Enterprises have always struggled to ensure only good-quality data is used to inform decisions. In the era of AI, including generative AI, that’s no different.
“The problem is still hard,” Abhyankar said.
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But there are steps that organizations can take to lessen the likelihood of bad data slipping through the cracks and affecting the accuracy of models and applications. There are technologies they can use and processes they can implement.
Ironically, many of the technologies that can detect bad data use AI to do so.
Vendors such as Informatica and Oracle offer tools designed specifically to monitor data quality. These tools can look at data characteristics such as metadata and data lineage, sometimes have master data management capabilities, and in general are built to detect problematic data. Other vendors such as Alation and Collibra provide data catalogs that help enterprises organize and govern data, including descriptions of data, to provide users with information before they operationalize any data.
Still other vendors including Acceldata and Monte Carlo offer data observability platforms that use AI to monitor data as it moves through data pipelines, detecting irregularities as they occur and automatically alerting customers to potential problems. But unlike data quality tools and data catalogs that address data quality while data is at rest before being used to train AI models and applications, observability tools monitor data while it is in motion on its way to a model or application.
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“Increasingly, AI is actually in a sense running its own data quality,” Farmer said. “Many of those tools work on inferences, work on discovering patterns of the data. It turns out that AI is very good at that and doing it at scale.”
More important than any tooling, however, is that humans always remain involved and check any output before it is used to take action.
Just as a hybrid approach emerged as ideal for cloud computing — including on-premises, private cloud and public cloud — a hybrid approach that uses technology to augment humans is emerging as the ideal approach to working with the data used to train AI, according to SingleStore’s Kumar.
“First and foremost is to allow humans to have control,” he said.
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Humans simply know more about their organization’s data than machines and can better spot when something seems off. Humans have been working with their organization’s data from their organization’s founding, which in some cases means there are decades’ worth of code used to develop and inform dashboards and reports that humans can perfectly replicate, but a machine might not know.
Humans, in a simple example, know whether their company’s fiscal year starts on Jan. 1 or some other date, while a model might assume it starts on Jan. 1.
“Hybrid means human plus AI,” Kumar said. “There are things AI is really good at, like repetition and automation, but when it comes to quality, there’s still the fact that humans are a lot better because they have a lot more context about their data.”
If there’s a human at the end of the process to check outputs, organizations can better ensure actions taken will have their intended results, and some potentially damaging actions can be avoided.
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If there’s a person to make sure a mortgage application should be rejected or approved, it will benefit their organization’s bottom line. The approved mortgage will result in profits, as well as avoid the serious consequences of mistakenly declining someone’s application based on biased data, while the declined mortgage will avoid potential losses related to a default.
If there’s a healthcare worker to check whether a patient is allergic to a recommended medication or that medication might interact badly with another medication the patient is taking, it could save a life.
The AI models and applications, fueled by data, can be left to do their work. They can automate repetitive processes, generate code to develop applications, write summaries and documentation, respond to user questions in natural language and so on. They’re good at those tasks, when informed by good-quality data.
But they’re not perfect, even when the data used to train them is as good as possible.
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“There always has to be human intervention,” Menninger said.
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
Cards Against Humanity is the latest entity to take on Elon Musk in court. The irreverent party game company filed a $15 million lawsuit against SpaceX for trespassing on property it owns in Texas, which happens to sit near SpaceX facilities.
According to filed in a federal court in Texas, Musk’s rocket company began using its land without permission for the last six months. SpaceX took what was previously a “pristine” plot of land “and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage,” CAH wrote in a .
As you might expect from the card game company known for its raunchy sense of humor and headline-grabbing stunts, there’s an amusing backstory to how it became neighbors with SpaceX in Texas in the first place. , the company bought land along the US-Mexico border as part of a crowdfunded effort to protest then President Donald Trump’s plan to build a border wall. Since then, the company writes, it has maintained the land with regular mowing, fencing and “no trespassing” signs.
SpaceX later purchased adjacent land and, earlier this year, allegedly began using CAH’s land amid some kind of construction project. From the lawsuit (emphasis theirs):
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The site was cleared of vegetation, and the soil was compacted with gravel or other substance to allow SpaceX and its contractors to run and park its vehicles all over the Property. Generators were brought in to run equipment and lights while work was being performed before and after daylight. An enormous mound of gravel was unloaded onto the Property; the gravel is being stored and used for the construction of buildings by SpaceX’s contractors along the road. Large pieces of construction equipment and numerous construction-related vehicles are utilized and stored on the Property continuously. And, of course, workers are present performing construction work and staging materials and vehicles for work to be performed on other tracts. In short, SpaceX has treated the Property as its own for at least six (6) months without regard for CAH’s property rights nor the safety of anyone entering what has become a worksite that is presumably governed by OSHA safety requirements.
SpaceX, according to the filing, “never asked for permission” to use the land and “and hasnever reached out to CAH to explain or apologize for the damage.” The rocket company did, however, give “a 12-hour ultimatum to accept a lowball offer for less than half our land’s value,” according to a statement posted online. A spokesperson for CAH said the land in question is “about an acre” in size.
What CAH’s Texas land looked like prior to SpaceX’s alleged trespassing. (Christopher Markos / Cards Against Humanity)
In response to the ultimatum, CAH filed a $15 million lawsuit against SpaceX for trespassing and damaging its property. The game company, which originally was funded via a Kickstarter campaign, says that if it’s successful in court it will share the proceeds with the 150,000 fans who helped originally purchase the land in 2017. It created where subscribers can sign-up for a chance to get up to $150 of the potential $15 million payout should their lawsuit succeed. (A disclaimer notes that “Elon Musk has way more money and lawyers than Cards Against Humanity, and while CAH will try its hardest to get me $100, they will probably only be able to get me like $2 or most likely nothing.)
SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But CAH isn’t the only Texas landowner that’s raised questions about the company’s tactics. SpaceX has been aggressively growing its footprint in Southern Texas in recent years. The expansion, which has resulted in many locals selling their land to SpaceX, has rankled some longtime residents, according to an investigation Reuters.
CAH says that Musk’s past behavior makes SpaceX’s actions “particularly offensive” to the company known for taking a stance on social issues.
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“The 2017 holiday campaign that resulted in the purchase of the Property was based upon CAH undertaking efforts to fight against ‘injustice, lies, [and] racism,” it states. “Thus, it is particularly offensive that these egregious acts against the Property have been committed by the company run by Elon Musk. As is widely known, Musk has been accused of tolerating racism and sexism at Tesla and of amplifying the antisemitic ‘Great Replacement Theory.’ Allowing Musk’s company to abuse the Property that CAH’s supporters contributed money to purchase for the sole purpose of stopping such behavior is totally contrary to both the reason for the contribution and the tenets on which CAH is based.”
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Game marketing is changing, thanks to Hamster Kombat, a tapping mini-game on Telegram that has been downloaded more than 300 million times since March. It took only 73 days for Hamster Kombat to reach its first 100 million users.
Traditional marketing tactics are losing their power when it comes to attracting the attention of target audiences, said Tavia Wong, chief marketing officer at Credbull, a small private credit company in Asia with a dozen employees. The age of the viral game is back, at least on one platform. And many are starting to copy the formula like PiP World, Bondex, Gamee and Liithos.
In an interview with GamesBeat, she said that Web3 tap-and-earn games like Hamster Kombat are the unexpected inspiration for marketing professionals, and she believes every business can learn from their success, as well as how to leverage it for translating hype into revenue. Will it be a lifeline for Web3 games, which have struggled to get mainstream acceptance?
“When I first saw Hamster Kombat, I thought it was quite silly. It was going viral on Telegram and I thought it probably wasn’t going to go anywhere,” Wong said. “”But low and behold, the community has been growing really, really quickly. It’s one of the most successful games on Telegram, where there’s a cute hamster that a lot of people can just tap away on.”
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She added, “As a marketer, it really makes you sit up and go, ‘Okay, what’s there? Why is the community going so quickly?’ And it keeps growing.”
Hamster Kombat
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Hamster Kombat is a tap-to-earn crypto game on Telegram, where you click or tap on the screen. Players take the role of a CEO at a cryptocurrency exchange. The creators said in May 2024 that they would launch a token on The Open Network (TON), a Layer-1 blockchain originally created by Telegram. Now the development is being handled externally by the community.
In the game, players start as a bald hamster under contract to be a CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Users can tap the hamster avatar to generate in-game coins, but the main gameplay mechanic involves purchasing exchange upgrades to increase the hourly profit. You can earn coins by referring friends to play the game on Telegram or by finishing harder in-game tasks like solving a daily Morse code cipher.
It’s popular for the moment. But things can change. Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and is being held on charges that the platform doesn’t do enough to protect users from fraud, terror and other negative influences. It’s not clear how this will affect Telegram.
Marketing savvy
Tavia Wong of Credbull.
At a marketing agency, Wong ran ad campaigns for more than eight years and she sold the agency to a Fortune 500 company. She then joined an AI firm and later looked into crypto. Her current company Credbull is looking to engage with the retail community — the enthusiasts who will pay attention to such “tap and earn” games. So she really wanted to find out what was driving this game forward.
“One of the main reasons behind it is incentives (check out our recent story on the Benjamin app), and it’s almost like going to a casino. It’s a little bit of a gambling effect because people tap. They get more points when they refer their friends to the game, and they also get points to rank on the leaderboard. So they have to do it like a daily streak,” Wong said.
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It could be viewed as addictive like gambling. Or like other more benign habits.
“Think about it like Duolingo. So every day you have to kind of log in and they are cool sound effects,” Wong said. “There are things that really keep you engaged within the app. And there are leaderboards to show you where you rank, so that you really don’t want to go down because it affects how many points you’re going to get. And it becomes this crazy, crazy game. And you would think that a user is probably going to get a huge amount of tokens or rewards — a financial incentive for being so active. But the fact is that most of this project has not even launched or released yet. So everybody is playing in anticipation of a future reward.”
It’s like any other speculative bubble in that respect. There’s a lot of word of mouth, and people are just really engaged within those communities, Wong said.
This bodes well for marketers because they lost virality after Facebook shutdown the game spam and after Apple hobbled targeted ads in favor of user privacy.
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“It’s a very good thing for marketers because these games, as we get more sophisticated, can also introduce the idea of clans. And these clans compete against each other to see who gets the most,” Wong said. “That makes you feel a sense of belonging to a bigger club.” And the wining gets bigger.
Soon enough, there’s a domino effect that fuels the game’s momentum.
Growth hacking
Hamsters are popular on Telegram.
Wong believes that Hamster Kombat leverages growth hacking. She said the game’s explosive growth isn’t a coincidence. It’s a winning formula fueled by social media buzz, word-of-mouth, and clever referral programsthat create a self-sustaining wave of new users. Every victory, every success story, and every shared experience attract more players to the action. It’s a domino effect fueling the game’s momentum.
It’s also tapping into gamification on Telegram, a platform that doesn’t have a ton of hardcore games. She thinks Web3 games like Hamster Kombat are exploding with easy-to-play, gamified experiences that seamlessly integrate with crypto.
Telegram happens to have a lot of crypto fans, particularly those who are concerned about traditional government that they’re willing to put their money into cryptocurrency. Telegram also has a lot of people who therefore have their own cryptocurrency wallets — something that Hamster Kombat leverages.
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Wong believes this is the future of user engagement, and it’s not just for gamers anymore. Think gamified loyalty programs or interactive marketing campaigns. Tap into reward-seeking behavior, a natural competitive spirit, and the classic fear of missing out to incentivize potential customers to engage with your communications.
Good old days of Facebook
Developers can still leverage network effects on Telegram, as it’s like the old Facebook before it cracked down on viral messaging. Being strategic about choosing a crypto native messaging app to launch a relevant tap and earn game or other gamified experiences is key to leverage the large user bases of apps like Telegram, Wong said.
For the moment, players are embracing the quirkiness of Hamster Kombat. These mini-games are fun, quirky, and full of surprises. Forget dry press releases. Think interactive challenges, gamified product features, or even a mascot that embodies your brand’s personality.
And community is everything, Wong said. Look at Hamster Kombat’s massive social media following, consisting of 300 million users; 13 million followers on Twitter/X, and their YouTube account of tens of millions subscribers. Web3 games foster strong communities through shared gameplay and rewards. Can your marketing strategy create a similar level of engagement?
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Harnessing traffic
A hyperrealistic hamster.
It’s important not to measure engagement just for the sake of reporting on success. Marketers need to ask themselves how they can harness the traffic and attention they’re receiving from successful campaigns to translate it into users, she said.
By making gamified experiences highly relevant to the end solution, companies can not only educate users on their solution, for instance as Monzo did by providing insights on spending habits, but by directly pushing communications aimed at customer onboarding within the experience itself and continually rewarding them with bonus points for following the user journey.
Each day, millions of new users are joining Hamster Kombat, making it one of the fastest-growing digital services in the world, according to Telegram. We’ll see what happens once the Hamster Kombat team mints its token on TON.
Loyalty
What kind of gamers like Hamster Kombat?
I asked Wong what’s the difference between this and regular loyalty programs that people are creating.
“With regular loyalty programs, you come up with a program, you try to engage your existing community, but people don’t really care much about your loyalty program unless you’re a really big brand,” she said. “So how do you build something like that from scratch? So I think the key is to go where the traffic is. Go out on Telegram, for example, where these tap to earn games are so popular. You can tap into the millions of people already using Telegram.”
Hamster Kombat is a hypercasual game where everybody can play. Brands can start moving in on the action to reach the players with various kinds of ads. The people are already there. Credbull launched its own tap-and-earn game that got off the ground.
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“We’re leveraging on the hype of this, and then putting in all the psychology of good marketing and selling, where it’s like social rush,” she said. “You have speculation and future rewards and then create surprises within the game in a very simple way. It leads to really explosive in growth.”
“What’s cool is that the the benefits of this go past marketing. So our product team has also been loving tis as they can launch small product features and test them within the game. You can use it to test offers, product features and see how the crowd responds to it,” she said. “It becomes your focus group for your product team. You get immediate feedback on whether users love it or not.”
Wong compares this time, where the number of games is in the hundreds, to the early days of Facebook. She predicts the brands will come in. Credbull has experimented with its own Telegram game in various ways.
“I think there is a parallel with the game and metaverse brands, like how they want to engage with retail consumers and so they created shops on the metaverse,” she said.
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These brands go where someone is succeeding in getting attention.
“I wouldn’t underestimate how effective Telegram has been at onboading users,” she said. “There are so many messaging apps out there. But Telegram is one of the top in the world.”
Leveraging popularity
Nothing lasts forever. But when you can leverage popularity for a purpose, you can grow.
When you’re planning loyalty campaigns, you’re trying to get people interested in the first place and then to retain that interest in the long run, she said. Big social media companies have studied what it takes to make people play. The details get very granular. Games like Angry Birds had memorable sounds that could serve as psychological triggers within your brain to keep playing, she said. A huge team comes together to understand the psychology, game mechanics, the tokenomics and more to start social engagement. In the case of Telegram, it’s so brainless that you create a game to tap.
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The good question is at what point does the game with weak gameplay give way to a more sophisticated game with much better gameplay. The game can be simple, but it has enough sophistication to keep people playing. Gamification apps focus on motivating the player to stay engaged and use social techniques to retain them.
I noted one triple-A game company, Liithos, wanted to make an open world game. It couldn’t raise money in the current environment, so it took one piece of the intellectual property and made a character out of it. Then it launched it as a viral clicker game. It’s called Clickbait, a satirical game called Clickbait as part of its No One Is Safe franchise.
It’s trying to draw attention to its bigger mission and games through the Clickbait game, which revolves around mischievous chatbot called RantCPU. and it focuses on the anxiety around AI and a world where humanity has destroyed itself. It’s a new transmedia property set to launch as a game on Steam, a comic book series from Scout, and trading cards.
Wong noted some game companies raise money directly from the community. With NFTs, sometimes that worked and sometimes it went horribly wrong, with scammers stealing money.
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“When I saw this tap and earn game, as a CMO, to be honest, I dismissed it because I was like, it’s so silly. I played so much better production games from big gaming houses. Why am I spending my time playing on this? But when I looked at the metrics, they were growing like crazy,” she said.
Wong added, “I understand why it’s so popular now, because it’s using all the effects of the psychology.”
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The federal government is handing out another $3 billion to startups in the buzzy battery tech sector.
The investment, which the Biden administration announced Friday, is the latest injection of capital to come from a $16 billion pot that the Department of Energy set aside to build out local battery manufacturing, processing, and recycling facilities. It’s part of the broader Inflation Reduction Act, which passed into law in August 2022 and includes incentives to boost the domestic battery industry and reduce reliance on the world’s battery incumbent, China.
This tranche of funding went to startups across 14 states, but there were certain winners that will see the bulk of the expected 18,000 jobs to be created as a result of this funding. South Carolina companies secured the most funding, with five projects being awarded $850 million. For example, Cirba Solutions grabbed a $200 million bag to build, own, and operate a facility to process large-scale battery-grade salts to support the electric vehicle market.
Four Michigan companies snagged a total $355 million in grant money. General Motors-backed Mitra Chem got $100 million from the DOE and another $25 million from the state of Michigan’s Competitiveness Fund. The company will partner with Sun Chemical to build a facility that will develop and manufacture lithium-iron phosphate materials for electric vehicles and battery storage systems.
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The DOE also awarded venture-backed battery recycling startup Ascend Elements $125 million, alongside chemical manufacturing company Orbia, to build a recycled graphite production facility in Kentucky that converts graphite residue from lithium-ion battery recycling and cathode material production into battery-grade graphite.
The loans and grants will go to companies working across the battery supply chain, from critical mineral extraction to production of cathode and anode materials, from electrolyte salt production to battery recycling.
Here’s a list of all of the startups that have secured funds:
The DOE awarded $3 billion to 25 battery startups as part of the Battery Materials Processing and Battery Manufacturing and Recycling Programs.Image Credits: U.S. Department of Energy
With a smart video doorbell, your front door’s communication skills go from 1980s landline to a modern smartphone. Combining a motion-activated camera with a microphone, speaker, and doorbell, a doorbell camera sends alerts to your phone to show you who’s calling without you having to open the door or even be at home. Whether you’re curled up on the couch, hard at work in your office, or sunning on a beach in the Bahamas, a smart doorbell camera keeps you in touch with what’s happening on your doorstep.
I’ve tested more than 30 video doorbells, and while there’s no one-size-fits-all — like a smartphone, it’s a personal choice — I have thoughts on which are the best of the best and which work well for specific use cases.
What I’m looking for
A nice design
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This is on your front door, and it needs to look good and / or blend in.
Affordable (or free) video recording
All video doorbells must offer a live feed, but a cloud or local storage option for video recordings, so you can see visitors you missed, is important too. Some companies offer free local storage or some free cloud storage, but most require a monthly fee.
Good motion detection and alerts
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Fast and accurate motion detection so you know when someone is at the door, plus smart alerts for people, animal, and vehicles to cut down on nuisance notification. The option to add custom motion zones helps with this, too. Some even offer package detection, which is always nice.
Good video quality
At least 1080p HD video with the option of HDR to help see faces clearer if your doorway is backlit. Color night vision is a bonus but not a necessity if you have a porch light.
Head-to-toe aspect ratio
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If you’re concerned about keeping an eye on packages, a head-to-toe view will let you see the space in front of your door from top to bottom. There are uses for other aspect ratios, though, so read my FAQ for more on this.
Useful smart home integrations
Compatibility with the major smart home platforms adds features like having lights turn on on your porch when motion is detected or being able to unlock your front door while viewing a live feed from your doorbell. Also, compatibility with smart displays so you can have a video intercom for your doorbell.
An indoor chime
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Some way of alerting you to the doorbell ringing inside your house (not just through your smartphone) is important, either through your existing doorbell chime or through a smart speaker or plug in chime.
Wired power option or removable batteries
I always recommend that if you have existing doorbell wires, use them; you’ll never have to worry about charging your doorbell (see my FAQ for more on this). Battery-powered options will do if there’s no way to wire; removable or replaceable batteries are important here — taking your entire doorbell down to charge it up every three months is a pain.
My most important advice is that if you have existing doorbell wires, use them. Wired doorbells are generally cheaper, work better, and are more compact, so they tend to look nicer.
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If you don’t have wires and don’t want to pay for an electrician to run them, try using an AC power adapter (Ring and Google Nest sell their own; you can also find generic ones). But if all else fails, I’ve got a couple of recommendations for good battery-powered buzzers. Just plan to pick up an extra battery when you purchase, or factor in removing it from your door every few months to charge it for a few hours.
Best doorbell camera
With 24/7 recording, facial recognition, reliable smart alerts, and some free video recording, Google’s newest wired doorbell is the best option for most people.
Video quality: 960x1280p, 6x zoom, HDR / Smart alerts: Person, package, animal, vehicle, and facial recognition ($) Aspect ratio: 3:4 / Field of view: 145 degrees diagonal / Power options: Wired / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz / Storage: Cloud and local / Subscription fee: $8 a month / Works with: Alexa, Google, SmartThings
The Nest Doorbell Wired (2nd-gen) is one of only two video doorbells in this list that can record 24/7. Scrolling through a continuous timeline view of everything that’s happened at your front door is super helpful and means you won’t miss anything. This, along with a low price, good video quality, the ability to tell you what and who is at your door, and some free recorded video, make it the best doorbell for most people.
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The Nest Wired is also the best video doorbell that works with Google Home, and the best for protecting your packages. Its proactive package watch feature tells you when a package arrives and sends another alert when it’s gone. In my testing, it worked very well.
Unlike many competitors — such as Ring and Arlo — Google doesn’t charge you for smart notifications. The Nest Wired will tell you if it’s a person, package, animal, or vehicle at your door for free. You also get free activity zones to cut down on unwanted notifications, and three free hours of event-based recordings, thanks to its local storage and local processing.
You can, in theory, use this doorbell without paying a subscription.
But three hours isn’t enough time to be particularly useful. And the $8 per month ($80 / year) Nest Aware subscription is very expensive compared to some single-camera subs from competitors. However, it does cover all your Google Nest cameras for less than competitor multi-camera offerings and adds 30 days of event-recorded video storage, plus Nest’s excellent Familiar Faces feature that tells you who is at your door, mostly reliably.
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If you want that 24/7 recording, you need to up it to $15 per month ($150 / year), but again, this subscription applies to all Google Nest cameras you have — the company has an indoor, indoor/outdoor, and floodlight camera.
The Nest wired has four color options and more discreet branding than most doorbells.
The Nest Doorbell Wired is essentially the same as the Nest Doorbell Battery. It costs the same, has the same tech specs, and looks identical beyond a size difference. But there is one key hardware change: the Nest wired is a true wired doorbell, which means it runs directly off your existing doorbell wiring.
Because it’s wired, it can record continuously, which the battery version can’t. The wired power also means it’s faster and more reliable. Plus, as with all true wired doorbells, it catches more footage at the beginning of each event (about three to four seconds) — so avoids the back-of-the-head problem many doorbells suffer from, where the camera takes too long to wake up to catch the visitor as they approach.
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On paper, it doesn’t have the best specs; the Arlo and Ring Pro 2 look better technically. But you do get 960 x 1280 pixel resolution and a 6x digital zoom. And video quality is very good, thanks to some digital trickery. A 3:4 portrait aspect ratio and 145-degree field of view meant I could see my porch from top to bottom and a fair amount from side to side.
On-device AI makes the Nest speedy with notifications, and it delivers rich alerts to both your phone and watch. These are interactive, allowing me to press and hold the video to see a clip and activate one of the three pre-set quick responses. It’s also quick to call up live video.
Nest’s doorbells and cameras work with Nest smart displays and speakers to show and/or tell you who is at your door, and with Amazon Alexa smart displays to see and talk to your visitor. Recently, Google also updated its Pixel Tablet so you can use it to pull up a livestream from a Nest video doorbell to see who’s at your front door; they also work with Samsung SmartThings, but there’s no native integration with Apple Home.
There are a few quirks. There’s no reliable way to snooze notifications from the doorbell, and if you use multiple Nest speakers or displays, they’ll all announce your visitors. Not great if you have a Nest Mini in your kid’s nursery. It also doesn’t work with the Nest app, only the Google Home app, but following a big redesign last year, the app handles video playback very well, and you can now use a doorbell press to trigger an automation — such as turning on a light in the hallway.
The newest Ring doorbell adds better video quality, head-to-toe view, and speedy response times for a battery doorbell. It works great with Amazon Alexa and can record locally to a Ring Alarm Pro, but the battery still only lasts two months.
Video quality: 1536 x 1536p, HDR, color night vision / Smart Alerts: Person, package ($) Aspect ratio: 1:1 / Field of view: 150 degrees horizontal, 150 degrees vertical / Power options: Battery, wired trickle charge, solar / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz / Storage: Cloud and local (with Ring Alarm Pro) / Subscription fee: $4.99 a month / Works with: Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings
If you have no choice but to rely on battery power, the Ring Battery Doorbell Plus is the way to go. At $149.99, it’s still expensive but offers a head-to-toe view and high-quality video resolution, giving you a clear picture of what’s going on at your door.
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The Plus also has color night vision and was more responsive than any other battery doorbell I’ve tested. It pulled up a live view in under four seconds, compared with upwards of 10 seconds for most others.
As with other battery-powered doorbells, there’s no pre-roll. If catching people as they approach your door — not just at your door — is crucial for you, you might want to consider the new Battery Doorbell Pro ($229.99), which adds pre-roll and improved motion detection. I am currently testing this and will add it to the guide shortly.
The Ring Plus and the previous Ring 4 look identical, but the Plus has some plusses.
Battery life isn’t great, despite the “Plus” name. It lasted two months with all the features turned on except for extra-long recordings (the default is 30 seconds, but it can go up to 120). This is about the same as Ring’s previous Ring 4 and less than the Eufy Dual. You can tweak settings on either doorbell to reduce power consumption, but then you have to give up features like HDR (which makes it easier to see faces) and snapshot capture, which takes a picture every five minutes to give you a better idea of what’s been happening at your door.
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On the plus side, Ring uses swappable batteries. The Plus uses the same $35 Quick Release ones as Ring’s battery-powered cameras. This makes it much easier to keep your doorbell charged — just have a second on hand charged and ready to swap in when you get low (they’re easy to charge with a USB type-A cable, and one is included). Most other doorbells require you to take them down to recharge.
The Ring Battery Plus uses a removable, rechargeable battery.
But — as with all Ring doorbells — there are no animal or vehicle alerts, only people and packages (for a fee). It’s also 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi only, which is a disappointment, although I didn’t have any connectivity issues in testing.
Other features include pre-recorded quick replies and the option to set a motion alert schedule, plus live view and two-way audio. You need a Ring Protect Plan for recorded video, as well as people-only mode and package alerts, which cuts down on unnecessary notifications. Both of these were very accurate in testing. A subscription starts at $4.99 a month. Home and Away features are also behind the paywall, which makes it fiddly to automaticallyturn off your cameras when you’re home without coughing up some cash.
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The Plus also works with Ring Edge, a local storage and processing option that requires a Ring Alarm Pro smart hub and a Ring Protect Pro subscription ($20 a month). This also adds cellular backup through its built-in Eero Wifi system, so it can keep your doorbell online if both the power and internet go out.
The Plus can announce visitors on Echo speakers and automatically initiate a two-way audio/video call on an Echo Show. It won’t work with your existing chime unless you wire it (which also trickle-charges the battery), but Ring sells a plug-in chime.
Finally, it’s worth noting Ring recently introduced a new entry-level doorbell camera, the Ring Battery Doorbell. It also runs on batteries and offers a head-to-toe view like the Plus, but it offers lower-resolution, 1080p HD video. You can also can’t remove the batteries. We’ve yet to test the doorbell, but we’ll update this guide with our thoughts when we do.
Best budget doorbell camera
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$60
Blink’s Video Doorbell is the best if you’re looking a budget-friendly buzzer that offers motion-activated recording and alerts, night vision, two-way audio, and up to two years of battery life.
Video quality: 1080p / Smart alerts: none / Aspect ratio: 16:9 / Field of view: 135 degrees horizontal, 80 degrees vertical / Power options: Wired or battery / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz / Storage: Cloud or local with a Sync Module / Subscription fee: $3 a month / Works with: Amazon Alexa
The Blink Video Doorbell is the best cheap doorbell with the option of no ongoing fees. And while it works as a wired doorbell, it’s also a good option for a battery-powered buzzer, as it can go up to two years on two AAs. I don’t love this doorbell, as video and audio quality are not great, but it’s cheap, it gets the job done, and that battery life is phenomenal.
The Blink lacks a lot of bells and whistles (no smart alerts or quick replies, only 1080p video, and a standard 16:9 aspect ratio), but the basics are here — motion-activated recording (with a max of 30 seconds), alerts, live view (with caveats), night vision, motion zones, and two-way audio. If you want to pay $50 (often less) to have a camera at your door and be done with it, get the Blink. If you pay $10 a month for a Blink Subscription Plus Plan, you can also get access to Blink Moments, a neat app feature that stitches together relevant clips from multiple cameras into a single video. That should make clips easier to share and see at a glance, but we’ll share our thoughts on the feature in the coming weeks.
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I only recommend buying the Blink with its wireless hub, the Sync Module 2.
The biggest selling point for Blink is the feature that makes its similarly inexpensive security cameras so attractive: up to two years of battery life on two AA lithium batteries. The company has developed a super energy-efficient chip that will power its cameras longer than any other doorbell I’ve tested. (I managed almost a year with very heavy use).
Uniquely for a battery-powered doorbell, the Blink can also be a true hardwired doorbell. When wired, it will activate an existing chime (something neither the sub-$100 Ring nor Wyze doorbells can do) and provide constant power — not just trickle charge. This means it can wake up faster than a battery-powered buzzer and catch your visitor as they arrive. Wiring also adds on-demand two-way audio and live view (otherwise, you can only see the stream if there’s a motion event at the doorbell or someone presses the buzzer.)
The lack of an on-demand live view on battery power would be a deal-breaker, but I only recommend buying this doorbell with its wireless hub, the Sync Module 2, which also enables on-demand live views plus adds free, local storage. (You can get a live view with a subscription, too, starting at $3 a month). The extra $35 for the Sync Module 2 should pay for itself compared to a monthly subscription, and for a total of $85, this is still less than Ring’s similar offerings (you will also need a USB stick to store the videos on).
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The Blink comes in white or black and, because it uses AA batteries, isn’t as huge as most battery-powered doorbells, making it a more discreet option. However, it is a giant pain in the neck to install; make sure to follow the video instructions Blink provides closely to save a lot of frustration.
The biggest drawbacks are lower video quality and poor audio quality (it can be staticky, and it’s push-to-talk — not full duplex), short recording length, and no smart alerts. The app is also a bit tricky to navigate. It doesn’t work with Google Home, but it works great with Alexa, and you can see a live view on Echo Show devices and use any Echo speaker as an indoor chime.
Best doorbell camera without a subscription
This battery-powered video doorbell features two cameras to catch both packages and visitors, as well as local storage, package alerts, facial recognition, and compatibility with Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
Video quality: 2K HD, 4x zoom / Smart Alerts: Person and packages, facial recognition Aspect ratio:4:3 / Field of view: 160 degrees horizontal / Power options: Battery, wired trickle charge / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz / Storage: Cloud / Subscription fee: none / Works with: Amazon Alexa, Google Home
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If you don’t want to pay any monthly fees but want a feature-packed doorbell that records footage for free, the Eufy Dual is the best, thanks to a second camera at the bottom that records the doorstep. But it’s expensive.
There’s no charge for smart alerts that spot people and packages, and innovative AI features are free, too. These include facial recognition and “Package Live Check Assistance,” which frames any packages in a blue box and collects recent events around the delivery for quick viewing, and an Uncollected Package alert, which has the doorbell check for packages at a designated time, alerting you if you forgot to pick something up.
Important Note: In late 2022, Eufy suffered some security vulnerabilities, which the company was not transparent about. We temporarily removed our recommendations while the company worked on a fix. While the security flaws appear to have been resolved, the company’s lack of transparency is something to consider before purchasing a Eufy camera. You can read more about the issues and Eufy’s solutions here.
However, as a battery-powered doorbell, the Dual has the same problem as others. No pre-roll footage means you may not see the person as they approach your door, only when they’re in front of it or walking away. But its onboard machine learning, AI-powered smart alerts, and motion detection that uses both PiR and radar mean no false alerts. And those two cameras give you a blind-spot-free view of your front door area, one in 2K and the other in 1080P.
Battery life is good, better than the Ring Plus, lasting about three months based on my testing (it claims 3 to 6 months). But you have to take the whole doorbell down to charge, which is a pain.
Best wired video doorbell that works with Amazon Alexa and Ring
$230
The flagship Ring doorbell has the best video quality, good connectivity, and excellent motion detection. It works smoothly with Amazon Alexa, but is expensive, requires a subscription for most features, and doesn’t offer 24/7 recording.
Video quality: 1536 x 1536p, HDR / Smart alerts: Person, package ($) Aspect ratio: 1:1 / Field of view: 150 degrees horizontal, 150 degrees vertical / Power options: Wired / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz / Storage: Cloud and local (with Ring Alarm Pro) / Subscription fee: $4.99 a month / Works with: Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings
The Ring Pro 2 — previously my top pick — is the best-wired doorbell camera that works with Amazon Alexa and integrates with Ring Alarm and other Ring cameras. It’s more expensive than the Nest Wired — which also works with Alexa — but its video is higher quality and much brighter.
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It has an ideal square aspect ratio for a full front porch view, speedy notifications, and impressively accurate motion detection using three separate sensors — radar, video analysis, and passive infrared. It also has a nice slim design and multiple faceplate options to fit your decor. But there’s no free video recording, no option for 24/7 recording, and the smart alerts are limited to people and packages only.
The Ring Pro 2 does work with Samsung SmartThings and while it doesn’t support Apple Home, it can be integrated with extra hardware. There’s no support for Google Home.
The Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 has a compact design and the option of swappable faceplates for a different look.
A true wired doorbell, Ring Pro 2 has alerts for packages and people (but not for vehicles or animals), color night vision, dual-band Wi-Fi, and smart responses (which let your doorbell talk to your visitor for you). The Ring app is excellent. There are pages of settings you can tinker with, and the timeline view to scroll through your recordings is very good.
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The Pro 2 will work with existing doorbell chimes, plus Ring sells a plug-in Chime and Chime Wi-Fi extender that can help boost connectivity while providing a selection of fun doorbell tones. Of all the doorbells I tested, this had the best range and connectivity, and built-in, full-color pre-roll helps ensure you don’t miss any crucial action.
Ring doorbell cameras can stream to Amazon Echo Show smart displays, and show the feed automatically if someone presses the doorbell.
As with a lot of doorbell cameras, the Pro 2 can use Echo smart speakers to announce when there’s somebody at the door. Ring doorbells can also automatically pull up a live feed of your doorbell on an Echo Show or Fire TV-enabled television when someone presses the doorbell. This gives you an instant video intercom in your home — a super handy feature.
The downside is that the Pro 2 is expensive. Although it recently dropped by $20, its subscription fee — the Ring Protect plan — went up to $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year). This adds recorded footage, smart alerts, and an extra six seconds of pre-roll video, which, in lieu of 24/7 recording, provides plenty of time around motion events to catch all the action. The digital zoom is good, but not the best on offer — Arlo wins that race with a whopping 12x.
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The Pro does work with Ring Edge for local storage and processing of videos, plus the option of cellular backup. But you need a Ring Alarm Pro and Ring Protect Pro subscription for this ($20 a month, which includes professional monitoring and recorded video), although compared to $15 a month for just video services with the Nest, it’s a good deal.
Best doorbell camera that works with any smart home
Arlo’s first-gen wired video doorbell has excellent video quality, wide smart home compatibility, extensive smart alerts, and a square aspect ratio for spotting packages. It suffers from some connectivity issues, requires a subscription for recorded video, and doesn’t have 24/7 recording but does include a pre-roll feature.
Video quality: 1536x1536p, 12x zoom, HDR / Aspect ratio: 1:1 / Field of view: 180 degrees horizontal / Power options: Wired / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz / Storage: Cloud / Subscription fee: $7.99 a month / Works with: Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings, Apple Home (with an Arlo Hub)
If you use more than one smart home platform or are looking for something that’s outside the Google or Alexa ecosystem, the Arlo Essential Wired Doorbell (first-gen) is a great all-around choice with wide smart home platform compatibility. The company recently launched a second-gen model that’s battery-powered with optional wired trickle-charging, but it doesn’t work with Apple Home, so the first-gen is the one I currently recommend.
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For less money and with more features than the Ring Pro 2, Arlo’s video doorbell adds native Apple Home support and works very well with Google Home. It’s one of the few non-Google cameras you can view live feeds from in the Google Home app and it also works with Amazon Alexa. But note it doesn’t support HomeKit Secure Video, and you will need to pick up the Arlo SmartHub ($100) to integrate with Apple Home.
If you are already using Arlo cameras or its security system, this is an easy add. It also has smart alerts for people, packages, animals, and vehicles, a handy square aspect ratio, and a 180-degree field of view that gets the whole porch. Plus, it has the same high video resolution as the Pro 2.
There is also a built-in siren for scaring off a package thief or neighborhood cat and a backup battery (it only lasts for a few minutes). Courtesy of its wired nature, it has a pre-roll that captures your visitor as they approach. Arlo’s wire-free option doesn’t have this and suffers from that back-of-the-head problem.
However, the Arlo is not as fast or reliable as the Nest Doorbell Wired. It isn’t as quick to send alerts or pull up a video feed and struggles when placed farther from the router. If you don’t have a good Wi-Fi signal at your front door, the Arlo isn’t for you. There is no option of a chime Wi-Fi extender as with the Ring Pro 2, and it only works over 2.4 GHz — both the Ring Pro 2 and Nest Wired can use 5 GHz.
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Arlo’s doorbells cost less and offer more but aren’t as reliable
A subscription plan is pretty much a necessity since, without it, all you get is a live view. Starting at $7.99 a month ($89.99 annually), Arlo Secure adds smart alerts, automatic geofencing to turn your camera off when you arrive home, 30 days of rolling cloud video storage, interactive notifications, quick responses, and activity zones. (Ring doesn’t charge for activity zones.) But there’s no option for 24/7 recording, which is available on Arlo’s non-doorbell security cameras.
The Arlo is a nice-looking doorbell and comes in all-black or black with white trim. It works with your existing chime and can use Amazon Echo or Google Nest smart speakers to notify you of a visitor; plus, Arlo sells its own plug-in chime with a choice of ringtones for $50.
Finally, a unique feature about the Arlo doorbell I really like is that when someone presses the button, the notification arrives like a phone call — as opposed to a pop-up. This makes it less likely you’ll miss a visitor, plus the doorbell will prompt them to leave a message if you do.
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A great wired doorbell camera for Ecobee users
This is a great wired doorbell camera, and the only one that can use an Ecobee thermostat as a video intercom, making it a no-brainer for Ecobee households, as long as you can hook it to your doorbell wiring.
Video quality: 1080p, 8x zoom, color & IR night vision / Smart Alerts: Person, package Aspect ratio: 3:4 portrait / Field of view: 187-degree diagonal / Power options: wired / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz / Storage: Cloud / Subscription fee: $5 a month or $50 a year / Works with: Amazon Alexa, Apple Home
The Ecobee Smart Doorbell Camera is a great wired doorbell camera and the only one that can use an Ecobee thermostat as a video intercom — a very neat feature. It sends fast, accurate alerts for people and packages, and thanks to radar detection and computer vision motion detection, it never once sent me a false alert.
The Ecobee has a comprehensive 187-degree diagonal field of view that lets you see top to bottom and side to side and offers decent 1080p HD video. A subscription is required for viewing recorded video, $5 a month / $50 a year, but alerts for people and packages are free.
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One quirk is there is no option to get an alert if there is motion at your door, only for people or packages. This does cut down on the number of alerts you get, but I’d like the option to turn motion alerts on, mainly so I can know when my dog has got out and is sitting at my front door (as there are no animal or vehicle alerts). The doorbell does record all motion (if you subscribe) — for up to two minutes. So you can go back and view those events, but you won’t be get notified about them.
The video doorbell works with Apple Home and can ring a HomePod as a chime (as well as your existing chime) and pull up a live view on your Apple TV. But it doesn’t support HomeKit Secure Video, so you have to pay Ecobee’s subscription fee if you want recorded videos. It also works with Amazon Alexa, but there’s no Google Home integration. If you have an Ecobee thermostat in a convenient location, this is an excellent option.
The Belkin Wemo doorbell works with HomeKit Secure Video and detects people, packages, animals, and vehicles. It’s fast and reliable but there is no 24/7 recording and you need an Apple Home hub and iCloud plan for recorded video.
Video quality: 1200x1600p, HDR, 5x zoom / Smart Alerts: Person, packages, facial recognition Aspect ratio: 3:4/ Field of view: 178-degrees vertical, 140-degrees horizontal / Power options: Wired / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz / Storage: Cloud / Subscription fee: $0.99 a month, iCloud / Works with: Apple Home
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The new Wemo Video Doorbell from Belkin is the best doorbell that works with Apple Home and its HomeKit Secure Video feature. This is Apple’s service that stores recorded video securely in your personal iCloud account, so you don’t have to pay any additional subscription fee. You do need an iCloud Plus plan (starting at 99 cents per month) and an Apple Home Hub to view any captured clips.
The Wemo doorbell is fast and secure. It has decent 1200 x 1600 HD video quality, HDR, and a circular view that shows the whole porch (although with a rather discombobulating fish-eye effect).But it’s better than the other wired HomeKit option, the Logitech Circle View.
With rich notifications in HomeKit, you can talk to a visitor from your lock screen.
The Wemo is easier to install than the Logitech. Both share the same simple software setup. (Thanks to relying entirely on the Apple Home app — there’s no compatibility with the Wemo app or any other smart home platform). Thanks to HKSV, the doorbell recognizes multiple motion events (people, packages, animals, and vehicles) and can also identify faces and announce exactly who is at the door on a connected HomePod or HomePod Mini. However, there’s no option for 24/7 recording.
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The Wemo is very, very quick. Button push to a notification to pulling up live video is under five seconds.
While daytime footage was good, night vision isn’t, and I had some issues with it missing motion events and sending false alerts for people due to its reliance on pixel-based motion detection (others use PIR and radar detection). However, the Wemo was very, very quick, with the speed from a button push to a notification to pulling up the live video being under five seconds. It’s even quicker if you use the interactive notification on your device (through which you can talk to the visitor). And that speed makes up for some of its failings.
All things considered, it’s the best choice for a wired doorbell compatible with HomeKit Secure Video. However, if you don’t mind paying a subscription fee, Ecobee’s video doorbell is a better Apple Home option overall.
Best battery-powered doorbell camera for Apple Home
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The Aqara G4 is an inexpensive HomeKit Secure Video doorbell that also works with Alexa and Google Home. It’s powered by batteries, wires or both, and offers 24/7 local recording. But a 16:9 aspect ratio and poorer video quality let it down.
Video quality: 1080p / Smart Alerts: Person, facial recognition and person, facial recognition, packages with HSV, / Aspect ratio: 16:9 / Field of view: 162-degrees horizontal / Power options: Wired or battery / Wi-Fi: 2.4 GHz / Storage: Cloud and local / Subscription fee: 7 days free cloud storage or $0.99 a month with iCloud / Works with: Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Home
If you don’t have the option of wiring and / or you really want 24/7 video recording, then Aqara’s G4 is a good option for Apple Home users. It’s the only battery-powered doorbell that’s compatible with Apple Home, and it works with HomeKit Secure Video. It runs on six standard AA batteries and can be hardwired to support 24/7 video recording (through Aqara’s app, though, not in Apple Home). It’s jam-packed with features, but it’s probably best suited for those who live in apartments as its landscape aspect ratio means it can’t really see packages at the doorstep, and it’s not very weather-resistant.
At $120, it’s the least expensive HomeKit option and pairs with the Aqara U100 smart lock (which also works with Apple Home and Home Key) for a nice, fully Apple Home-compatible setup on your front door — if you are okay with the black, high-tech look.
The G4 can be powered by wires as a true wired doorbell, or by six AA batteries, or both!
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The downsides of this doorbell include a 16:9 aspect ratio (a problem if you want to see packages on your porch), no HDR imaging, which delivers pretty bad video quality, and a finicky Chime box that has to be plugged in inside and near the doorbell. That Chime also houses a microSD card, which is required for 24/7 recording. Unfortunately, the G4 can’t ring an existing electronic chime, but the Chime box is plenty loud, and you can customize the heck out of the sounds,
The G4 shares all the same HKSV features as the Wemo, including smart alerts for people, packages, animals, and vehicles, facial recognition, and the option to announce who is at the door on a connected HomePod or HomePod Mini (you need an Apple Home hub to use this in HomeKit). It responded just as fast as the Wemo to doorbell rings and motion alerts, but I’ve had some connectivity issues. Plus, occasionally, I got an overheating warning while testing in May — and that was before the heatwave we experienced in South Carolina this summer.
A benefit over Wemo and the other HomeKit Secure Video options is that Aqara has its own app, which has a ton of innovative features, including custom ringtones for different people, a voice changer, and the option to have your smart home devices react depending on who is at the front door.
The Aqara app is also where you access 24/7 video, a really nice feature to have, especially for free — Nest charges $15 a month for it. The implementation here is spotty, and video quality is not great, but it will do in a pinch.
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The Aqara doorbell works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, unlike the Wemo, which can only be set up through the Apple Home app. Aqara has said it will be updated to support Matter when (and if) the new smart home standard works with video cameras.
The Netatmo, Arlo, Logitech, and Wemo video doorbells are among the doorbells I’ve tested.
I’ve tested dozens of video doorbells, and many popular models didn’t make the cut because they rely on battery power. Doorbells that can’t be hardwired tend to start recording too late, so you see a lot of back-of-the-head shots. The standard Ring Video Doorbell (second-gen) — which was recently replaced with the longer-lasting Ring Battery Doorbell — misses those first few moments and has to be removed to charge. The same goes for the Google Nest Doorbell Battery, which had connectivity issues that were a major pain point in testing.
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The Wyze Video Doorbell Pro has some impressive features for its price, and if you hardwire it, you do get pre-roll video. However, a five-minute cooldown period between recordings, unless you pay for a subscription, is an inexcusable amount of time that negates its offer of “free recording.” Plus, Wyze has had some major security issues in recent months (and years).
I also tested the Arlo Essential Video Doorbell Wire-Free, which does have a removable battery but doesn’t work with Apple Home, unlike its wired counterpart, and takes too long to wake up to catch the visitor as they approach.
The Wyze Video Doorbell Pro has a 5-minute cool-down period between recordings unless you pay for a subscription.
As for other wired options, the Ring Video Doorbell Wired is a budget buzzer at just $60, but it won’t work with your existing chime and doesn’t draw the same amount of power from those wires as the Ring Pro 2, making it generally less reliable. Without HDR, its video quality is spotty, and its sister brand Blink beats it to the Best Budget spot in terms of features — including better battery life and free local storage options. Granted, the Ring can record for longer than 30 seconds and has package detection, but you have to pay for those features.
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The Netatmo Smart Video Doorbell has some interesting features, including entirely local storage (to an included microSD card) and free person recognition. It also works with Apple Home (but not HomeKit Secure Video), but a weirdly narrow field of view and poor video quality let it down — not to mention that $300 price tag.
Other Apple Home options we tested include the Logitech Circle View Wired, which, while fast, is expensive, only works with Apple Home and frequently dropped off my Wi-Fi network.
There are also doorbells built into smart door locks. I’ve tested the Lockly Vision Elite and the Eufy Security S330 Video Smart Lock, and both are very expensive and work better as door locks than doorbells. But if you have a specific need for this device (e.g., you have nowhere else to put a doorbell camera), then they are useful for at least seeing up the nose of whoever is at your door, if not much beyond that.
Doorbell cameras I’m currently testing
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One of Ring’s newest video doorbells — the Ring Battery Doorbell Pro — brings the company’s excellent radar motion detection to its battery-powered doorbell for the first time — which should cut down on nuisance notifications compared to the Battery Doorbell Plus. The $229 buzzer has all the important features of the wired, top-of-the-line Ring Pro 2, including dual-band Wi-Fi, color pre-roll, color night vision, and noise-canceling audio, but in a battery package. It’s looking like a great alternative to the Pro 2 if you can’t use wires. Read about all the Doorbell Pro’s features here.
The Arlo Video Doorbell (wired/wireless) is the second generation of the Arlo doorbell included in this guide. However, the new doorbell doesn’t have the option of wiring only; instead, it’s a battery doorbell you can wire to trickle charge the battery. You can choose between a 1080p ($79.99) or 2K ($129.99) resolution, and it features a 180-degree field of view and an integrated siren. This price gives the Blink a run for its money with the added option of vehicle, animal, and package alerts. But these require a paid subscription ($7.99 monthly), and there’s no local storage or continuous recording. It does work with both Google Home and Amazon Alexa but not Apple Home.
The $60 Kasa Smart Doorbell (KD110) from TP-Link comes with a plug-in chime and 2K video quality, free person detection, and the option of local storage to a microSD card. It’s a wired doorbell with a 160-degree viewing angle and works with Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
The Reolink Video Doorbell is a wired doorbell with the option of POE and local storage to a microSD card or FTP server. Starting at $99, it offers 2K video, comes in black or white (with two different fields of view, horizontal or vertical), and includes a plug-in chime. Free person detection, pre-roll, dual-band Wi-Fi, and no subscription fees are great features, and it works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
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Reolink also recently introduced the Reolink Battery Doorbell, the company’s first battery-powered option. The company says its 7,000mAh battery should last five months with “typical usage,” but you also have the option of connecting it to wiring or using it with existing door chimes. It offers head-to-toe footage, records 2K video at 15fps, and captures footage locally to a microSD card up to 256GB in size, meaning you don’t need to pay any subscription fees for cloud-based storage.
FAQ: Smart doorbell cameras
Most doorbells can be wired to existing doorbell wiring, but only true wired doorbells are powered by your home’s electricity. Battery-powered doorbells are just trickle-charged when wired.
Wired vs. wireless doorbell cameras: what’s the difference?
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Wired video doorbells use existing doorbell wiring attached to a doorbell transformer and chime box to provide continuous power, so they don’t need to be recharged. Most won’t work when the power goes out, but some have small batteries to keep them going for a few minutes in the event of a power outage. If you don’t have existing wiring, you can use an AC power adapter (Ring and Nest sell their own; you can also find generic ones).
Battery-powered doorbells, also known as wireless doorbells, are powered by a rechargeable battery. Because they don’t have continuous power, they have to wake up first when they detect motion before starting to record. This often results in a clip only catching the back of the person’s head as they walk away, which is not super helpful if you’re concerned about porch pirates. True wired doorbells don’t have this problem, and most will reliably catch all the action.
Many doorbells that advertise themselves as wireless and run on a battery can also be hard-wired to your existing doorbell wiring. But these are not “true” wired doorbells. Your home’s electrical power isn’t powering them. Instead, in almost all cases (Blink being the only exception), the battery is being “trickle charged” by the power from the doorbell wiring. This means that without any extra features, they simply don’t react as quickly as true wired doorbells. It’s science, people.
The Blink Video Doorbell has a 16:9 aspect ratio.
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The Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 has a 1:1 aspect ratio.
What is aspect ratio on a doorbell camera, and why is it important?
Aspect ratio is arguably more important than video resolution when it comes to video doorbells. This spec tells you what shape of video you will get, whether it’s top-to-bottom or side-to-side, whether you’ll see your doorstep and the whole of the visitor or just a head-and-shoulders shot. Common aspect ratios include 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, and 1:1.
Aspect ratios are always written with the horizontal number first. If the first number is smaller than the second number, then the image will be taller than it is wide, or “portrait orientation.” If the first number is larger than the second (as in 16:9), then the image will be wider than it is tall, or “landscape orientation.” If both numbers are the same, as in 1:1, it will be a square view.
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My recommendation is to go for a square view when possible, but if you have a wide porch area — and would like to see people approaching from the left or right, as well as straight on — a 4:3 or 16:9 might suit you better.
Installing a wired video doorbell camera involves connecting a chime power kit to your indoor chime box to help power the camera.
How to install a video doorbell camera
Battery-powered doorbells are easy to install and generally just require screwing the mounting bracket to the area around your door. Some come with the option of tape strips, so you don’t even need to get out the screwdriver.
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Wired doorbells require a bit more effort. And while you can choose to pay around $100 for a professional to install it, if you have existing doorbell wiring, it’s a simple job.
Locate your indoor chime and connect the chime power connector that came with the doorbell (this helps to facilitate power to the new doorbell)
Remove your old doorbell
Attach the mount for your new doorbell using screws or double-sided tape (some have the option of an angled wedge to get a better view of the person in front of the door)
Attach the doorbell wires to the connector screws on the doorbell
Attach the doorbell to the mount, either with screws or by snapping it on
Turn the power back on
Pro tip: Before installing any doorbell, download the manufacturer’s app and check the instructions — some cameras need to be paired to the app before mounting them.
Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
Update, September 20th: Adjusted pricing, added a mention ofthe Ring Battery Doorbell, and noted several other updates throughout the article.
Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
Your Strands expert
Your Strands expert
Marc McLaren
NYT Strands today (game #202) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… I’ve got the music in me!
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NYT Strands today (game #202) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
STUD
DUNE
ETCH
RATE
TARE
STONE
NYT Strands today (game #202) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• Temple of music
NYT Strands today (game #202) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First: left, 5th row
Last: right, 3rd row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
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NYT Strands today (game #202) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #202, are…
ARENA
STADIUM
NIGHTCLUB
THEATER
FESTIVAL
SPANGRAM: CONCERTVENUE
My rating: Moderate
My score: 1 hint
I’ve marked this one as moderate simply because I couldn’t get started without a hint; the theme clue of ‘I’ve got the music in me!’ seemed too obtuse, despite the fact that with hindsight it was really rather obvious. Once I asked for help and was given ARENA it all became much easier, and I ticked off the likes of STADIUM, NIGHTCLUB and THEATER with no issues.
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Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Friday 20 September, game #201)
RHYME
VERSE
METER
STANZA
SYNTAX
DICTION
SCANSION
SPANGRAM: POETRY
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s new word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now out of beta so is a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable and can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
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