Well, it has been a year since I posted my initial review with my Blink XT. Aside from little bit of dirt and grime from being outside, it still looks new. It has survived the Texas heat last summer and a bit of cold spell last December. I am still with my original lithium batteries.
The batteries doesn’t show any corrosion and the rubber seals around the camera are still intact. I’m very confident that I’ll get the 2 years of battery life that Blink has been advertising on these cameras. Now to be fair, this camera monitors my backyard which most of the time has little to no people traffic. I have my motion sensitivity setting dialed in that I barely have any false alerts but if there is a person that goes across the camera’s field of view, it will surely be recorded.
As you can see, I only have used 57% of the 7,200 seconds or 2 hours alloted for my account in the cloud in 1 year. If I scroll down in the bottom, you will see my first recording was in June 2nd of last year.
So it really depends on your use on how fast the battery needs to be changed.
I’ll also show you my settings which you can see the battery is still “ok”
My retrigger time is 30 seconds…my sensitivity is level 6 and my recording length is 10 seconds.
My IR illuminator intensity is low and is set to auto mode. Audio recording is also turned on.
Video quality has always been the “enhanced” setting since the update.
Now, my gripes about this camera that Blink might need to address in the future updates is the delay in alert notification which is dependent on how long you setup the recording length. So, for example, if I set my recording length to 15 seconds. Then, when the camera senses motion, it will record first for 15 seconds, then that is the only time it will send the notification alert.
The good thing is that you can play around with the settings, like the recording time, the retrigger time and also there is an option to end the recording early when motion stops. So, if somebody walked past the camera pretty fast, then it will not record the full 15 seconds and you will get notified faster. I think the reason why Blink opted to send the alert after the recording because it has to take into account the upload time of the footage when you click on the notification alert…even with 15 seconds lead time, it still needs a few more seconds before the footage comes up… One way Blink can do this is to send the user to live view instead of the recording. But, I’ll let them worry about that. For, now , I just set the recording length to 10 seconds with a retrigger time of 30 seconds which works for my needs.
Another issue that I have is the night vision glare. The camera’s black and white mode is set to be very sensitive to light that even the one little LED can cause my face to light up and be unrecognizable at 5 feet. Beyond that though, the camera captures a decent footage.
I even tested it in color mode when I did a video of night vision comparison between the cameras and it does the same thing. The glare is also there and you have to take that into account when you decide where to install the camera. I’ll include the link on that test video in the description down below.
One last issue about this camera is their mount. I’ve mentioned this during my initial review a year ago and also on my 6 month review. The mount is a bit flimsy and that the camera shake
s if it is a windy day which is normal here in south Texas. The shaking will cause the camera to trigger and send false alerts that I have to disable motion detection on windy days.
It took about a year for somebody to make a decent mount that can be used with the Blink XT. We are going to do a quick unboxing and check it out.
Let’s open it up.
We have a small phillips screw driver and a bunch of small screws.
We have the mount which is plastic but should be rigid enough to hold the lightweight Blink XT.
We have the mounting screws and plastic anchors.
And we have the case which will enclose the camera and this is where the mount will be attached to.
It is plastic but pretty solid and it comes in 2 parts…
The front and the back side…
Putting in the camera is pretty easy. Just place it inside the enclosure and use the small screws to secure it in. Before you do that though, I noticed that the camera is loose inside the case and you will need to put a foam or a cardboard as a shim for the camera so that it will not move and jiggle around.
As you all know the Blink XT is weatherproof but you will lose the weatherproofing of the camera if you want to hard wire and plug it in using a micro USB cable.
BTW, if you are changing batteries that often and if you are installing the camera near an electrical outlet, you can hardwire the camera using a micro USB cable and a USB power adapter.
With this case, it was designed with an area at the back to accomodate the micro USB plug so that you can hard wire the camera and maintain it’s weather resistance. The cable will route at the bottom of the case preventing water to come in if installed properly.
If you know what setup you are going to do battery or hardwired, then you can close and screw in the case using the small screws and the philips screw driver that was included in the package.
You can then screw in the mount to the case just like any traditional security camera mount. The case and mount will make the foot print bigger on the Blink XT but it will be sturdier.
You are probably going to ask if the original Blink camera will fit in this case. It does. But because it is thinner, you need to build it up with a foam, plastic or cardboard from the back so that it will not move around inside the case. Take note though. This case will not make the original Blink cameras weatherproof. The front is partially open and will be exposed to the elements if you decide to install this outside.
Once everything is setup, installing the camera is also pretty easy. You just now need 4 screws instead of one to secure it to the wall or ceiling.
Blink XT Home Security Camera – amzn.to/2syqcqB Original Blink XT Review – youtu.be/lH1mgTeBlIU Blink XT 6 month Update – youtu.be/gmgRhDIjWCM WiFi Camera’s Night Vision Comparison Test – youtu.be/hx5k4dIbT3Y Blink XT Case/Mount – amzn.to/2Jfhwvx