If you’re in the market for a video doorbell, it’s not an unreasonable question to ask as to which one’s the best. Now, here at Amberly security, we’re always really conscious of being as transparent as we can with people. And if I was to say to you, well, the one that we sell is by far the best, you’d be forgiven for thinking, well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Equally, you might think that if I was to look at all the technical specifications and recommend a brand that we don’t sell, you’d wonder why we didn’t sell that brand. So, instead of making a specific product recommendation, I’m going to give you five factors for you to look at when you’re comparing, the various video doorbells that there are on the market.

So, factor number one, screen resolution or picture resolution, rather, resolution on any camera is measured in pixels. A pixel is an individual spot or point on the picture. The more of them, the better the more individual spots there are, or points there are. Then the higher the resolution, the greater the detail of the picture that you’ll get.

For a point of reference, two megapixels, which is a very common camera resolution, is about the same as a normal high definition television, kind of freeview HD or Sky HD. And for comparison, if you’ve got an ultra hd, television or a 4k television, that’s about eight megapixels. So that’s factor number one.

Look at the resolution that the manufacturers say that they offer. Factor two is whether it works with an app and how much the app, ah, costs on a monthly basis. Now, the vast majority of video doorbells have an app on your phone and many of them record their footage, to the cloud, and that’s where your app looks for the footage.

Many of the video doorbells on the market at the moment have monthly subscription. So the thing that you need to find out from that is how much is the monthly subscription that each manufacturer is asking you to pay. Factor three, is it just the app, or does, the doorbell have an internal chime as well?

Some doorbells work with an existing hardwired doorbell, the old fashioned ding dong type and some of them also come with a separate little chime. Some of them don’t have any of that at all. So it’s only if you’ve got your phone on you that, you can hear when there’s someone at the doorbell.

So if you’re upstairs and you’ve left your phone on charge downstairs you might not hear someone at the door. So that’s factor three. Factor four is cybersecurity. All of these video, doorbells connect to the Internet if they’re going to record to the cloud and send messages to an app on your phone.

So the thing to look out for is how secure is the hardware of the video doorbell? Can hackers use it? Now, I’m not a cybersecurity expert in the slightest, so all I would suggest you do on that is just go onto Google or your favourite search engine, type in the name of the doorbell and then type security issues and do a Google search for that.

See what it says. Lastly, it’s the sensitivity of the camera. Now, a lot of cameras or a lot of video doorbells, rather, will send a notification to your phone when they see movement. Now, what would be a bad idea is if every time a leaf flutters by or a butterfly or a bird or something comes past or a fox comes past, you don’t really want to be getting notifications all the time.

What would happen? It’s going to be the cry wolf scenario, isn’t it? For the first day or two, you’ll probably notice, or take a quick cheque of your phone there’s nothing happening. And then after a few days it pings at you and you say, oh, it’s probably nothing and then you might miss something important.

So sensitivity is key on that one. Can your video doorbell be set for various different levels of sensitivity? Can it detect humans only? Has it got human detection built into it? These are all the things, that’s your five factors that I think would be your best bet when considering video doorbells.