The Blink Mini 2 Security Camera: Setting up, Configuring, and Manipulating a Wide-Field Multi-Wavelength Camera

Overall, the Blink Mini 2 is an excellent upgrade to a popular inexpensive security camera. It’s very easy to set up and use — and its mounting system is one of the simplest and most flexible I’ve used.

It captures crisp video, reliably detects motion, and can slot in just about anywhere you want to put it. I was impressed with the quality of the footage after a couple of weeks of testing. Low-light performance is much better than the original, and the expanded field of view (up from 110 to 143 degrees) enables it to take in a whole room. The person detection works well to ensure that every shadow, cat, and tree branch does not cause an alert.

You must first create an account with the Blink app for both platforms to setup and use the Mini2. Agreeing to Blink’s terms of service is needed to create one. Without an account, you cannot proceed.

A Mini but mighty: Blink’s inexpensive camera can now go outdoors, and how well can you use it? (Extended review)

The idea of being watched in your home is something that many people don’t like. But these gadgets do offer useful features such as checking in on pets, monitoring your house when you’re away, or catching someone prowling in your backyard after dark.

The Mini has a sharper field of view, is better at low-light, and comes with a sleeker design. Plus, there’s still the option of local storage by adding with a $50 Blink Sync Module 2 and a USB stick (the module is not required to use the camera, only if you want local storage).

A teeny, tiny camera, the Mini 2 can fit pretty much anywhere. I had a camera in my office, my garden, and my kitchen where I tested it out in the day and it delivered clear, crisp video during the day. Infrared night vision was fair, but the spotlight-enabled color night vision was very grainy.

The Mini’s motion and people notifications are super speedy, but there are no rich notifications, which is a shame. The Early Notification feature will alert you as soon as possible so you can see the live action while it’s still happening. Personally, I prefer rich notifications with a snapshot of the action.

Source: Mini but mighty: Blink’s tiny, inexpensive camera can now go outdoors

The Blink Mini 2: A Small Camera For Outdoors, and Its Importance For Home Smart Sensors And Smart Detectors

The Mini 2 has a ball and socket base that can be screwed into a wall or ceiling, and it is simple to adjust the camera’s angle after that. I could just pop it on a flat surface without the base, and it would fit everywhere I wanted to. It is the smallest camera I have ever tested.

The camera has good motion sensitivity. Without enabling person detection, I got alerts when the lights on one of my smart light strips changed color in my office. Adjusting the sensitivity helped a bit, but you need person detection if you don’t want to be inundated with notifications. Helpfully, you can snooze motion alerts.

Multifactor verification, Face ID, and other features are available for use in the blink app. Blink product manager Jonathan Cohn explains that all cloud footage is encrypted at every endpoint: “in the cloud, in transit and at rest, and when it’s sent back to your phone,” he says. “There’s no way of anyone accessing it at any point.” End-to-end encryption is where only the cloud can have access to the footage.

The end-to-end development of the camera and the build out of privacy and security into the chip is owned by Blink, as well as the fact that the company makes its own chips.

If you don’t want to pay a subscription fee, you can still get motion notifications to let you know when something is happening at home. But there’s no person detection without paying.

You can also record video locally with a Sync Module 2 to avoid those cloud storage fees, but that’s an extra $50, and you won’t get person detection without a subscription and are limited to how long you can watch a live view; with a subscription, it’s up to 90 minutes.

I can see the livestreams with my smart display, and it works with the camera. It can also be set to announce motion or person detection on Echo speakers, but there’s no support for other smart home platforms.

Using this outdoors and cutting down on notification noise with person detection, all while staying under $50, are great improvements over the Mini 1. The video (both daytime and nighttime) and audio quality are noticeably better than the Mini 1. But the zoom is still limited, and I’d like to see more smart alerts for things like animals and vehicles; sound detection would be excellent, too.

It can be used as a simple security camera for a specific purpose and does not need super high resolution.

Every smart device now has a series of terms and conditions that you must sign before you can use it. It is not possible for us to analyze every single one of these agreements. But we’re going to start counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.

The company’s terms of service encompasses the following agreements, and as an Amazon subsidiary, Blink requires you to agree to Amazon’s conditions of use: