Ring Battery Video Doorbell Pro review: the new 4K model on a stone house in Sheffield

Our postman, Gary, has a theory about our house. He reckons it's the only one on the round where you knock, wait, hear a spaniel go berserk, wait some more, and then a voice shouts "just leave it on the step, love" from somewhere up the garden.

The voice is Pauline's. The garden is steep, like everything in this part of Sheffield, and by the time either of us gets from the veg beds at the top to the front door, Gary is three houses down and the parcel is on the step in the rain. We've had a cheap wireless bell for years that nobody hears from the garden. That's the problem I wanted fixed this summer.

So on 4 July I bought Ring's newest battery doorbell, the one Amazon.co.uk lists as the Ring Battery Video Doorbell Pro (newest gen) and Ring's own site calls the Battery Video Doorbell 4K Pro. Same product, two names, which is a very Amazon thing to do. It came out in the UK in March at £219.99, and I ran it for 54 days on the front of our 1934 stone semi, with Bramble, our springer spaniel, doing his best to set it off.

I spent 19 years repairing appliances, so before it went on the wall, it went on the kitchen table.

What's in the box, and what isn't

The doorbell is a tall, slim slab in a finish Ring calls Deep Silver: glossy black at the top where the camera sits, brushed grey below, and a round button that lights up blue. The faceplate is metal-effect plastic, but thick, and it feels solid.

In the box: the doorbell, a mounting bracket, a wedge for angling it, screws and wall plugs, a USB-C cable and the battery pack. What isn't there is a chime. Out of the box, the doorbell rings your phone and nothing else, and I'll come back to that, because it matters more than it sounds.

The headline changes from Ring's previous Pro are:

• Retinal 4K video with up to 10x Enhanced Zoom, which is digital zoom helped along by the higher resolution.
• A square, head-to-toe view, 140 degrees across and 140 degrees top to bottom. So you see the face at the door and the parcel on the step in the same frame.
• A bigger battery, which Ring calls the Quick Release Ultra Battery Pack, charged by USB-C.
• 3D Motion Detection, a small radar that measures how far away something is, so you can ignore the pavement and only get told about the path.

It runs on Wi-Fi 6 and it's rated IP55 for weather, from minus 20°C to 50°C. Sheffield tests the minus end more than the plus. Now for the wall.

Fitting it to a stone doorframe

Our front door is set into gritstone, which laughs at cheap drill bits. I used a 6 mm masonry bit, the supplied wall plugs and the level on my phone. The bracket goes on first, the doorbell clips down onto it, and a single security screw at the bottom holds it there. Box open to first test ring: 24 minutes, and 10 of those were Pauline holding a torch and telling me it was on wonky. It wasn't. Her eyes were.

The wedge is worth using if your door sits back in a porch or a recess, as ours does. Without it, the camera was looking at the hedge. With it, angled 15 degrees towards the gate, it covered the path, the step and the bottom of the garden steps.

The clever bit is the battery. On older Ring battery doorbells you often had to take the whole unit off the wall to charge it. On this one the faceplate pops off with the little tool and the battery pack slides out, so the doorbell and its screws stay put. I did it twice during the test in under a minute each time.

Wi-Fi was my worry, with 45 cm of stone between the router and the front door. The app showed the signal as "good", and live view took 3 to 4 seconds to connect. If yours struggles, a Wi-Fi extender in the hall is cheaper than a lot of frustration. Then came the real test: the doorstep.

54 days, 1,236 alerts, and one very keen dog

For the first week I left the motion settings on their defaults, and I logged every alert in a notebook by the kettle. There were 162 of them. Of those, 50 were things I didn't care about: cars going up the hill, the neighbour's cat on the wall, the bin men, and Bramble, twice, sticking his nose through the letterbox from the inside. That's 31% false alerts, and it's why most people turn their doorbell notifications off after a fortnight.

Then I set up the radar. In the app you draw a line on a picture of your path, and anything further away than that line is ignored. I set ours at 4 metres, just short of the gate. Over the remaining 47 days the doorbell recorded 1,074 events and only about 6% were things I'd rather not know about, mostly the cat, who does come up the path, so fair enough.

Sorting alerts into people, packages and vehicles worked well: 19 of the 21 parcels left on our step came through as "package delivered". The two it missed were small envelopes half under the mat.

An alert is only as good as the picture it sends, so that's where I went next.

The picture: day, dusk and dark

In daylight, 4K makes a real difference. Faces are easy to recognise even with heads down, which older 1080p doorbells often fluffed. With the 10x zoom I could read the size on a shoe box left on the step, and the square picture showed the courier's face and the box by his feet in one frame.

Dusk is fine as well. Ring's Low-Light Sight keeps the picture in colour under our street lamp and the light from the hall window, a bit grainy but clear enough to see the colour of a coat. When it's properly dark, with no light at all, it switches to black and white night vision, which is sharp near the door and fades out towards the gate. If the bottom of your path is pitch black, a cheap motion light on the wall will do more for your night footage than any doorbell setting.

Sound is clear both ways. Pauline talked to a delivery driver from the top of the garden while pulling up carrots, and he heard her perfectly and said so, then put the parcel behind the recycling bin as asked. That's the moment she decided she liked it.

"I don't care about 4K. I care that I can tell the man where to put the box without getting off my knees." Pauline, by the carrot bed, on day 9

Which brings us to the battery, the thing everybody asks me about first.

How long the battery really lasts

Battery life depends almost entirely on how busy your door is, and ours isn't a quiet cul-de-sac. Here's what I logged:

At our rate, a full charge should last around 12 weeks in summer. Cold is hard on any battery, so I'd expect less in January, and I'll update this page after a Sheffield winter. A quieter house could easily go twice as long. If the doorbell is hard to reach, a second battery pack to swap in is worth the extra.

On the subject of the button, Alfie, our grandson, is six. On his first visit after it went up he pressed it 14 times in a row to see if the blue ring would "run out". It didn't, but my phone buzzed 14 times in the garden centre and a lady by the compost looked at me as if I'd done something wrong.

So far, so good. Then comes the bit Ring's box doesn't make much of: the running costs.

The real cost: subscription and chime

Without a subscription, the doorbell rings your phone, shows you live video and lets you talk. It doesn't save a single recording. So if somebody takes a parcel while you're out and you didn't see the alert in time, there's nothing to look back at. For most people, that's the point of the thing, so budget for a plan. Ring's UK plans at the time of writing:

There's a free 30-day trial. After that, for one doorbell, Ring Solo paid yearly is the sensible choice, and over three years the doorbell plus Solo comes to £369.96. The Pro plan's video descriptions, which write things like "a person in a hi-vis jacket leaves a parcel at the door", were accurate during the trial. Worth three times the price for one doorbell? Not for us.

The chime is the other hidden cost. With my phone left in the kitchen, we were back to the problem we started with. A plug-in Ring chime in the hall fixed it, loud enough to hear from the veg beds with the back door open. Bundles with a chime usually cost less than buying the two separately.

One more thing before the money: the law, because in Britain it applies to doorbells too.

Your neighbours, the pavement and the ICO

If your doorbell camera films beyond your own property, the pavement, the road, a neighbour's garden, the Information Commissioner's Office says data protection law applies to you. In plain English: you should have a good reason for filming, keep recordings only as long as you need them, and be ready to share or delete footage of someone who asks.

Ring's privacy zones black out parts of the picture so they're never recorded. I blanked the pavement, the road and our neighbour Maureen's front path, then showed her the result. Audio carries further than the camera sees, so I switched off audio in recordings and kept two-way talk. Renting? Ask your landlord before drilling, or use a no-drill mount.

Set up sensibly, it's a good neighbour. Now, should you buy it now or wait?

Buy now, or wait for November?

This model only arrived in the UK in March 2026, so it hasn't been through a Black Friday yet, and at the time of writing we hadn't seen a big cut on it. What we do know is how Amazon treats its own Ring doorbells in November. Last Black Friday the basic Battery Video Doorbell went from £99.99 to £39.99, and the Battery Video Doorbell Plus dropped to £69.99, £60 off. Ring doorbells are among the most heavily discounted things Amazon sells. This year the sales peak over the weekend of 27 to 30 November.

As a Christmas present, it's a thoughtful one for an older parent who lives alone and finds getting to the door a struggle, or for anyone forever missing deliveries. Set it up for them before you leave, including the chime, the radar distance and the privacy zones. And agree who pays the £49.99 a year, because a doorbell that records nothing makes a disappointing gift in February.

£220 plus a subscription not in the budget? Fair enough.

Right for your front door?

• Ring Battery Video Doorbell Plus (2nd Gen), £149.99 list, £130 at John Lewis at the time of writing. 2K instead of 4K and a smaller battery, but for most front doors it does the job, and it's £70 to £90 cheaper.
• Ring Wired Video Doorbell Pro (3rd Gen), £219.99. If you already have doorbell wiring, never charge a battery again.
• Google Nest Doorbell (battery), £145.97 at John Lewis. Good if your house already runs on Google Home. Its subscription is separate and it has a different app.
• Eufy E340, £179 at John Lewis. Two cameras, one for faces and one for parcels, and it saves clips on the doorbell itself, so there's no monthly fee.

The first-generation Pro, 1536p with a smaller battery, is listed at £89.99 at John Lewis, out of stock when we checked. At that price it's a bargain if it reappears.

After 54 days

It's staying on our wall. It's the first doorbell I've fitted that I'd happily put on my own door: sharp picture, battery that lasts months, a radar that actually stops the nonsense alerts, and a battery pack I can swap without a ladder or a toolbox. The subscription is the catch, and Ring should be clearer about it on the box.

Gary noticed it on day two. He waved at it, pressed the button, and when Pauline's voice came out of it from the top of the garden he jumped a good six inches. He now says "morning Pauline" to the doorbell whether she's there or not. I haven't the heart to tell him most mornings she isn't.

For more of what's been through my hands this summer, from the Dyson V16 Piston Animal to the rest of our reviews, have a look round. Janice's Furbo 360 review is the one to read if the camera you need is for inside the house. And how we measure every one of them is written up under how we test.

Ring doorbell questions people ask