New Video – Ring Floodlight Cam Brightness: Is 3,000 Lumens Enough?!

The Ring Floodlight Cam should be bright. After all, it’s a floodlight! But is its 3,000 lumen total light output (from two 1,500 lumen lights) bright enough?

I wanted to answer that question in this video, which compares it to other outdoor lights and also talks generally about when the Ring Floodlight Cam’s brightness will (and won’t) be sufficient for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viBNLNuRJRs&ab_channel=SmartHomePoint

Timings:

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:29 Ring Floodlight Cam = 3,000 lumens
• 1:51 The two individual Floodlight Cam lights
• 2:28 When the Floodlight Cam is (and isn’t) suitable
• 3:41 Some examples of outdoor lights
• 5:39 Ending

Video Transcript

Hey YouTube, I’m Tristan from Smart Home Point. So I recently installed my Ring Floodlight Camera, and I wanted to film this video today just to talk through and to show you just how bright it is, because it’s quite an important decision, the fact it’s marketed as a flood light, means it has to be fairly bright.

But sometimes with smart products such as smart lighting, you sometimes take a downgrade in terms of the brightness. So I thought it was important to film this video and show you how bright the Ring Floodlight Cam really is. Okay so before I actually show you that, I wanted to talk through some of the technical side of things.

So the Ring Floodlight Cam has 3000 lumens of brightness. Lumens being a measure of how bright something is. Now 3000 lumens sounds fairly good, because if you go on Amazon, and you look at different floodlights, you’ll see a lot of floodlights that have 3000 or 3500 lumens of brightness, so in that sense, that’s fairly good. Equally if you compare the Ring Floodlight Cam’s 3000 lumens of light to a ceiling bulb, that’s often around 1000 lumens, give or take. For example Philips Hue bulbs are just over 800 lumens of light, while LIFX is around 1100 lumens of light, they’re around that figure. Equally down lights or spotlights are usually around 350 lumens of light, but sometimes they go up to around 500 lumens of light, in the best case. So 3000 lumens of light for the Ring Floodlight Cam sounds pretty good.

However, that’s until you realize that actually that refers to the combined total of two separate lights. So on the Ring Floodlight Cam, you’ve got left light and right light, each pump out around 1500 lumens of light. Now that is fairly good considering that you can effectively combine the total to 3000 lumens, but it does also mean that each individual light isn’t all that much brighter than a ceiling bulb. It’s only 400 lumens brighter than a LIFX ceiling bulb, for example.

Each left and right light as well, also had a bit of a cone or a shape around it that projects the light in a certain way. And this works fairly well and I quite like it, as we’ll see later, but it does also mean that the light is a little bit more focused than you might think. So that’s one downside of the fact that you’ve got two separate lights, which are 1500 lumens of light. But the benefit to this as well, is because you’ve got two sources of light, they both project in slightly different directions, you actually get a wider sort of cone, or wider sort of distance of light that’s projected from the Ring Floodlight Cam, compared to a traditional LED floodlight, that’s a lot more focused in how it projects the light out. What this means is, in my opinion, the Ring Floodlight Cam is really good for a backyard or for a patio or things like that, but perhaps it’s not so much good over a really long driveway or really narrow driveway, where a traditional LED floodlight is probably a little bit better.

Because in that case, the floodlight will actually project the light a lot more focused and brighten up that area a lot more than a Ring Floodlight Cam. But none the less, as we’ll see in a second, the Ring Floodlight Cam is pretty good. It certainly suits my purpose as well. I’ve got it installed in my backyard and when it comes on, it brightens up the area a whole lot more than my previous light, which was only, I think it was only 800 lumens, which isn’t very much. But of course, it depends on your own circumstances, if you’ve got a really long, really massive, really impressive backyard, course that’s what I’m on about, really big impressive backyard, the Ring Floodlight Cam’s 3000 lumens of light, probably won’t be sufficient for you.

In that case, on Amazon you know, you can get LED floodlights that go up to 10,000 lumens or sometimes beyond, and they might be more suitable if you’ve got a particularly big backyard. But let’s have a look at some examples of just how bright the Ring Floodlight is in practice.

Okay, so this is my old camera which is the 800 lumens one. You can see there’s also light from my house as well. Let’s turn it on now, it’s got a really bad motion sensor. There we are, right, so it’s come on, and as you can see, although there’s brightness there, the bricks around it aren’t all that illuminated to be honest. And if you actually look around, I’ll stop there, you can actually see that although the gate is sort of lighted, my garage certainly isn’t at all, and that’s certainly the flaw with my old 800 lumen light. So I replaced it with the Ring Floodlight Cam, and let’s have a look at that now. Okay, so I come outside, instantly the motion sensor kicks off, ’cause it’s a lot better, and this is the Ring Floodlight Cam, you can see it’s really bright there.

Then you can see the two lights I’m on about and you can see that the lighting effect slightly changes as you look around. And actually things are a lot better illuminated. So if I stop there, you can see that actually, most of my backyard, or all of my backyard is illuminated really nicely, which is a big improvement over what I had before. Which, you just couldn’t use the backyard with the old one, but you can with the Ring Floodlight Cam. Now let’s look at another example, so actually go into live view on my Ring Floodlight Cam. So I’ll tap to go live, okay, so that’s it without the light on. I’ve now created some motion and the lights have actually triggered and you can see in this light view, exactly how much things are illuminated, you can see how the video has changed and actually, you know, it’s pretty good amount of lighting here, provided by the Ring Floodlight Cam.

So I’m quite happy with that as well. Okay next up, I just wanted to compare it to the floodlight I got on my garage, so I’ll turn that on now. It’s pretty bright, so this is 3000 lumens as well. But obviously it’s a more direct hone in light, it’s more suitable for my driveway, which has my cars in it, and as you can see, things are quite well illuminated by this floodlight. Now this is not smart, it’s just a standard floodlight and it lights everything up. But as you get lower down, it’s obviously not quite as bright, because of how floodlight works.

Okay, that wraps up this video, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. As you can tell, the two individual 1500 lumen lights, of the Ring Floodlight Cam, that add up to a combined total of 3000 lumens of light output, is fairly sufficient for me. It’s a lot better than what I had before, so for me I’m really happy with the light output, but that is probably not for everyone. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please click the thumbs up button and don’t forget to subscribe. Thank you!