Blink Mini Review

The Blink Mini is a subpar camera even when considering its low cost. The camera has poor audio and video quality, limited alerts and features, terrible night vision, and you have to have a subscription to record and store data. We recommend looking at the higher-ranking products in our review instead.

Performance Comparison

Although it may look like a better performing camera, the video quality and features do not match up.

Credit: Chris McNamara

Recorded Video Quality

The Blink Mini has extremely poor recorded video quality despite claiming 1080p resolution. The video is easily overexposed in bright light resulting in a whitewash effect. We struggled to make out facial features, too. Additionally, blurring occurred whenever the in-frame subject was moving at a decent rate of speed. Finally, there is a paywall for recording. Given the limitations of the Mini, it's no surprise that its evaluation scored far below average.

The Mini claims to have night vision functionality. However, we found it to be pretty ineffective. The background tends to be blurry, and the subject's facial features are not as clear as we would have liked. The camera also produced an eerie glowing eye effect when subjects looked directly at the camera. Lastly, the camera has a fairly narrow field of view at just 110 degrees.

The Mini has pronounced "eye glow" and fuzzy details in low light.

Credit: Matt Spencer

Monitoring Performance

The Blink Mini did even worse in the monitoring performance assessment, garnering one of the lowest scores in the class. The camera has a latency of ~1.8 seconds between real events and their appearance on screen. While the video isn't too bad, the sound is terrible. Voices were very difficult to discern due to the amount of feedback that rendered speech fuzzy and staticky.

Another issue we encountered with the Mini is its continuous monitoring — or lack thereof. When trying to watch a live feed as you would do with children, pets, or workers in your home, the Blink only allows you to watch for 30 seconds at a time. In order to continue, you have to select "continue" in the app and repeat that action every 30 seconds. As if that wasn't annoying enough, the camera lacks an alarm despite having an onboard speaker.

Limited monitoring time is just one of the restrictions that the Mini imposes on users.

Credit: Matt Spencer

Ease of Use

Most cameras do pretty well in the ease of use analysis because they are pretty simple, to begin with, so you have to go out of your way to make them hard to use. However, the Blink Mini manages this feat by hiding its limited functionality behind a subscription paywall.

While the Mini's app is easy enough to navigate, this is largely the result of it not having much to offer users. There is only one type of alert that can be set up (motion), and aside from that, you can turn the camera on and off. The camera lacks local storage unless you buy a separate base to accomplish this basic task, and you can't record any videos without paying to do so. The camera does come with a stand attachment and hardware if you want to mount it to the wall.

The mini lacks onboard data storage, requiring users to subscribe to the Blink cloud to access video recordings.

Credit: Chris McNamara

Value

Despite this camera's low cost, we do not find it to be a good deal. The camera has minimal functionality as well as a paywall to unlock basic features. As such, we deem this camera to be of poor value.

Conclusion