Can anyone tell me if it’s possible for a physical reason why Ring cannot add the ability to turn off night vision, even with a firmware upgrade? For example, could they have put it on a separate chip that cannot be controlled by a firmware upgrade?
I’m trying to figure out why Ring has not corrected this yet. We are not asking for a feature. It’s not a want, as one of the managers claimed. It’s a BUG FIX! Our Ring doorbells are not operating as advertised. They are defective. Ring shows their doorbell being able to capture useable video at night, and that’s not what’s happening. We know why. We know what would fix it. But for some reason, Ring refuses to address the problem.
I’m getting the very same problem as everyone else here. When night vision turns itself on, whatever is closest to the doorbell looks white (regardless of its true color), and everything else is black with a few dots here and there from houses with their lights on. But as soon as I cover the infrared lights, bingo! I have a decent video again where I can see all the way to the street and beyond.
The night vision is mistakingly using the closest object to set the lighting levels. The close object is set to extreme white (regardless of its true color) and the midtones are set extremely dark. almost black. The result is an image with a glaringly white object and everything else black or nearly black. This is not how night vision is supposed to work.
We want night vision turned off because it’s broken. If it worked right, we wouldn’t have this problem.
In the last 2 days, I’ve talked with Ring’s customer service for several hours, with the last few hours talking with a supervisor. He’s a nice person, but he has no knowledge of how Ring doorbells work. His latest suggestion was to turn the infrared lights to the lowest setting, something he says that he can do, but neither I nor the regular customer service reps could do. The effect? He turned off the color vision – which we all know is a setting in the Ring app. And, of course, the instant I removed the tape covering the infrared lights, the video went black again. I regained video when I put the tape back on.
I also did the flashlight trick someone else suggested in this thread. When I shined the light at the doorbell, I could hear an audible click as the night vision shut off. But when I removed the light, I got 1-2 seconds of video and then click, the night vision turned itself back on which destroyed my video.
The next step the Ring supervisor said he’d do is send me a replacement doorbell. I’ll take it with the very slim hope that the night vision setting is less sensitive on the replacement doorbell and won’t turn itself on at night – but I’m not holding my breath.
The problem is in the design of these doorbells. It is a design flaw. And I question whether it can be fixed with a firmware upgrade. I suspect not. And I suspect Ring knows this which is why they have not addressed this problem. And if I’m right, it means that Ring has knowingly and intentionally left us hanging with defective devices. How else can they explain not fixing this defect in a year?
https://share.ring.com/ee2b6182-d5f7-460b-96d9-8c9229109aee.mp4