Ring Stick Up Cam Pro review: Not on the radar

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Unlike most customers who pick up a Ring Stick Up Cam Pro, I wasn’t immediately sure where I wanted to place the home security camera for my review. 

Because it can be used both indoors and outdoors, using either battery or wired power, the Stick Up Cam Pro is more versatile than your average home security camera.

It comes with plenty of advanced technologies too, making it smarter than many of its competitors. But it’s not perfect. You can’t record locally, which means you need to fork out for Ring’s premium subscription to really get the benefit of the camera.

Unlike the Eufy S340 Solocam, you only get a single lens with a limited field of view. 

And with Ring being owned by Amazon, you only get to enjoy smart assistant integration with Alexa devices.

But if you already have a Ring security system and are looking to plug a hole, this is one of the best cameras in the brand’s lineup.

Ring Stick Up Cam Pro review: Design

The Ring Stick Up Cam Pro isn’t much of a break from the traditional design of Ring’s security cameras. 

Taking it out of the box, I was surprised by the camera’s bulk. The Stick Up Cam Pro measures in at 153.9 mm x 70.1 mm x 70.1 mm, which makes it seem unnaturally tall. 

This means it’s mostly impossible to hide the Stick Up Cam Pro. Installing it means you are loudly proclaiming you have home security installed, which is probably part of the reason it’s so large.

The cylindrical design with a flat camera front clearly matches the Stick Up Cam, but the extra height allows it to house a radar sensor, which allows you to take advantage of advanced features like Bird's-eye view. 

The camera comes with a pre-installed mounting stand. You can use it to sit the camera on a shelf, or use the included screws to mount the camera around your home.

The base of the camera does twist off, revealing a cavity for a standard Ring battery pack. There’s a screw to securely lock the battery (and camera) in place.

Importantly, you decide when you purchase the Stick Up Cam Pro which power source you want to use. The unit I was sent to review came with a power cable, but there are options for a battery-powered unit and a solar-powered unit. 

That said, the camera itself is the same, so you can buy a battery or solar panel later and switch things up.

Ring Stick Up Cam Pro review: Performance

The Stick up Cam Pro records 1080p HD video in HDR. Image quality is solid, particularly in daylight. You can clearly see the details in dark spots even in the most difficult lighting conditions.

Night vision clarity is also impressive, with the infrared camera doing a good job of picking up movement and action in the dark.

The colour night vision is less impressive, at least for the setup I was testing. The camera uses a light to illuminate the immediate area, which allows you to see in colour. 

But I found the light was nowhere near bright enough to capture details further away from the camera. The Eufy S340 Solocam did a much better job on that front.

Using the radar for Bird's Eye Zones

The biggest reason you would opt for the Stick Up Cam Pro over the standard Stick Up Cam is the included radar sensor and its ability to offer a Bird's-eye view of where visitors (or intruders) come from.

I’m sorry to say that, for my home at least, it was not a useful feature.

The biggest reason for this is the mapping software Ring uses to set up Birds Eye Zones. When you set up the feature in the Ring app, you are asked to drop a pin on an aerial map of your home. It asks you to be as precise as possible.

For my address in Sydney’s suburbs, the image was too low resolution to be useful. As soon as I zoomed in even the slightest bit to try to offer a more precise position, the image became a blur of grey, with barely any detail or features to pinpoint its position.

Once you drop the pin, it asks you to line up the image the camera sees to the aerial map. But that was impossible because there were no landmarks to map to — everything was a pixelated mess. 

I bluffed my way through the process, but the results are shown on the same grey blur. If somebody were to intrude in my backyard, I wouldn’t be able to make out anything of where they had come from or gone to.

Software performance

Ring’s app is sleek, and so it’s easy to use and control. If you have a doorbell like the Ring Doorbell 4, the app can have the devices work together to create a complete view of when someone comes to your home.

It also allows you to easily communicate through the camera’s 2-way speaker and microphone. The audio quality is surprisingly great — I could hear my neighbour’s dog barking incessantly with no real delay or feedback.

There’s also a siren to give intruder’s a bit of a scare. It’s pretty loud, and I imagine would do a good job. But you can only set it off manually — even when you pop your system into “away” mode, the siren requires you to manually set it off.

Subscriptions

The greatest challenge with the whole Ring ecosystem is that there’s no local storage of your security footage. 

If you own a Ring product, the only way to really feel secure is by having a Ring Protect subscription. 

And if you already had a Ring doorbell, and decided to expand your system, then you need to pay for a higher tier of security.

The cost increase for a single additional camera is, frankly, not worth it. You move from $49.95 a year for the Protect Basic subscription to $150 a year for Protect Plus. 

While the Protect Plus tier lets you have a full suite of devices connected, it’s still difficult to swallow when other camera solutions offer free local recording and a more affordable subscription.

Ring Stick Up Cam Pro review: Verdict

Ring makes high-quality home security hardware. The versatile nature of the Stick Up Cam Pro’s power and mounting options mean you can easily set it up anywhere you need to around the house.

There’s a lot to like about the Stick Up Cam Pro. It delivers high-quality audio and video and seamlessly integrates into the Ring app. Setup is incredibly quick and simple, and the build quality of the camera itself is impressive, though the design may not be to everybody’s tastes.

But I found the integrated radar functionality for motion detection and Bird's-eye View tracking is let down by poor quality mapping. That may not be the case for everybody – the world’s a big place and I only checked it at my address – but it effectively rendered the feature useless.

Also, remember that you need to factor in the cost of a Ring Protect plan to the purchase. It's not cheap, and that extra cost may be better spent on a device that doesn't require the subscription.

Buy the Ring Stick Up Cam Pro online

Ring Stick Up Cam Pro

The Ring Stick Up Cam Pro is a great security camera with features let down by average mapping performance.

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