Ring Video Range: How Far Can It See? Can You Zoom In/Out?

Ring’s cameras and doorbells tend to film in full HD (1920x1080p) with a few exceptions. Whilst this is good, Ring cameras also use a wide angle lens that pick up a lot of footage – at the sacrifice of overall detail quality, that is.

Whilst you can zoom in on Ring recordings by doing a two-finger pinch, the overall detail you will get when zooming in can be fairly poor (especially at night time). Most of the time, it’s very hard – if not impossible – to make out car plate numbers.

If you like video, feel free to check out the YouTube guide for this video below. If not, please keep reading!

Ring camera and doorbell recording quality

Ring were one of the first to market with their smart doorbell, releasing the Ring Video Doorbell 1 in 2013. It recorded in ‘HD ready’ 720p, i.e. 1280 x 720 pixels.

Since then, Ring have released a range of smart cameras and doorbells, all of which record in ‘full HD’ 1080p, i.e. 1920 x 1080 pixels. Whilst the difference might not sound like much, full HD can capture more than twice as many pixels as 720p.

I should clarify that when I say ‘pixels’, I’m generally talking about the level of quality and detail: 1080p will capture a greater level of detail than 720p will.

To give an example, the below are some video captures from my 1080p Ring Doorbell Pro:

Ring Doorbell footage at 6pm in the UK.
Ring Doorbell footage at 6pm in the UK.
Footage from my Ring Doorbell Pro, showing a cat which triggered motion detection.
Footage from my Ring Doorbell Pro, showing a cat which triggered motion detection.

You can see that they capture a fairly impressive level of detail, especially for a doorbell! Ring cameras capture the same level of detail, too.

Ring devices record when motion is detected, and they record around a 1 minute video clip. You can also do a live view session to see a real time view of what’s being captured, which lasts up to 10 minutes. Finally, a Ring Doorbell will also record when the doorbell is clicked. No Ring devices currently offer the ability to record 24/7, however.

Whilst the level of detail provided by Ring’s devices is fairly good, anything captured more than a few metres away from the device won’t be amazing quality. For example, if I wanted to get the plate number for a car parked opposite, I wouldn’t be able to – it’d be too blurry.

Hence I wanted to cover different zoom options that are available to you, and test out whether any of them can provide useful information when you need it.

Zooming in – Ring app

When viewing recordings back in the Ring app (or if you’re in live view), you can use the two finger pinch motion to zoom in or out. In other words:

  • To zoom in: put two fingers very close together, and move them away from each other.
  • To zoom out: put two fingers apart from each other, and then move them close together.

This allows you to see the following level of detail:

Using 'pinch zoom' in the Ring phone app to try and read information from a passing car at night.
Using ‘pinch zoom’ in the Ring phone app to try and read information from a passing car at night.
Using 'pinch zoom' in the Ring phone app to try and read information from a parked-up van.
Using ‘pinch zoom’ in the Ring phone app to try and read information from a parked-up van.

As you can see, there’s varying levels of quality when zooming in. Anything captured at night time is going to be a bit blurry and obscured anyway (due to night vision mode being on), and so zooming in will never be too useful.

However the day time zoom is better – I’m able to see that the parked-up van is some sort of window company, based on its logo and the word “WINDOWS“. Heck, I can see that the company name is… wait… “[Word] of [word] WINDOWS“. Okay, that’s not too useful actually.

The reason that zooming in is never perfect is because Ring devices (like nearly all of their rivals) are only fitted with a single camera lens: a “1x” wide angle lens which is good for objects close to the lens, but not great for objects far away.

The fact that I can make out “of” and “WINDOWS” from a van parked up 20+ metres (64+ feet) away is actually pretty awesome when you consider that this is all from a doorbell!! 10 years ago, doorbells just made a sound after being pressed, so the current state of smart doorbells and cameras is much advanced.

But this knowledge doesn’t help if you were burgled or seen something suspicious, and hence you wanted to get plate numbers or extra information from a recording to provide to the police.

Since Ring’s 8-10x digital zoom isn’t too useful, can analyzing things on a computer help more?

Zooming in – computer

If you go to Ring.com (or download the Ring app), you can view the 1080p recordings from your Ring cameras and doorbells. However they are still the same quality level as when you viewed them on a mobile phone – i.e. they’re still 1920 x 1080 pixels.

Equally, viewing the recording on Ring.com doesn’t actually allow you to zoom – there’s just no option for it. What you have to do instead is download the video by right clicking on it, and clicking “Save as”. This will download it to your computer, and you can then open it up in your computer’s video player.

If your video player has a zoom feature then great, you can try zooming in here. But if it doesn’t, consider using VLC Player which is free and comes with a digital zoom option:

Using VLC Player's "Interactive Zoom" feature to zoom in on part of a Ring.com video clip.
Using VLC Player’s “Interactive Zoom” feature to zoom in on Ring footage.

You can enable ‘Interactive Zoom’ by going to:

  • On the menu bar, click:
  • Tools…
  • Effects and Filters…
  • Video Effects…
  • Geometry…
  • Interactive Zoom
  • Click ‘Save’
  • Click ‘Close’

A window in the top left will appear over your video, allowing you to move the white box to show which part of the main video should be zoomed in on.

This is a fairly good level of zoom – probably a 6-8x digital zoom, which is similar to the Ring app’s zoom on a mobile phone.

Having said this, you can’t magically start seeing extra level of detail – you’re still just doing a digital (i.e. software based) zoom. It’s not like fancy camera or the latest smartphone that has a zoom lens (known as an ‘telephoto lens’), and hence can take physically-zoomed video records.

One thing you could try is going into ‘movie mode’ and trying to enhance part of the footage in a photo editor. Hence I did a screen grap (pressing the ‘Prt Sc’ keyboard button) and copied the picture into Photopea – a really awesome free, browser-based photo editor. Naturally you can use use any photo editor that offers sharpen/enhance tools, though.

Using Photopea's video editing features to try and make out more information from a parked up van.
Using Photopea’s video editing features to try and make out more information from a parked up van.

In the above case, I extracted just the part of the footage I was interested in, and then I went to Filters -> Sharpen -> Smart Sharpen. This allowed me to play around with different options to try and improve the picture quality.

As you can see, I wasn’t able to make out the exact company name, but it’s a bit if an improvement – especially when you (again) remember that this van is parked up 20m/64′ (or more) away.

But in summary, there’s always going to be a limit to how much detail you can see from Ring’s video recordings. Whilst the movies (and shows like NCIS) sometimes show camera techs zoom in and gain an incredible level of detail from a single blurry video, the reality is somewhat different: you can’t magically obtain perfect quality from any part of a video.

Nest Hello’s zoom compared

Ring Doorbell’s closest rival is the Nest Hello, and they have a whole support page on their zoom and enhancement features.

Nest Hello also only has a single “1x” wide angle lens (i.e. no telephoto/zoom lens), so it relies on an 8x digital zoom – just like Ring.

However, Nest Hello comes with a really useful feature: enhance. You can specify a part of the doorbell’s view to focus on, and all recordings after this point will be zoomed in on this area – and be automatically enhanced.

Whilst you can’t then zoom back out of recorded clips (you can only cancel the enhance mode, and then future recordings will be zoomed out again), this is quite a nice feature because it allows you to get extra information about certain areas that concern you.

This is made possible via Google’s state of the art photo AI, which is the same sort of technology that Google Pixel phones use to allow really good level of ‘zoom in’ even with a single “1x” lens (such as with the Pixel 3).

Whilst it’s unfortunate that you can’t enhance on pre-recorded clips, if you see a suspicious vehicle parked up then you could always temporarily zoom and enhance on this area to get extra detail quality.

Equally if some of your doorbell footage is obscured by a wall or siding, being able to zoom this area away – and only see the useful parts of your outside – is a nice feature… one that Ring unfortunately doesn’t have.

About Tristan Perry

Tristan Perry is a software developer who is passionate about tech gadgets, DIY and housing. He has therefore loved seeing smart homes hit the mainstream. Tristan also has an academic background (in Math & Computer Science), and so he enjoys digging into the technical ways that smart home devices work.

Tristan owns close to a dozen Amazon Echo devices, way too many Philips Hue bulbs and lightstrips, a boat-load of Ring Cameras and Doorbells... and a bunch of other smart home devices too (from Reolink, Google Nest, GLEDOPTO and others).

If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about this article, please leave a comment below. Please note that all comments go into a moderation queue (to prevent blog spam). Your comment will be manually reviewed and approved by Tristan in less than a week. Thanks!

16 thoughts on “Ring Video Range: How Far Can It See? Can You Zoom In/Out?”

    • That’s interesting. From an image quality perspective, it’s rare to see loads more with a Ring camera than our eyes. BUT maybe there’s an element of reflections at play here, causing one camera to be able to see that other camera’s reflections easier? Not sure.

      Reply
  1. My doorbell will video movement coming from the left of my door and continue until it’s out of sight, but movement coming from the right of my door, only records a few seconds then it’s out of sight to the left. What can I do to fix this please.

    Reply
    • I’m sorry to hear that, that’s frustrating. I get equally good (or bad!) motion detection from both left and right, so I can’t say that I’ve experienced this myself. All I can suggest is to double check any motion zones you might have set (if you have), along with the motion sensitivity settings – try increasing this. You could also potentially look at an angle mount for your Ring Doorbell, moving it slightly to the right so that it will detect right-side motion more.

      Beyond that, there’s always a small chance that it’s a hardware issue – so ringing Ring Customer Support might help.

      Reply
  2. Great info Tristan!
    Thanks.

    Question: Is it possible to use a Nest Camera with my Ring Cameras or another camera for clear longer distance shots?

    Here’s my situation: I have Ring cameras all around the house and they work great. I also have one camera connected through a Chime Pro pointed at my gate. The camera is about 150 feet from the house and it’s still about 100 feet from the gate. I can’t get any closer to the gate. That’s as far as I can get it to work with the extender/chime. At 100 feet from the gate I can see what’s going on but it’s not zoomable, it just gets completely pixelated.

    Any suggestions?

    Reply
    • Hi Ed, thanks! And good questions.

      I would probably just look at installing a completely different smart camera: one that you either pair with a mobile hotspot, or one that has 4G/5G support.

      If you go down the mobile hotspot route, you have pretty much limitless options. The hotspot will provide you with a new Wi-Fi network, then you can just choose any smart camera (from Ring, Nest etc).

      Alternatively, there are products like the eufy 4G LTE Starlight Camera and Reolink Go that work via mobile data – for exactly your situation.

      I hope that helps. Certainly, trying to extend your Wi-Fi so far out probably won’t work reliably – so relying on mobile data might be a better option.

      Thanks,
      Tristan

      Reply
  3. Hi Tristan, great! But I have a problem, my bell is inside a arched doorway of which some of the build appears in the view ( surround ). So question is can I crop it out permanently just leaving unobstructed field of view. Any advice
    Would be helpful, the Ring door bell is a late 22/23 model. Thanks. Bob. Bath.

    Reply
    • Hi Bob, thanks for the comment! Yes it’s always a bit annoying when there’s an arched doorway blocking the view. Unfortunately you can’t crop this out with Ring’s doorbells (you can with the Nest Doorbell IIRC, but certainly not with Ring’s). Your only real options will either be to relocate the Ring doorbell, or potentially check out Ring’s angle mounts, which allow you to ‘turn’ the doorbell slightly. This may or may not help, depending on exactly where the Ring Doorbell is installed.

      Reply
  4. Hi Tristan, I have just installed a ring doorbell and cameras all round my house (for good reasons ?). I have a narrow side path with trees running the length of it (1.5 metres from house wall) and I have installed a ring camera in the middle which doesn’t capture all of it. Would I be better to install a doorbell so I can maybe see all of the path from top to bottom (it’s about 12 metres)?
    Does the doorbell work better as I am happy to purchase another for the path? Also, the trees do have small gaps and the camera is not picking up motion on the far side what do you think?
    Thank You
    Ali

    Reply
    • Hi Ali,

      Sorry to hear you’ve needed to install various Ring cameras, but your question definitely makes sense. It can be a bit unreliable when it’s fairly narrow, as you have found.

      A Ring doorbell could make sense – the best for your case being the Pro 2 (because it has ‘head to toe’ functionality, meaning it will show the path top to bottom quite nicely), although unfortunately this is quite an expensive product.

      In terms of missed motion, in general hardwired (or plugged-in) Ring devices work a lot better than battery ones – the battery ones need to conserve power, meaning their motion detection isn’t quite as powerful. So if the camera (that is missing motion) is a battery one, you might want to consider trying to run power to it and getting a hardware/plug-in one instead.

      Thanks,
      Tristan

      Reply
  5. How do I change the field of vision on my Ring Wired doorbell? The instructions said to click on the 3 dots on my app, but there is only 3 lines that don’t help.

    Reply
    • Could you please take a screenshot of the app/screen you’re stuck on? You can’t permanently change the field of view on Ring devices, but you can temporarily zoom in when watching back the footage.

      Reply
  6. I had a Ring Pro doorbell from 2019. The motion detection ranged captured my mailbox and the corner of my driveway. The doorbell appears to have fried itself, no idea why, and I know electronics to a fair degree. I bought a Ring Pro 2 this week (3/1/23). It’s better in many ways, but not the detection range. I no longer can see anyone access my mailbox nor vehicles coming in my driveway. I’m guessing that they’re in the 40-50 foot range. Is there any way I can increase the range on my current doorbell. My wife is quite unhappy.

    Reply
    • Sorry to hear it, but unfortunately I think you are out of options. The Ring Pro 2 does seem a bit more limited here, probably due to their introduction of 3D radar technology which adds more motion-detection features, but also will limit things a bit.

      Reply

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