Amazon’s budget security brand, Blink, announced two new cameras during the company’s fall hardware event in New York City: the Blink Mini 2K+ and the Blink Outdoor 2K+. As the names suggest, these cameras sport 2K resolution to pick up more details. But it's the Blink Arc accessory that makes these security cameras more interesting.
The Arc can combine two cameras and stitch the feeds together for a complete 180-degree view. The product of some glue-gun experimentation, a borrowed 3D printer, and some nifty AI tools, this accessory came together in just 60 days. “There’s this fatal flaw with pan/tilt cameras,” says Jonathan Cohn, head of product at Blink. “The cliché Mission Impossible scene, where they wait for the motorized pan/tilt to turn the other way and duck behind.”
Camera Fusion
Blink’s Arc is Cohn’s solution, initially cooked up in his kitchen, and it’s designed to eliminate your blind spots. He showed some photos of the early prototype, cobbled together using snap mounts and hot glue. He was able to get the right angle so that he’d walk out of the frame on one camera mounted on the front of his house and into the frame on another camera on an almost level horizon.
The junior mechanical engineer, tasked with perfecting the angle and necessary overlap, used an AI tool to stitch the videos together, and despite some warping, it looked promising straightaway. Cohn borrowed his kid’s 3D printer to build the first Arc and popped in a couple of third-generation Blink Mini 2K+ cameras. Before long, the computer vision team found a way to dewarp the video, and the Arc was producing an almost seamless 180-degree live view.
Part of the charm of Amazon’s budget security camera brand is the jerry-rigged nature of add-ons like the Blink Mini Pan-Tilt, which allows you to slot a Blink Mini camera into a base that adds pan and tilt functionality. The Blink Arc is very much in the same mold. You can slot in your existing Blink Mini 2 cameras or snag a couple of the new Mini 2K+ models. (It doesn’t work with Blink’s other devices.) As long as the cameras are the same type, the Blink app can stitch their views.
The Arc houses the cameras at just the right angle and enables them to use a single outdoor power supply. You can connect the Arc to a snap mount to set it up horizontally, vertically, or hanging under your eaves. The video stitching is done on the software side; you simply link the cameras in the Blink app as left and right, and get a panoramic view. Blink even worked out a way to pan and zoom on subjects, so when there’s an event, it looks much like a pan/tilt camera tracking a subject, but it’s really just zooming on the 180 feed.
The idea is nothing new (the dual-lens Reolink Argus 4 Pro is our favorite 180-degree view outdoor security camera), but Blink has found a way to enable this functionality for some existing cameras. And it's hard not to love the commitment of keeping things affordable; you can buy the Blink Arc accessory for $20 and slot in your existing Blink Mini 2 cameras, or snag the Blink Arc, comprising the mount, outdoor power supply, and two of the new Mini 2K+ cameras for just $100.
Resolution Bump
So, what about the new cameras? The Blink Outdoor 2K+ ($90) and the Blink Mini 2K+ ($50) have an upgraded resolution from 1080p to 2K. There’s a slight drop in the maximum frame rate—25 frames per second—and they will need strong Wi-Fi signals due to the increased resolution. (Blink suggests upload speeds of at least 6 Mbps for 2K footage). The Outdoor 2K+ also has a slightly wider field-of-view than its predecessor, but it still runs on two AA batteries.
The jump from 1080p to 2K is fast becoming universal in the security camera industry, but it may not be for the reason you think. Both Cohn and Jamie Simonoff, founder of Ring and now vice president of Amazon’s home security business, say you may not notice a huge difference between 1080p and 2K on your phone screen, but it gives AI more data to analyze.
While AI may be overhyped in many industries right now, it has serious potential for security cameras, cutting down on false alerts and reducing noise by identifying and summarizing videoclips, making your footage more easily searchable and even curating highlight reels, like Blink Moments. As creepy as it may sound, if AI is watching us, it can also learn our habits, which could be the missing piece of the puzzle for proactive smart-home automation. Google is expected to announce new cameras with 2K resolution and an expansion of its Gemini home assistant into Google Home tomorrow.
Both new cameras and the 180 footage from the Arc can be saved in the cloud for up to 60 days with a Blink Subscription Plan, but prices increase from October 8, now starting from $4 a month or $40 for the year for the Basic plan covering one camera or $12 a month/$120 a year for unlimited cameras.
