Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: A security camera with a twist

Thanks in no small part to their ownership by Amazon, Ring cameras have become the default systems for anyone wanting to dip their toes into the world of smart home security. Of course, ubiquity is no guarantee of quality, and the cameras do require a paid subscription to access services that some other manufacturers offer for free.

The new Ring Pan-Tilt indoor camera is an interesting addition to the Ring line-up because, unlike most security cameras, which just sit where you put them and point where you point them, the Pan-Tilt offers remote control panning and tilting. These features allow you to look about the room in a way that is beyond cheaper cameras like the Ring Indoor Camera and Blink Mini 2.

There being no such thing as a free lunch, the pan and tilt facility adds another £20 to the price of the otherwise identical Ring Indoor Camera, bumping the price to £70. However, as is usual for any gadget from under Amazon’s umbrella, it can often be found on promotion for around £25 less.

Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: What do you get for the money?

The Ring Pan/Tilt camera is essentially a Ring Indoor Cam (Gen 2) – itself a warmed-over version of the original Ring Indoor Camera – mounted on a powered, rotating platform. It weighs 180g and is available in black or white.

Said platform has inevitably resulted in a package that’s larger than more basic cameras, putting it at 147mm tall and 60mm in diameter. As such, it’s not quite as easy to fit into small spaces as the admittedly more basic Blink Mini 2 cameras I have dotted around the house. It’s hardly a monster, though.

Along with the camera, there’s a plastic wall mount in the box, a 3m USB-C power cable and a USB wall plug. If you do plan on mounting your Pan-Tilt someplace exotic keep in mind that this is a wired system, so it has to be kept plugged in at all times.

Elsewhere, the camera maintains the 1080p resolution and 30fps specification of the original, which is perhaps a little disappointing when some of the opposition offers 2K or even 4K.

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Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: How easy is it to set up?

Ring has got the set-up procedure down pat. Once you’ve downloaded and opened the app, logged in or set up a new account, all you do is plug in the camera, add it to the app as a new device – then scan a QR code, name the camera and input your Wi-Fi system credentials. After the camera has finished its short calibration routine, it’s ready to go.

The app itself is easy to navigate and replete with features, but certainly repays a decent amount of time spent familiarising yourself with all the features. For instance, it’s not obvious that tapping on the Calendar button gives you access to the snapshots the camera has automatically taken.

Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: What does it do well?

The Pan-Tilt’s party piece is the ability to physically pan (rotate left and right) through 360 degrees and tilt (rotate up and down) through 169 degrees. Given that camera’s static field of view is already 115 degrees horizontally and 59 degrees vertically, this means you can see everything in a room bar immediately above and below the camera.

The electric motors move the camera about quickly and quietly – I was worried my dog would hear it, see it and then decide it was a chew toy, but the noise it made never attracted his attention.

You control this movement via a D-pad in the camera’s live view screen, and although it takes a second or so to react to initial taps or changes in direction, it does move smoothly and quickly.

The camera’s reaction time to motion detection was every bit as good as I expected, too. Ring’s cameras have are among the most responsive around and the Pan-Tilt continues that tradition. Performance was similar to the Ring video doorbell I tested recently, other than in the time taken to open a live feed from the app which was even faster.

Given that the Tilt-Pan is being marketed as a security camera it also has a siren, although this can only be activated manually. There is an option to have the camera automatically announce it has started recording when motion is detected, but oddly, not to start the siren wailing.

It isn’t the loudest siren you’ll ever hear but it could prove useful for deterring – or at least startling – intruders.

Another area where the Pan/Tilt performs very well is its two-way talk system. The speaker is very clear with none of the tinny distortion effects which you find on some cameras and there’s very little delay. The noise-cancelling microphone does a great job, too, making conversations sound surprisingly life-like.

The privacy shutter was a new feature added to the basic Ring Indoor Camera last year. It’s a manual affair – making it controllable through the app would be pointless as anyone with remote access could override it – but when it’s turned into the locked position, it covers the camera and disables the audio system.

Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: What could it do better?

Ring could have made more of an effort to improve video quality. It’s not intrinsically bad, it just doesn’t seem to have improved much since the first Ring indoor camera. Video quality is a little soft, it doesn’t handle the contrast issues created by bright windows as well as it could and a fisheye effect is noticeable at the top and bottom of the picture.

It left me wondering if the Pan-Tilt wouldn’t be better if it used the same square 1,440 x 1,440 sensor as the Ring Doorbell. But then that would make it a whole new product rather than an existing one mounted on a servo stand and there would be cost implications to that.

In the dark, the camera shoots with its IR lights in black and white, which makes the image softer still. You can also use colour night vision, which uses IR lighting and a colour sensor, but the quality depends on the level of ambient light available. The Pan-Tilt doesn’t have a built-in light like the Blink 2 Mini indoor camera.

As with all Ring cameras, the Pan-Tilt only works directly with Ring’s app and Alexa. Yes, there’s support for IFTTT applets, but that’s straying off the path of true mass-market usage. By comparison, the TP-Link Tapo cameras play nice with Apple Home and Google Home as well as Alexa and they’re cheaper, too.

For example, the Tapo C225 pan/tilt indoor model costs around £45, and you can also slot a micro SD card in, allowing you to record video footage locally and avoid paying a monthly subscription. You can also do that with the even cheaper Blink Mini or Blink Mini 2 indoor cameras, although you need the Blink Sync Module 2.

With a Ring camera like the Ring Pan-Tilt there is no option to store footage locally at all, so unless you are happy just looking at live feeds you must take out a Ring subscription which means coughing up £5/mth, £50/yr for one camera or £8/mth, £80/yr for two or more. If you’re new to Ring, you get 30 days free of the £8/mth plan but if you buy the camera, you will have to take out the subscription at one stage or another.

Those are the big negatives with Ring cameras but there are some smaller niggles worth pointing out as well. I wish, for instance, that the system could distinguish between humans and pets as other camera systems can. An option to restrict motion detection alerts to when my dog was on the move would have been most welcome.

The camera also lacks anything in the way of a tracking system. Granted, in most domestic environments this is unlikely to be an issue, but the ability to follow movement down a long hallway could be useful. I have seen rumours that auto-tracking will come to the Pan-Tilt in a firmware update but I’ve not been able to confirm this.

Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera review: Should you buy it?

As is always the case with Ring cameras and doorbells, the big issue with the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera is the fact you need a paid subscription to record video or access historical video footage.

This is less of an issue if you already have a Ring subscription for a Ring doorbell – the most popular entry point into the Ring ecosystem – but, for everyone else, it involves a permanent ongoing cost just to watch Tiddles or Rover cavort about while you are out.

Assuming you have a Ring subscription or don’t mind taking one out, the Pan-Tilt is a very useful gadget. The 360-degree coverage means nothing should ever be out of sight and while the video quality is merely good the audio performance is very impressive. If don’t want to pay monthly, however, then check out the competition from either Tapo or Eufy. Both offer similar devices that support local recording and don’t demand a paid plan.