Blink Outdoor Camera Floodlight Mount

I had high hopes for this £34.99 new battery-powered floodlight from Blink, an accessory for their rather excellent Outdoor model security camera. Sadly, I was to be disappointed.

The lamp arrived very nicely packaged and presented, as Blink products always are, and included the light itself, a set of Duracell D cell batteries, a comprehensive and well designed fitting kit and a rather hard to follow multilanguage user guide. Build quality seemed fine, the floodlight seemed robust and well made if not particularly attractive to the eye.

Getting it up and running seemed easy enough too. After removing the insulation strip from the batteries it was simply a matter of opening the Blink app and pressing the + button on the top right to add a camera accessory and following the walkthrough guide. Then it started to get tricky. I struggled for some time to get the hard wired USB plug on the floodlight to engage with the socket in the recessed port on the rear of the camera and in fact, I struggled with three cameras before I got one to connect. No doubt it gets easier with practice. The camera could then be pushed in place onto the projecting ball and socket mount on the floodlight. Returning to the app I saw that the floodlight was recognised and incorporated into the app with a new section in the camera settings panel and lamp on and off buttons on the main screen of the camera.

It all worked well enough for the first day although even at full power I did not find the floodlight to be as bright as some rivals but adequate for my small garden.

Then it stopped working.

The light was still recognised by the Blink camera and app and allowed me to change the settings for it but it refused to operate either automatically or in manual mode and gave communication error messages between the app and floodlight. Multiple reinstalls of both the floodlight and camera from the Blink app did not help. The light would flash once during the install process, show up on the app with a 100% battery level. It just did not work anymore.

Although I have not heard of this error before other reviewers of the floodlight have encountered a range of problems with the floodlight.

There are several third-party rivals available as well as competing camera systems with reliable outdoor options. I also have the Arlo floodlight camera and that is brighter and works better although is much more expensive.

If you need an outdoor floodlight then I would give this one a miss or if you are married to the Blink system then hang on until version 2 comes out.