Best High-End Smart Doorbells 2022

If you’ve ever had a “delivered” package go missing or have needed to nip out when you’re expecting a package then smart doorbells are the perfect smart home device for you. Smart doorbells integrate the functionality of a smart camera with that of a doorbell, allowing you to receive notifications on your phone when your doorbell is pressed. If you respond to the notification you can then see a live feed from your doorbell and generally communicate with the person at the other end.

While you can choose to go for a budget model, if you want to be confident of excellent video quality and reliability, you should be prepared to put down some more money. Unfortunately, you’ll also often have to spring for a subscription fee as well, often for core features, making it only technically optional.

To help you find the best options available, we’ve drawn up a list of the best high-end smart doorbells in 2022.

The Arlo Essential doorbell is a great choice for just about any house. It combines appealing design with steady wireless functionality and a good set of features (albeit some of them require a paid subscription to work). One battery charge lasts up to six months, and charges back up in just a few hours at most. As with most models of this type, the Arlo Essential consists of a mount that’s fixed to the door, and the removable doorbell that can be mounted or removed for charging.

It offers good camera resolution and a solid field of view for the camera. The FoV for the motion detector isn’t as large – with 110 degrees, it’s still solid though. It features things like a siren alarm that can be activated remotely, as well as an infrared LED that allows for black and white night vision recordings. While they aren’t as crisp as the normal camera footage, the result is still more than good enough for most purposes.

The Ring video doorbell is a staple – not only is it one of the best-known brands on the market, but it has earned its good reputation for a reason. The Ring Pro 2 is one of their better models available, with solid performance stats and the same subscription setup that other Ring models have, where a monthly or yearly subscription is needed to access certain features.

As with any other Ring doorbell, you will also be able to use the companion app, where you can control all of the settings of your doorbell – including things like the detection range, motion sensitivity, people only mode, and so on. The Ring doorbells really do put the smart in smart home device, so you can expect a great amount of customisations and functions from your Pro 2 – if you’re willing to pay for the subscription on top of the device.

The Lorex is a solid all-rounder camera doorbell. Unlike a lot of its competitors, it manages to offer colour footage at night (though this is optional and black-and-white is also available), and it also has a set of other convenience features, such as a nightlight that you can set up via the app, and local storage on a microSD card. It is wired, which means that you’ll have to set up your doorbell somewhere near enough a power source. On the plus side, that means you won’t have to worry about keeping your doorbell charged.

Compared to competing devices, the Lorex has an advantage – it doesn’t paywall off useful features like person detection or two-way conversations the way for example a Ring does. It is required to make an account to use the app, but there are no costs associated with it. The motion detection, as well as general picture quality, work well, with the only minor drawback being that colour footage at night is predictably dull and can be a little difficult to make out – a given in bad lighting.

The Eufy Security Video Doorbell Dual Camera deals with one of the most common issues that smart doorbells face, vertical field of view, with a second downward-facing camera. Generally, you want a smart doorbell to have a wide field of view so it covers as much area in front of your front door as possible; being able to see down the road may reveal a car licence plate of a porch pirate that otherwise would have been missed. You also want a strong vertical field of view so that kids can’t just stand out of view under your doorbell or so you can see that your package has been delivered and is still there ready for you to collect it. Having both at the same time, however, tends to waste a lot of pixels on what’s essentially dead space, increasing costs, as well as bandwidth and storage requirements for next to no benefit. By integrating a downward-facing camera, you get a great view of any delivered packages without sacrificing anything from the main camera.

Eufy makes the most of the second camera by using an AI algorithm to identify and detect packages and to periodically remind you to collect them. It also notifies you if someone attempts to interfere with it after it has been delivered. Unfortunately, it still suffers from some issues including a low bitrate and framerate view, as well as being slow to activate after motion is detected. False positives are reduced significantly thanks to a pair of motion detection features working in tandem. As of the time of writing the wired version hasn’t been released, though it is due out by the end of March.

The Google Nest Doorbell (Battery) offers reliable Google tech in the smart doorbell space. One of its cooler features is the ability to locally record up to an hour of video if your Wi-Fi or power goes out and then upload it when the internet is back. Most features don’t even need a subscription to work, with face recognition and long term video storage being the main exceptions.

Video is recorded in 1280 by 960 at 30 fps, this means that while the resolution is lower than most competitors, the video is pretty smooth. Unlike most smart home devices, the Nest doorbell actually supports dual-band Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to disable your 5GHz network to connect it or anything, it just works. Google also offer a great warranty service where they will replace your doorbell for free if it gets physically stolen off your wall. The main drawback is that without a subscription, footage from alerts is only stored in the cloud for three hours. While any free cloud storage is better than none, this isn’t enough for an activation recorded at night to be visible in the morning when you wake up.

That was our roundup of the best high-end smart doorbells in 2022. Have you recently bought a high-end smart doorbell? What sold you on it and what has your experience been with it so far? Let us know down below.