Why You Can Trust CNET Amazon's Blink Adds a Wired Floodlight Camera and a Pan-and-Tilt Mount Into the Mix
The newly announced hardware is the latest expansion of Amazon's growing portfolio of camera-equipped products for the home.
- 10 years product testing experience with the CNET Home team
Blink, the Amazon-owned smart home security camera brand, announced a pair of new products at Amazon's September hardware and services event: a Wired Floodlight Camera that costs $100, and a new $30 Pan-Tilt mount for the Blink Mini that'll let you adjust the viewing frame up and down or left and right.
The former is built for outdoor use, with its built-in floodlights offering up to 2,600 lumens of light whenever they detect motion. The wired design eliminates the need to worry about batteries while offering anytime access to the 1080p video feed in Blink's app, as well as two-way talk capabilities. Support for Amazon's Alexa lets you pull up the feed on a compatible Fire TV or an Echo Show smart display with a quick voice command.
Price: $100
Release date: Jan. 26, 2023
The wired floodlight camera delivers 2,600 lumens of light whenever it detects motion without needing batteries. You can you pull up the feed on a compatible Fire TV or an Echo Show smart display with a quick voice command via Alexa.
Blink adds that the camera is built around Amazon's AZ2 Neural Edge Processor, which enables enhanced motion detection features like person detection and activity zones, while also enabling footage to be processed locally on the device itself instead of in Amazon's cloud. You can store footage locally, too, provided you're using a USB flash drive and a Sync Module 2, each sold separately -- otherwise, you'll need a Blink subscription plan to store video clips and images on Amazon's servers. The Floodlight Camera became available for purchase on Amazon on Jan. 23.
New product No. 2 isn't a camera at all, but a motorized mount for the Blink Mini, a budget-priced indoor camera that costs $35. Dubbed the Blink Mini Pan-Tilt and available for preorder starting at $30 -- or $60 packaged with the camera -- the mount is built to turn the Blink Mini left and right, or to tilt it up and down, all of which users can control from the Blink app to adjust the direction the camera's pointing in.
Price: $30 or $60 bundled with the camera
Release date: Oct. 20, 2023
What it says on the tin: It's a motorized mount for the Blink Mini that allows you to pan left and right and tilt up and down via the app for better remote viewing.
The new Blink products reflect Amazon's growing focus on selling cameras and camera-equipped gadgets for the smart home. It's not just Blink -- at the same event, Amazon also revealed new spotlight cameras for the Ring lineup, as well as new Echo devices with built-in cameras and a virtual security guard use case for Astro, the camera-equipped patrol bot.
"The Blink Wired Floodlight Camera is our first wired floodlight device, and it adds to the existing lineup of easy-to-use, reliable, and affordable security devices that help customers keep an eye on their homes," said Mike Harris, Blink's chief operating officer. "Plus, it leverages the intelligence of Amazon silicon, enabling features such as computer vision and local video processing for the first time."
The Pan-Tilt mount accessory was immediately available for preorder and officially released less than a month later in mid-October. The Wired Floodlight Camera came with a longer wait, but it's available for purchase on Jan. 26.