Ping my bell

The latest video doorbells make it easy to talk to couriers from the bath and find out whose cat is pooing in your front garden... but which is best?

Saved by the bell Colour pre-roll is a handy addition, storing a few seconds of footage from before the video is triggered so you can see what caused it.

Ring Video Doorbell 4

£180/stuff.tv/Ring4

Ring has been around for a decade now and its smart doorbells have matured through various iterations of this, its flagship ding-donger. This is our top pick of Ring's Full HD battery doorbell range, although the £90 second generation of the standard Ring Video Doorbell (yes, the names are confusing, it's not just you) will be enough for many people despite its lack of a removable battery.

The Video Doorbell 4 introduces colour pre-roll via a second camera and boasts stellar battery life of many weeks, but it's not without issues. Although it's mostly a set-and-forget device, the Ring app is guilty of feature-creep...even if the ability to specify particular areas for motion monitoring is admittedly brilliant. The design of the bell itself is also looking a trifle tired.

As with other Ring devices you will need a £3.49 monthly sub to store 30 days of video in the cloud (in other words, to get it to work in any kind of useful way). But Ring is part of Amazon these days, so if yours is an Alexa household then getting a Ring bell is a no-brainer, because it works with it it brilliantly. That's especially true if you have an Echo Show or Fire TV device, because you can see the camera feed on it whenever you desire.

STUFF SAYS 4/5