Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera

Verdict

The integrated motorised base lets the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera see more of a room, with manual controls to adjust its point of view. That’s useful to a point, but it’s a shame that the camera can’t do advanced things, such as automatically track motion. As it stands, for the most part, this camera operates in the same way to the fixed Ring Indoor Cam, which is a lot cheaper. If you really want the motorised base, then the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera is easy to set up, integrates well with other Ring products, and shoots good-enough Full HD video.

Introduction

Ring has sold a Pan-Tilt Mount for the Stick Up Cam for a while, but the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera is the company’s first integrated camera with pan and tilt.

Effectively, an Indoor Camera with a motorised base, the new camera is great value and shoots more than good enough video, but it’s a little light on features that make the most of the pan and tilt option.

Design and Installation

• Wall or bookshelf mounted
• Privacy shutter
• USB powered

There’s not much difference between the Ring Indoor Cam (2^nd Gen) and the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera, bar the latter having a chunkier base and being mounted on a stick. This new camera is powered by USB-C, with the connector on the back.

At its simplest, the camera can be placed on a bookshelf. Just make sure that there’s enough room behind it. As the entire camera moves for vertical adjustment, it can roll back, hit a book and push itself over. There’s no problem with horizontal adjustment, as the camera rotates on its base.

If you prefer, there’s a wall mount in the box, which sits the camera far enough forward that it can’t hit the wall behind.

As with the Indoor Cam, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera has a physical privacy shutter on the front that can be turned to block off the camera’s view. It’s a nice-to-have feature, but you need to remember to unlock the cover before you leave the home, as you’ll otherwise miss everything.

Features

• Integrates with Ring Protect and the Ring Alarm
• Smart Alerts warn you of people only
• Pan and tilt with home position

The Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera is controlled in the Ring app, the same as the company’s other products. Tap its thumbnail, and you dive into the live view section, which looks similar to that of the other cameras, including activating the siren and operating the useful two-way chat.

The main difference is that there’s a pan-and-tilt control option that let me operate the motorised base. The camera itself has a decent 143-degree field of view, but there’s 360-degree coverage from the pan option, and 169-degree coverage via tilt. Effectively, I could look anywhere in a room with the controls.

This camera let me set a home location. As soon as a live view session is closed, the camera switches back to its default position. That’s useful, as it means that activity zones can be set, accurately covering the area that you want.

It’s a shame that there’s nothing more advanced, and no tracking. With the Eufy Indoor Cam S350, once motion has been detected, the camera can be set to track that motion through a room, capturing more of an event.

With the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera as soon as someone (or a pet) walks out of the field of view, the footage ends, even if the camera would technically be capable of following the movement.

Motion detection options are the same here as for other cameras, and include setting activity zones, motion sensitivity and, with a Ring Protect plan, a people-only detection mode. That latter is useful if you want to cut down on alerts and don’t want notifications when a pet walks past.

You’ll also need a Ring Protect plan if you want to save footage to the cloud. It’s relatively expensive to cover one camera, at £4.99 a month (£49.99 a year). That gets you 30 days of cloud history. If you’ve got multiple products and a Ring Alarm, the Ring Protect Plus is just £8 a month (£80 a year) for unlimited cameras.

As with other Ring cameras, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera integrates nicely with the Ring Alarm, and can be turned on and off based on the alarm’s mode. With this integration, I didn’t feel I needed to use the privacy shield.

Old footage is available from the live view using the scrollable timeline below, which can also be filtered by day and event type. There’s also an event section in the app that shows events filterable by device, date and type, with thumbnails for each. Any clip can be downloaded and saved to the device.

There’s support for Amazon Alexa, with the camera able to stream its feed to a compatible smart display. There’s no option to control pan and tilt with this mode, though.

Video Quality

• Basic night vision quality
• Good daylight sample
• Struggles if pointed at a window

With a 143-degree field of view, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera manages to capture a lot of a room when in its fixed position. That makes placement fairly easy, with the added bonus that pan-and-tilt let me look around a room manually.

Similar to other Ring cameras, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera struggled with overexposure when pointed towards a light-filled window. Moving the camera so that it pointed away from my office doors improved things.

With its Full HD resolution, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera isn’t the sharpest camera that I’ve reviewed, but its daylight footage is more than good enough. I found that the image was generally sharp, detailed and well exposed, making it easy to see what’s going on.

At night, the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera turns on its IR lights to shoot in black and white. Technically the camera is capable of shooting colour night vision, but with little ambient light available inside at night, I wasn’t that impressed with the results.

Night footage does tend to look quite soft and there’s less detail going on. However, I could see what was happening and didn’t struggle to find a frame or two that showed someone’s face in sharp enough detail.

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