Four months ago, I swapped out my old Ring Video Doorbell 3 for the Ring Video Doorbell 4. The reason was simple: I kept missing the first few seconds of every delivery person walking up to my door. By the time the motion alert fired and the camera started recording, the FedEx driver was already halfway back to the truck. That four-second Pre-Roll Video Preview on the Ring 4 seemed like it could fix exactly that frustration.
After 120+ days of daily use through fall rainstorms, a few freezing winter mornings, and roughly 2,300 motion events logged in my Ring app, I have a pretty clear picture of what this doorbell does well and where it still falls short. Some of my initial impressions held up. Others changed completely once the novelty wore off.
Video Quality: Day & Night
The 1080p resolution is adequate but not exceptional by 2026 standards. During daytime, the image is sharp enough to clearly read text on packages, identify faces at about 15 feet, and see license plates on cars parked in the driveway. Colors are accurate and the 160-degree horizontal field of view covers my entire front porch plus a good portion of the walkway.
Where the Ring 4 genuinely impressed me is the Color Night Vision. Previous Ring models used infrared LEDs that produced a grainy, black-and-white image after dark. The Ring 4 uses ambient light processing to deliver color footage at night, and the difference is dramatic. On a well-lit porch (I have a 60W equivalent LED porch light), the night footage looks nearly as good as daytime. On nights when I turned the porch light off to test, the image drops to a dimmer but still color-capable view. Complete darkness without any ambient light source does push it into infrared mode, but that scenario is rare if you have any porch or street lighting at all.
The real headline feature is the 4-second Pre-Roll Video Preview. Here is how it works: the Ring 4 captures low-resolution black-and-white snapshots continuously, even before motion is detected. When a motion event triggers, the saved footage from 4 seconds before the trigger gets stitched to the beginning of the full-color HD recording. The result is that you see what happened before the motion alert, not just after.
In practice, this solved my original problem completely. I can now see the delivery driver walking up the path before they reach the door. I can see the neighbor’s dog entering the frame before it triggers the motion zone. It is a small feature on paper, but after using it daily for four months, I consider it essential. Going back to a doorbell without Pre-Roll would feel like going backward.
One caveat: the Pre-Roll footage is lower resolution and black-and-white, even during daytime. It is not a seamless transition from pre-roll to full recording. You can tell where the preview ends and the HD footage begins. It is functional, not pretty.
Motion Detection & Alerts
Ring gives you three tools to fine-tune motion detection: adjustable motion zones (draw up to three custom zones), motion sensitivity slider, and a People Only mode that uses Ring’s onboard processing to filter out non-human motion.
I spent the first two weeks tweaking these settings because the default configuration was too sensitive. My front yard faces a moderately busy sidewalk, and without People Only mode enabled, I was getting 40+ alerts per day from passing cars, blowing leaves, and shadows. Once I drew tighter motion zones excluding the sidewalk and turned on People Only mode, the false alerts dropped to about 5–8 per day, which is manageable.
Alert speed is decent but not instant. From the moment a person enters the motion zone to the notification appearing on my iPhone, the delay is typically 3–6 seconds on WiFi and 5–10 seconds on cellular. That is fast enough for most situations but too slow to catch a porch pirate in the act unless you are already near your phone. The Ring 4 does not have onboard sirens or deterrence features — if that matters, you are looking at the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 or a separate Ring Siren.
One persistent annoyance: the People Only mode occasionally misses actual people. Over the past four months, I have noticed it fail to alert on about 1 in 20 visitors who approach from the far edge of the motion zone. The events still get recorded (I can find them in the timeline), but the push notification never fires. Ring has improved this through firmware updates — it was closer to 1 in 12 when I first installed — but it is still not perfect.
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