Tell unwanted guests where to go with the Lorex Video Doorbell

Video doorbells are an interesting proposition; they fit somewhere in the overlap between convenience and household security. Depending on your circumstances or the layout of your house, it may be really convenient to be able to engage in a conversation with the person at your front door without having to be physically present. In a security context, you might want to know if anyone’s looming around and not pressing the doorbell. Whatever your situation, the Lorex Doorbell provides a rich feature set and detailed customisations, with the apparent goal to fit neatly into the mix of almost any household.

 

First impressions

The first thing I noticed about the Lorex Doorbell is it is a big, chunky thing. My model is all black, and has a pretty neutral design that will not look out of place against most homes’ colour schemes. The actual door-bell button is bordered by a soft colour-changing LED light that makes it quite easy to spot.

Unpackaging the Lorex Doorbell is a pleasing experience, with very clear and to-the-point instructions included that make the setup process feel quite achievable.

 

Set up

Different Lorex Doorbells either require wiring installed by an electrician, or else come with a battery that enables them to be installed anywhere, so take care checking which one you’re buying depending on your situation. I tested the B463AJDBA model, which has a battery that needs charging for a few hours before installation. Once it was ready, it was very simple to pick a spot and screw the provided mount into place.

Once the mount is installed and the doorbell is clicked in, it can only be removed using the supplied release pin (which is very similar to the tool you normally receive with a new phone for opening the SIM port). Using the provided mounting wedges, you can also tilt the doorbell up to 15º horizontally or 5º vertically.

You will need to install the Lorex app on your mobile device to finish the setup of the doorbell and connect it to your home’s Wi-Fi.

I also tested a Lorex Wi-Fi Chimebox, which you simply plug into any powerpoint in your house, and pair with the doorbell using the Lorex app. It communicates over the Wi-Fi network, so it doesn’t need to be especially close to the doorbell so long as they’re both using the same Wi-Fi.

Note: Before you invest in a Wi-Fi doorbell, make sure you check that the place you intend to mount it can actually get a decent W-Fi signal! You can easily check this with your mobile device.

 

 

In Use

Having both the Wi-Fi Chimebox and the Lorex app buzzing away on your mobile does give you peace of mind that you’re going to hear someone if they’re at the door. The app in particular treats the doorbell like it’s a phone call, so it will keep ringing and vibrating for quite some time in your pocket until you answer it. We had a guest due to arrive while I was vacuuming, and when my partner told me I should keep an ear out it was quite novel to be able to reply “No need!”

Once you answer a ‘call’ in the app it initiates a conversation via the doorbell with two-way audio and one-way video. This is particularly useful if you’re not at home – for example, you might tell a courier where to leave a package. There are also a number of pre-recorded ‘quick responses’ that you can send off (like “We’ll be there in a moment”), and you can record your own custom quick responses if you have a use for it.

The wide angle lens and 2K video resolution does a great job of clearly capturing anyone who’s at the door, and this includes a night light and night vision for callers after dark.

The doorbell also has a motion sensor that can notify you of visitors who don’t ring the bell. It comes with optional AI-powered Person detection, which in my experience did a great job of avoiding false positive notifications. In general I found the motion sensor did not miss any legitimate motion, and only gave me one false positive.

 

 

Other features

The Lorex app is well designed and comes with a raft of customisations and pretty useful features. As with most security apps, you can invite other members of the household to access the doorbell using their own logins. If you have other Lorex devices, like their security cameras, the doorbell will fit in seamlessly as another entry in the overall household’s devices.

Some standard functions you may be familiar with from other security apps include the ability to temporarily snooze alerts (useful if people are using the door a lot), or to temporarily block just the capture of video.

Some of the more nuanced settings available include some pretty in-depth power management options, which give you an impressive range of control over where you want to spend your battery. For example, you can choose to increase or reduce the quality or length of the video, how regularly it should record, whether the night light should activate, etc. This helps you really enforce your priorities for how you use the device; for example, you could be very specific about whether you care more about just capturing a good likeness of the person at the door (prioritising high resolution video), and are willing to trade off capturing much info about what they actually do while they’re there (lower video length).

Everybody’s battery usage will differ depending on your settings and how much activity your front door gets; in my usage one charge of the battery lasted about a month.

The doorbell is also accessible using Google Assistant or Alexa. In my experience the voice commands here are all pretty useless, except perhaps as a quick way of turning off the siren if that’s been activated.

 

Subscription package

It is worth pointing out here that the Lorex Doorbell stores video on the device itself. The one big advantage of this is that you do not need to pay any kind of ongoing subscription to use the device or the app – video is streamed from the doorbell over your Wi-Fi.

However, with 32GB of included MicroSD storage, you should not expect to be retaining the videos on the device for very long. You can manually save video recordings as mp4 files if you want to retain them, but if you need them to remain accessible in the app for longer than a few days you will want to consider Lorex’s cloud storage plans.

This might also be a drive for you if you are particularly concerned about theft of the device itself. As mentioned earlier, the doorbell can be removed from the mount using a normal SIM card tool, and as the video files are stored on the doorbell and are otherwise inaccessible when the device is offline, cloud storage would be your only chance of capturing video of a thief stealing the actual doorbell.

 

Issues

On that point, the lack of any anti-theft features is notably missing from the Lorex doorbell. Some equivalent devices can emit a piercing siren if they are removed from their mounting before being deactivated.

The other thing we need to talk about is unnecessary motion sensor notifications. Anyone with a security system knows that a big part of making it workable involves fine-tuning notifications to avoid unnecessary alerts about your own comings and goings. The Lorex doorbell has two main options for stifling unnecessary motion alerts: you can de-activate them at certain pre-scheduled times (e.g. high traffic times during the day), or you can use geofencing. Geofencing involves giving the Lorex app on your mobile device access to your location, and you can use this to modify the behaviour of alerts; for example you can disable motion sensor alerts when you are home. In my testing, Lorex’s geofencing drained my Android phone’s battery like nothing else. I use a few different location tracking apps, and Lorex’s geofencing was the #1 drain on my phone battery by a fair margin.

I did find that setting schedules or using geofencing were both successful methods for controlling unhelpful motion sensor alerts, though at time of this writing you can’t set any more complex rules that leverage both features – for example there’s no way set a rule that would mute motion sensors while you’re in the house, unless they happen late at night.

If you don’t think scheduling or geofencing are going to suit your needs, there are more sophisticated video doorbells on the market that purport to leverage AI to recognise and ignore motion alerts from members of the household, but you can usually expect these to come with a premium retail price, or else require an ongoing subscription fee for the feature.

Conclusion

The Lorex doorbell provides reliable motion sensing, high quality video capture, and the provided app provides user friendly remote two-way communication with visitors. In general I found the customisations allowed me to successfully target the settings to fit my specific circumstances, though it took a week or two of experimentation before I landed in a happy place.

If this price point of $327 is about all you can justify spending on a doorbell, Lorex have provided a great option. While it feels quality and performs reliably, it’s really the flexibility and broad feature set that will give it the best chance of fitting your particular needs.

Thanks to Lorex for providing the hardware for this review.

 

Specifications

Max Video Resolution: 2K (2560 × 1920)
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video Modes: 2K, 1080p, D1
Video Features: HDR
Max Lens Field of View: 124º Horizontal, 164º Diagonal
Nightlight / Warning Light: Yes
Quick Responses: Yes
Built-in Battery : 6200mAh
Night Vision: High powered Infrared LEDs (850nm) with IR Cut Filter
Color Night Vision: Yes
Indoor / Outdoor: Outdoor, IP65 rated
Microphone: Microphone with noise cancellation
Speaker / Siren: Yes
Audio: 2-Way audio
Network Connectivity: 2.4/5Ghz 802.11b/g/n/ac
Operating Temperature: 14°F to 122°F / -10°C to 50°C