Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: two-minute review

Doorbell brands usually sell you the hardware cheap and charge you monthly for the privilege of seeing the footage. Aosu has gone the other way, and for that alone the R1 Ultra is worth your attention.

Video clips go to the AosuBase Mini, a small plug-in box that lives inside your house and does three jobs at once — Wi-Fi bridge, indoor chime, and storage. It holds 8GB and keeps a rolling 60 days of footage.

There is an optional cloud subscription, AosuProtect+, but unlike Ring's arrangement, the doorbell isn't hobbled without it. You get alerts, live view, two-way talk, custom detection zones, and full playback for nothing other than the purchase price.

Detection is another strength. Rather than relying on a passive infrared sensor and hoping, Aosu layers radar and AI human recognition on top, which lets it judge distance and intent — approaching versus passing, lingering versus walking through.

There's also a Tone button hiding in the two-way talk screen. Tap it, and you can answer the door as either 'uncle' or 'clown', with Aosu's straight-faced explanation that this disguises your voice for privacy.

The uncle setting artificially deepens voices, transitioning women and children to something resembling a man to deter would-be intruders. Clown goes all high-pitched and distorted to mask your identity.

Fortunately, the latter falls on the right side of sinister, so you can forget scaring off trick-or-treaters with imitations of South Park’s Mickey Mouse.

Where Aosu gets ahead of itself is resolution and framing. The sensor is 2560 x 1920, which is 4.9 megapixels in a 4:3 frame. That’s sharp, and a step up from 2K doorbells at this price, but not the claimed ‘UHD’, which would be 3,840 x 2,160.

The asserted 60% improvement over standard 2K only holds if the 2K you're comparing against is Aosu's own 3MP doorbell. An earlier version of the identical claim, on the identical camera, said 40%.

Field of view should be taken with a pinch of salt, too. Aosu says 166 degrees, but that's the corner-to-corner measurement. In reality, it's 133 horizontal by 103 vertical, shot in a shallow 4:3 aspect ratio and no head-to-toe image tricks.

With realistic use, the battery should last six months between charges. The kicker is the cell isn’t quick-release, and juicing it from flat to full takes six hours. So that means unclipping the entire doorbell and going without it for quite a while.

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: price & availability

• List price: £139.99 / $135.99 (about AU$190)
• Launched July 2026 in the UK
• Available in the UK, US, and across the EU

With a list price of $135.99 / £139.99 (about AU$190), but usually discounted, the R1 Ultra is filed under ‘affordable’ and veers towards bargain territory if you find one hovering around the £100 mark.

At that price, the value case is strong, because the base station is in the box rather than a £50 upsell, and the 60 days of local recording would cost you a subscription almost anywhere else.

Over three years, that's the difference between a hundred pounds and several hundred more.

• Value score: 4/5

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: subscription costs

The R1 Ultra is fully functional without a subscription. Alerts, live view, two-way talk, detection zones, and 60 days of local playback are all included.

AosuProtect+ is the optional cloud add-on. In the UK, it's advertised at £9.99 (about $10 / AU$20) a month or £122.99 (about $160 / AU$230) a year, currently discounted to £3.49 (about $5 / AU$10) and £39.99 (about $50 / AU$80). Treat the higher figures with the same suspicion as the hardware list price.

The annual price is simply the monthly rate multiplied by twelve, so there's no built-in saving for paying up front, and £3.49 lands within pennies of what Aosu charges in dollars in the US. There’s a 30-day free trial if you wish to dip your toe.

What it buys you is cloud backup rather than capability: 14 or 30 days of event recordings, playback from anywhere, faster scrubbing, and bulk downloads. AI facial recognition sits on the top tier and is offered for video doorbells only.

The argument for paying is that local storage is bound to the base station like Bilbo Baggins is bound to the ring in The Lord of The Rings. If it fails, someone takes it, or you inexplicably drop it in the fires of Mount Doom, your footage dies with it.

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: specs

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: design and installation

• Plain but solid
• Hub required indoors
• Battery or existing wiring

The R1 Ultra is a black plastic slab with silver flourishes similar to a Ring, and very little design ambition beyond flattering imitation.

Installation is straightforward and takes about half an hour all in. Bracket on the wall, doorbell clipped on top, base station plugged in somewhere central.

Aosu recommends mounting at 4 feet / 1.2 meters rather than eye-level, which is lower than instinct suggests but necessary if you want the frame to reach the doorstep. Worth getting right the first time rather than re-drilling.

A 15-degree wedge is included if you need to angle it towards a path or a gate, along with a screwdriver, extension wires and wire nuts for anyone hardwiring to existing 8–24V doorbell wiring.

The base station isn't optional, and it isn't outdoors-rated. It's the storage, the chime, and the Wi-Fi bridge in one. It needs a mains socket permanently, and it's rated only to 14°F / −10°C, so it lives in the hall or the cupboard under the stairs and stays there.

Detaching the whole unit from the wall for a full six-hour recharge via USB-C is a weak point, but a cable is bundled in the box.

A neat addition is pry detection. Try to lever the unit off its bracket, and it sounds a chime and pushes an alert, with footage on the base station indoors rather than on what’s being stolen.

• Design score: 3.5/5

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: performance

• Sharp in daylight
• Strong multi-sensor detection
• Infrared-only after dark

Daylight is this doorbell’s happy place, with 5MP more than most similarly-priced rivals offer. Faces, delivery uniforms and parcel labels are legible rather than merely present.

Radar handles distance and movement, PIR picks up body heat, and the AI layer decides whether what it's looking at is a person. During testing, alerts felt instantaneous once someone reached the door.

After dark, expectations need managing. There is no color night vision and no spotlight.

Eight 850nm infrared LEDs offer monochrome up to 33 feet / 10 meters, and the manual warns mounting too close to a side wall will bounce IR back into the lens and fog the image. I’d pair the R1 Ultra with an outdoor light to make up for the shortfall.

Answering the door is well handled. Notifications arrive with a thumbnail of whatever triggered them, so you can tell a courier from a cat without opening the app, and tapping through starts a proper two-way video call rather than a one-way stream.

The 6x digital zoom lets you crop into a face or a label, though at 15fps and with a wide lens, it softens quickly.

Quick Reply issues an audible preset message when you can't talk. Somewhat boringly, they’re fixed, so you can’t edit the wording or add your own.

On connectivity, the doorbell itself is 2.4GHz only; the dual-band capability belongs to the AosuBase Mini, which talks to your router on 2.4 or 5GHz.

That's a sensible design for a battery device, but it means the camera-to-base link is on the crowded band and placement of the base matters more than usual. Plugged in 33 feet / 10 meters from my front door with the broadband router halfway, all was fine.

Live view includes a UHD/SD toggle to drop the quality when the connection struggles, and you can save a clip or a still straight to your phone's camera roll if you ever need to hand something to a neighbor or the police.

The six-month battery figure assumes up to ten events a day at 20 seconds each — about three-and-a-half minutes of recording daily. On a busy porch with a path or pavement in frame, expect considerably less.

• Performance score: 3/5

Should you buy the Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra?

Buy it if

Don't buy it if

Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra: also consider

How I tested the Aosu Video Doorbell R1 Ultra

• Fitted to a domestic front door
• Assessed daylight and infrared video, detection accuracy, and audio
• Ran entirely without a subscription

I mounted the R1 Ultra on my own front door and used it as the household's main entry camera for a fortnight, deliberately running it on local storage alone so the no-subscription claim could be tested as most buyers will experience it.

I checked live-view responsiveness and alert latency, reviewed clips in daylight and after dark, and tracked battery drain against Aosu's 180-day claim.

First reviewed September 2026

Video doorbells used to be fixtures in sci-fi media as futuristic tech, but fast-forward to 2026, almost anyone can install one in their home for not much money or effort, with a lot of the best video doorbells making for an easy home security upgrade.

But if you still find those options a bit pricey, the Blink Video Doorbell System discounted to just AU$27.99 ahead of Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale next week, should certainly make for a no-brainer addition to your home.

In our Blink Video Doorbell review, we called it one of the easiest security systems to install, with two different mounting options to suit any household, and setting it up within the Blink mobile app with the included Sync Module Core (which serves as the central system hub) takes just three steps.

Our tester found that it has good image quality at 1440p resolution and 30 frames per second, stable video connection, a wide 150º horizontal field of view and battery life rated for up to two years via three AA lithium batteries.

There’s no included indoor chime, but you can pair this doorbell with a Blink Mini camera that’s sold separately (but you can also buy a bundle with two Blink Mini 2K+ cameras for AU$48) or connect via the Alexa app on your phone to an Amazon Fire Stick or Amazon Echo Show to let you see who’s at your door on your TV or smart display.

As mentioned above, lots of features are locked behind a subscription plan, including video recording, cloud video storage, video sharing, person and vehicle detection, even photo capture. The Blink Basic Plan applies to just one device for AU$4.95 per month or AU$49.95 per year, while Blink Plus lets you add an unlimited number of Blink devices for AU$15 per month or AU$150 per year. For most households, though, the former is a good starting point at a reasonable price, which is made even more enticing by the device’s whopping 72% price drop.

Want to explore your options? Amazon has also discounted more Blink video doorbell models and cameras here.

• Cybersecurity company OPSWAT found a login bypass and a crash bug in TP-Link's Tapo C200 cameras
• TP-Link has extended that to include its C120 offering too
• Anyone on the same network could get admin access, live video, and recordings without requiring the owner's credentials

Security researchers at OPSWAT have detailed two high-severity flaws in TP-Link's Tapo C200, a pan-and-tilt indoor camera listed on Amazon for $26.99 and sold as a baby monitor and pet camera.

The more serious issue is that someone on the same network can log in as the camera's administrator without the password, accessing the live feed and stored recordings.

At least one other bug, which OPSWAT rates as critical in the same disclosure but does not detail, has not been published.

A localized login that requires no authentication

The TP-Link Tapo C200, as we noted in previous coverage of the incident, isn't just another security camera that happens to be vulnerable; it is one of the most popular models on the market, clocking in at over 3,000 sales on Amazon alone.

The Tapo C120, in its current iteration, sells over 5,000 units monthly, even as the advisory notes that its V1 hardware version is currently compromised until users update the firmware on their devices.

Both SKUs have received firmware updates that patch the vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-15315 & CVE-2026-15316), which are assigned 'high' scores of 8.7 and 7.1, respectively. However, according to TP-Link, CVE-2026-15316 does not affect the C120 camera.

However, the former vulnerability is the more pressing of the two and, according to OPSWAT, is particularly problematic for users because of how the C120 and C200 cameras function.

Both run a local management interface over HTTPS and use a challenge-response login designed to prove a client knows the owner's password. Khoi Tran, a graduate fellow at OPSWAT, and his mentor, Thai Do of the company's Unit 515 team, found a second verification path in which, under certain conditions, a value the camera hands out during login can be sent back and accepted as a valid authentication response.

The result is an administrator session after a small number of requests, with no password, no existing session, and no requirements for the new 'owner'. As a result, access includes live video, stored footage, and configuration changes.

OPSWAT's researchers pointed out that a C200 used as a baby monitor would expose "live video, night vision, crying detection and two-way audio."

The second flaw, CVE-2026-15316, affects only the C200 and sits in its Wi-Fi onboarding code. Sending the camera an oversized chunk of encrypted Wi-Fi credential data can crash its HTTPS service or restart the device outright, cutting the owner off from management and monitoring until it recovers.

The attacks are somewhat limited in scope: users aiming to exploit such vulnerabilities would need to be on the same Wi-Fi network, or within a certain trusted ecosystem, to begin with.

For now, users upgrading to TP-Link's newest firmware, issued for both models, rectifies both issues, but there might already be another security patch in the works: OPSWAT also found "a critical vulnerability that could allow an attacker to fully compromise the camera," which could then serve as a foothold inside the network.

It is currently holding off on publishing any details about the vulnerability as it waits for TP-Link to issue a patch that rectifies the situation. Neither OPSWAT nor TP-Link, however, has provided a timeline for when the patch will be available to end users.