Review: Ring’s new outdoor lighting products are brilliant

Ring’s new outdoor lighting products are impressive. It’s rare, even in 2019, for something to work out of the box, but that’s what happened when I installed Ring’s outdoor lighting products. They just worked.

You know the drill. You get a gadget and go to install it. Somewhere during the installation, it fails or hiccups. The thing doesn’t connect to Wifi, or it fails during an update, or something. Eventually, you’ll get it working after a few minor issues are solved.

Ring’s outdoor lighting products installed without issue. I took them out of the box, threw aside the instructions, and installed them in a logical manner. And 20 minutes later, I had five new lights configured to my home’s network and installed around my house. Brilliant.

This isn’t Ring’s first lighting product. TechCrunch tested Ring’s floodlight camera last year and found it just as impressive with an easy installation and straight-forward feature set. Unlike that product, these new lights lack the camera, which make them significantly less expensive.

The new lighting products are clearly the result of Ring’s purchase of Mr. Beams. The company purchased the lighting company in January 2018 before Amazon purchased Ring in April 2018. Like Mr. Beams lights, Ring’s new lights are just a light and a motion sensor. The lighting products are a natural extension of Ring’s offering and best yet they’re relatively inexpensive.

These lighting products lack cameras found in the rest of Ring’s products but still have motion sensors that work in conjunction with Ring’s cameras. If, say, the $25 step light senses motion, it kicks on the light but can also trigger a Ring camera to start recording. Likewise, if a Ring camera notices movement, it will begin recording but also trigger a series of lights to turn on.

The products are priced competitively considering their set of features. A small steplight is $25, a pathway light is $29, a big spotlight is $40, and a floodlight is $50. A $50 bridge is required to connect the lights to a local network. Or, if you want to connect existing low-voltage landscape lighting to the system, Ring sells a $100 transformer.

There are similar products on the market. Ring’s offering is not unique, but its integration and ease of installation set it apart. The new outdoor lighting products is a significant addition to Ring’s ecosystem, which now includes security lighting, indoor and outdoor cameras, security systems, and, of course, a video doorbell.