Blink Mini Review

There’s a growing market for cheap, entry-level security cameras that give you basic monitoring, and Amazon has joined the fray with its Blink Mini. Rather than being battery-powered, as with the other Blink cameras, this small cuboid is mains powered. It gives you all of the features that you need but there are a few caveats to this system, including free cloud storage that runs out next year.

Blink Mini – What you need to know

• Installation – Easy to set up and the camera can be placed on a desk or wall-mounted.
• Detection performance – Quite basic control, but you can select the areas of the image that you’re interested in to reduce the number of alerts that you get.
• Image quality – A touch soft in some places but the video is sharp enough to find a frame where you can see a person clearly.

Related: Best indoor security cameras

Blink Mini Design – Small and compact cube

Nobody particularly wants to put a small camera on display, so it’s good to see that the Blink Mini is so tiny. This little white cube (50 x 49 x 36mm) is discrete enough to tuck out of the way, so you shouldn’t have to see it. It ships with a neat bookshelf stand, which lets you angle the camera where you want, plus you can wall-mount the camera if you prefer.

Around the back is the proprietary USB input, which is used to power the camera. This plugs in securely, and the cable doesn’t pull the camera out of position, which is a frequent bugbear with cheap and light models that I’ve reviewed before.

Blink Mini Features – Clunky app but it gets the basics right

As with pretty much every smart device, the Blink Mini is configured through the Blink app. This takes you through getting the camera up and running and connected to your Wi-Fi network. All-in, it should only take a few minutes to do.

Once done, the app gives you a live preview from the camera. You’ll probably notice that your camera is called something strange. Mine was called G8T1-9400-0135-1J09. It’s only a little thing but it’s nice when a security camera system has the little touches, such as giving you the choice to give a camera a friendly name, such as, ‘office’. You can change the camera’s name manually, however,

It has to be said that the Blink app is rather clunky and looks and feels as though it was built by engineers who never quite got an experienced user interface team to look at.

Basic it may be, but the app gives you all the control that you need. From the settings menu, you can configure the motion sensitivity and retrigger time (how long after there’s motion before new motion counts again). You miss out on advanced features, such as only getting notifications when a person is spotted.

Activity Zones brings up a grid, where you can tap the squares that you don’t want to monitor for motion. This isn’t quite as neat as being able to draw boxes around areas that you want to monitor, but there’s enough customisation to focus on key areas and cut down on the number of notifications that you get. Overall, the camera wasn’t too notification happy and I wasn’t swamped with alerts.

You can also arm and disarm the camera, cutting off recording when you want privacy. This can be done using the Alexa Skill, the switch in the app or via a schedule in the app. There’s no geofencing option, although you can build your own skill to do this using IFTTT. Alternatively, you can use IFTTT to respond to a button push, say using a Flic 2 button to turn your cameras on when you go out.

Notifications are sent to your phone when motion is detected, and video is automatically saved to the cloud. Amazon currently offers free cloud storage until 31 March 2021, after which a plan costs £2.50 per month per camera or £8 a month for unlimited cameras. You get 7200 seconds of cloud storage per account and can choose to auto-delete clips after three days, seven days, 14 days, 30 days or one year. Note that the oldest clips are deleted automatically if you run out of storage.

Blink is also launching the Sync Module 2 soon, which will cost around the same as the camera, but will let you record footage from up to 10 cameras to a USB flash drive.

If you don’t have any storage or don’t pay for the cloud, then the cameras will notify you of alerts but nothing will be saved. Viewing clips is rather basic, with simple thumbnails for each clip and the ability to filter by camera. All clips can be downloaded to your phone for offline viewing.

You can also view your camera live and speak to a person on the other side with the two-way chat feature. The Blink Mini’s speaker is a little basic but it’s loud enough that people you can see will be able to hear what you’re saying.

Blink Mini Quality – Quality video considering the low price

The Blink Mini has a 1080p video sensor and 110-degree lens, which is enough to capture most of a room. Image quality is pretty good. The camera tends to blur things out in the background, and parts of my test footage were a little blown out in places. However, faces were clear and easy to see, even if a little soft.

At night, the camera uses its IR LEDs to light up the room. This softens the footage even further, and it’s hard to work out details in the background at all. However, close up, you can find a frame where a person is in sharp enough detail to see properly.

Should I buy the Blink Mini?

If you need something cheap and basic for monitoring your home, the Blink Mini fits the bill. Free cloud storage, for now, is good, although this will run out next year. If you don’t want to pay for cloud storage, then the Neos Smartcam may be a better option for you.

If you need a bit more, then the Ring Indoor Cam is a touch more expensive, but it shoots slightly better video and ties into Ring’s ecosystem, complete with a smarter app and better cloud storage. If you think you may expand your system with indoor and outdoor cameras, and a doorbell, then going with Ring makes more sense.

That all said, the Blink Mini gets the basics right, and the clunky app can be forgiven on the basis that the video quality is very good and the camera is super cheap.

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