Ring Floodlight Cam Pro (2nd Gen) Review: 4K Power vs. Subscription Costs
DRN were sent the recently released Ring Floodlight Cam Pro (2nd Gen) to review. After using it throughout the free Ring Protect trial period (one month) and then continuing for a couple of weeks without a subscription, here are my thoughts. There’s a lot to like about this outdoor security camera, but there’s also one major drawback that will be a dealbreaker for some.
Setup and Installation: Seamless Integration (with a Sparky’s Help)
Ring released the Floodlight Cam Pro (2nd Gen) around October last year, and getting it up and running was about as painless as it gets. Dropping it into my existing Ring setup on iPhone took only a few minutes. The Ring app remains one of the better-designed smart home apps around, and setup is largely a case of following clear, step-by-step prompts.
Every Ring device I’ve used has followed the same pattern. The app tells you exactly what to do, the device confirms things with LED colours and voice prompts, and troubleshooting is usually as simple as matching a flashing light to an instruction on-screen. I’ve also dealt with Ring’s support team both online and over the phone in the past, and they’ve consistently been solid.
This is a hard-wired camera, which means in Victoria you’ll need a licensed electrician to install it. In our case, we replaced an existing sensor light at the rear of the property, and the swap took around ten minutes all up. That said, expect to budget roughly $150 for installation if you don’t already have suitable wiring in place.
Ring App Experience and 3D Motion Detection Features
Setting up the Floodlight Cam Pro 2 is almost identical to the previous generation. You add a new device in the Ring app, scan the QR code on the camera itself (don’t put the ladder away too early… ask me how I know), then work through motion zones, alerts and detection preferences.
One feature I didn’t enable was Birds Eye View, which uses Ring’s 3D Motion Detection. In practice, this limits detection to around 30 feet. The gate I’m most interested in monitoring sits closer to 40 feet away on a diagonal, so enabling it actually reduced usefulness for my setup.
Birds Eye View also relies heavily on mapping, and for whatever reason it just doesn’t display particularly well here in Australia. Whether that’s a local data issue or something else, I’m not sure, but the overhead motion paths never quite lined up correctly. If you’ve had a better experience locally, I’d genuinely love to hear about it.
AI Smart Alerts: Detecting People, Dogs, and “Chickens”
With standard motion detection enabled, the camera performed very well. It reliably picked up people, movement around the gate, and even when someone relocated my ladder. It also detected what it confidently described as “a light-coloured chicken” wandering through the yard.
I do not own a chicken.
AI descriptions weren’t perfect, but they were mostly accurate, and when they weren’t… they were entertaining. I do have a white and brown dog, a light-coloured dog even, and I do have a fence gate. A chicken, however, is not part of our household. To be fair, it was my dog, caught on an odd angle, and it genuinely made me laugh out loud.
4K Image Quality and Enhanced Night Vision Performance
Image quality is very good for a camera designed to cover a typical suburban backyard. Detail is sharp, colours are accurate, and the built-in floodlights do a great job of lighting the scene without blowing highlights.
Ring claims up to 10x digital zoom, and while that’s technically true, usable zoom depends heavily on lighting conditions. In good light, zooming in to identify detail works well. In lower light, the image can break up as you’d expect from any security camera relying on digital zoom rather than true optical zoom. This isn’t unique to Ring and is fairly standard behaviour for 4K-class security cameras.
The Ring Protect Dilemma: Is a Subscription Mandatory?
And now, the big issue.
Once the free trial ends, the Ring Floodlight Cam Pro becomes dramatically less useful unless you pay for a Ring Protect subscription. Without it, you get no saved videos, no snapshots, no recorded history at all. Motion notifications still come through, but they contain no images or video previews. AI-powered alerts are disabled. Essentially, once something happens, it’s already gone.
There’s no local storage fallback, no limited history, no “basic” mode that lets you at least see what triggered the alert. It’s an all-or-nothing model, and personally, I’m not a fan. Other brands at least offer some level of functionality without an ongoing fee. Here, once the subscription stops, so does almost everything that makes the camera genuinely useful.
Final Verdict: Should You Buy the Ring Floodlight Cam Pro (2nd Gen)?
The Ring Floodlight Cam Pro (2nd Gen) is a well-built, capable outdoor security camera with excellent app integration, strong detection performance and good image quality. As hardware, it’s hard to fault.
But the value proposition hinges entirely on whether you’re comfortable paying an ongoing subscription. If you are, it’s a polished and reliable system. If you’re not, you may find yourself owning a very expensive motion sensor with lights.
Buy well, buy once… just be sure you’re happy buying monthly too!
