iPhone 18 Pro review: does variable aperture change everything?

9.1

Apple has done something to the iPhone 18 Pro that it has never done to an iPhone camera before. It has put a real, moving aperture inside it. Every iPhone camera up to this point had one fixed aperture. This is the first that can change it while you shoot.

That is a hardware change, not a software one, and hardware changes on a phone camera are rare enough to be worth stopping on. Apple has also rebuilt the cooling, jumped the battery figures a long way, and shipped the whole thing alongside iOS 27 and a new Siri that is still in beta.

I have been shooting with both the 18 Pro and the 18 Pro Max since returning from a briefing in Cupertino where I filmed a jazz set in a very dark room a fair bit of walking around my neighbourhood. Here is what the variable aperture actually does, what the cooling is worth, and who should be spending the money.

We love burgundy. Credit: Valens Quinn

iPhone 18 Pro specifications and price

Display	6.3-inch (Pro) and 6.9-inch (Pro Max) Super Retina XDR, ProMotion up to 120Hz, Always-On
Peak brightness	3000 nits outdoor peak
Build	Aluminium unibody, Ceramic Shield 2 front, Ceramic Shield back
Main camera	48MP Fusion with variable aperture, f/1.48 to f/4, six laser-cut blades
Ultra wide camera	48MP Fusion, fixed aperture
Telephoto camera	48MP Fusion with tetra-prism design, 4x and 8x, up to 8x optical-quality zoom
Front camera	18MP Center Stage with square sensor
Video	Cinematic effects applied after capture up to 60fps, 4K Dolby Vision time-lapse, Audio Mix with music isolation
Chip	A20 Pro, 2-nanometre, 6-core CPU, 7-core GPU, dual 16-core Neural Engine
Cooling	Next-generation vapour chamber with three times the surface area of the iPhone 17 Pro
Wireless	N1 chip with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread, C2 cellular modem
Battery	Up to 34 hours video playback (Pro), up to 43 hours (Pro Max)
Charging	Pro to 50 per cent in around 15 minutes wired, Pro Max five minutes for around seven hours of video playback
Storage and finishes	256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB in black, silver, glacier and burgundy
Operating system	iOS 27
Price (RRP)	From A$2,099 (iPhone 18 Pro), from A$2,299 (iPhone 18 Pro Max)
Availability	Pre-orders from 12 September 2026, on sale 18 September 2026

Specifications supplied by Apple. Prices are Australian recommended retail including GST.

Design and build

I had both the Pro and the Pro Max in burgundy and in black, and the burgundy is the one I would buy. It is subtle rather than loud, and it reads as sumptuous and rich in a way that phone colours usually do not. The black is very black, the darkest Apple has used on the Pro line, but it still has a nice sheen to it rather than going flat.

The glass panel on the back is a separate piece to the aluminium, but it is integrated cleanly enough that it reads as one surface rather than two parts bolted together. The camera bump is sculpted rather than stepped, and the lens rings match the body colour, which is a small thing that makes a big difference to how deliberate the whole back looks. The Apple logo is shiny against the matte finish, so it catches the light on its own.

And here are all the other colours…black, silver, glacier and burgundy. Credit: Apple

The enclosure is an aluminium unibody in a 7000 series alloy rather than the titanium of the iPhone 16 Pro – which I really liked. The front is Ceramic Shield 2, which Apple says is three times more scratch resistant, and the back is Ceramic Shield with four times more resistance to cracks.

Screen and Dynamic Island

The Dynamic Island is a welcome change. It is smaller, and it now supports three different app activities at once rather than two, which matters more than it sounds if you are the sort of person who has a timer, a flight and a rideshare all running together.

The wider dynamic island can show 3 items now. Credit: Apple

At the briefing in Cupertino, Apple had a microscope set up so we could look at how the infrared camera is now hidden under the glass. As far as I could see, they have used a coarser pixel design, effectively spreading the red, green and blue elements out around the camera so the lens can see through the display.

The screen itself is nice and bright. ProMotion up to 120Hz and the Always-On display carry over unchanged, and both models now peak at 3000 nits outdoors with better anti-reflection.

The camera: what variable aperture actually does

Most people hear variable aperture and think Portrait mode, done properly in hardware. It is closer to the opposite.

Portrait mode creates a shallow depth of field look, which is great for separating the foreground from the background. The hardware change in the 18 Pro goes the other way. The depth of field gets deeper, meaning more of the scene is in focus.

This shows the dynamic aperture’s different effects – at f/4 the pyramid in the rear is sharp, but soft at f/1.48, but both images are similar in brigthess. Credit: Valens Quinn

Samsung already tried this. It had a dual aperture that launched with the Galaxy S9 in 2018, switching between f/1.5 and f/2.4. Samsung ran it for a couple of years and then dropped it with the Galaxy S20. The difference is that Samsung’s was really a two position toggle. This is a real iris, with six laser-cut blades, and it comes with a developer API as well, so the benefits of the hardware can be used by apps like Instagram or WhatsApp rather than only in Apple’s own Camera app.

Keeping the aperture at f/1.48 is a great way to get motion blur into your shots. Credit Valens Quinn

The range runs from f/1.48 to f/4, and wide open it pulls in about 50 per cent more light. It works at every main camera focal length, including the built-in 2x.

Another example showing how the f/4 smaller aperture keeps the image sharper further away. Credit: Valens Quinn

Here is the part that trips people up. Shoot the same scene wide open and stopped down and both frames look about equally bright, with maybe a slight colour shift between them. That is the auto exposure equalising them. The difference is not brightness at all. It is what is sharp.

Setting it main camera at f/4 and aiming at a single point of light will show off the star effect from 6 aperture blades. Credit: Valens Quinn

Wide open buys you roughly two and a third stops, which the camera can then spend on a faster shutter. That means sharper subjects when things are moving. Shoot two objects at different distances wide open and the one at the back goes soft. Shoot a car going past wide open and it blurs, then shoot it at f/4 and it is sharp.

Motion blur or sharp – take your pick! Credit: Apple

The other effect is the sunstar. Six blades give you a six-pointed star on any point light source, and only at f/4. That is one thing software genuinely cannot fake.

Pro controls

All of this happens automatically, but you can drive it yourself in the new Pro controls, and this is a really welcome update to the camera software. You can customise the top tray and put what you want in it, so you get manual aperture, shutter speed and white balance, which is useful because the iPhone does sometimes struggle with white balance. There is a histogram in there too. I would like it to be a bit larger, but you can at least move its position.

The customisable tray at the top is where you can access many controls like aperture, shutter, exposure and white balance – yay! Credit: Apple

The other lenses and Photographic Styles

The ultra wide and the telephoto round out the creative options, but the attention this year is clearly on the main lens. The variable aperture applies up to the 2x, and the ultra wide is still fixed, so none of this applies at 0.5x. Perhaps in a future model we will see it supported across the other lenses.

Photographic Styles are a nice to have rather than a headline. The new texture and grain controls are the addition worth knowing about, and the grain control in particular softens skin in a way that some people will be glad of. There are lots of things to play around with in there.

Video is where it gets more interesting

The stills side is the story Apple is telling, but video is where I think this gets more interesting.

I shot a jazz set with no direct lights and no rig, just the phone, in a genuinely dark room. The phone is pulling light in from that wide open aperture across several frames to hold detail without blurring. Apple has also improved the default 1080p 30 low light capability, which combines frames when the auto frames per second kicks in.

Great low-light performance thanks to the variable aperture when filming some jazz. Audio was dialed in too thanks to the 4 mics. Credit: Valens Quinn

The part I did not expect is the audio. There are four studio-quality mics, and Apple’s new algorithms separate voice and music from background noise. Audio Mix can now isolate music, which is new, and on a live recording the difference between the raw capture and the processed version is not subtle.

Cinematic effects used to need their own mode. Now you shoot normally and apply the effect afterwards in Photos, at up to 60 frames a second, so you can get that sense of depth out of an ordinary recording.

Smart focus tracking is the other one worth knowing. Double tap a subject and it holds focus as they move, or as the camera moves, through the scene. It works even if the subject leaves the frame and comes back, which is the whole point. You do not want it hunting for the background the moment someone steps out of shot.

It is not a cinema camera, and the low light performance does fall apart if you push it far enough. It is very good, but there are still compromises.

Check out our video review to see the more recordings and photos:

Apple Reference Image

Here is a problem that did not really exist five years ago. Anyone can now generate a photograph that looks completely real. Apple has done something about it, and almost nobody is talking about it.

Shoot in the new Reference mode and the sensor itself signs the image at the moment of capture. Private Cloud Compute then develops that signed sensor data into an unalterable reference image, which you can view in Photos alongside the main image. It works like a digital negative. Any modification to the photo can be traced back against the original.

Great to see the Reference Image feature, which is like a ‘digital negative’ for photos. Credit: Apple

It is worth being precise about what this proves. It proves the sensor saw this. It does not prove the scene was honest. That is still a useful thing to have, particularly for photojournalists.

It is opt-in, and it is not everywhere yet. In China it is not available at launch for regulatory reasons, and in the EU you can view and develop reference images but not capture them on the 18 Pro at launch. Apple also says SynthID support arrives in a software update later this year, which is a separate, cross-platform way of flagging that AI has been applied to an image.

Heat, and why it matters more than the chip

The 18 Pro has a next-generation vapour chamber with three times the surface area of the one in the 17 Pro. At the briefing in Cupertino, Apple had the old chamber on one side and the new one on the other, the same heat load through both, and a thermal camera showing how the heat dispersed. The 18 spreads it across the whole device instead of building a hotspot down the midline.

iPhone 18 Pro’s new vapor chamber vs the iPhone 17 Pro. The thermal readout shows a more even heat spread versus the hot spot on the iPhone 17 Pro (left side phone). Credit: Valens Quinn

That matters for the obvious reason, which is that you do not want a phone uncomfortable to hold or sitting hot in your pocket. It also matters for a less obvious reason. Thermals can count for more than a fast chip, because chips get throttled when they get too hot. Any phone can go fast for 30 seconds. Then it heats up and the software slows it down.

Apple claims up to 40 per cent better sustained performance than the 17 Pro, and up to double against the 16 Pro. So I ran the 18 Pro until it stopped being fast, using the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test, and put a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra through the same test for comparison. Neither got too hot to hold, though the Samsung did feel subjectively a bit warmer.

Test	iPhone 18 Pro Max	Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
3DMark Wild Life Extreme, best loop	7944	7253
3DMark Wild Life Extreme, lowest loop	5523	3682
3DMark Wild Life Extreme, stability	69.5%	50.8%
Geekbench 7, single core	3965	3027
Geekbench 7, multi core	11247	10093
Geekbench 7, GPU	Test failed	Not compared
Speedometer 3.1 browser benchmark	65.3	47.2

Higher is better on every row. Stability is the lowest loop score as a percentage of the best loop score. Tested September 2026.

The two phones are nine per cent apart at peak and about fifty per cent apart under sustained load. The iPhone held far more of its frame rate as the test went on, which is exactly what the cooling is for.

The Geekbench 7 GPU test failed outright on both models, which is most likely because Geekbench has not updated for this chip yet. I had the phone before release. On the browser side, Speedometer 3.1 put the 18 Pro at 65.3 against 51.7 for the iPhone 17 Pro, which is about 26 per cent ahead.

Results on 3DMark’s stress tests showing that that the iPhone 18 Pro Max can manage heat loads without major throttling with the help of its new vapour chamber.

The chip is the A20 Pro, built on a 2-nanometre process. The headline numbers are a 6-core CPU, a 7-core GPU up to 40 per cent faster than the A19 Pro, a dual 16-core Neural Engine, and 50 per cent more memory bandwidth. The bandwidth is the one that actually shows up in use.

Gaming on the Pro Max with that large screen was a pleasure. I played Genshin Impact at maximum graphics settings and it looked great, with a frame rate that stayed fluid.

Battery and charging

Apple claims up to 34 hours of video playback on the Pro and up to 43 hours on the Pro Max. That is a big bump, and both figures come from Apple rather than from me.

Battery life is genuinely hard to pin down in a review week, because it depends so much on how you use the phone. What I can tell you is that I got two full days out of the Max without needing to plug it in, which is the sort of result that changes how you think about a phone.

On charging, Apple says the Pro goes to 50 per cent in around 15 minutes wired, or 30 minutes wirelessly, and that five minutes of wired charging on the Pro Max gives around seven hours of video playback. I put the Max on a 60W charger for five minutes and got about 17 per cent back.

Connectivity

Connectivity is as you would expect, and the useful part is that Wi-Fi 7 is genuinely there. Both models carry Apple’s N1 wireless chip, which brings Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and Thread. The 18 Pro also introduces the C2 cellular modem, which Apple says delivers meaningfully faster uploads than the C1X while using 15 per cent less energy.

iOS 27, Siri AI and the caveats

iOS 27 is out, and the headline is Siri AI. It is in beta, English to start, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish coming in October.

The part that has not had enough attention is that the features running in Apple’s cloud have daily limits. Apple has not said what those limits are, beyond that they vary by feature, request complexity and system demand, and it has said that expanded access above them will cost money in future. To be clear about what that means, it is not that Siri AI becomes a paid product. It is that there is an undisclosed free allowance, and going past it will eventually cost.

In the EU, Siri AI is not available on iPhone at launch, along with anything that depends on it.

One practical thing that catches people out. A new iPhone rebuilds its search index from scratch, and that can take days. Apple says the index is device specific, so even a restored phone has to build its own. If your new 18 Pro seems to know nothing about you for the first few days, that is why.

iPhone 18 Pro vs iPhone 17 Pro

	iPhone 17 Pro	iPhone 18 Pro
Main camera aperture	Fixed	Variable, f/1.48 to f/4, six laser-cut blades
Pro controls in the Camera app	Not available	Manual aperture, shutter speed, white balance and histogram
Apple Reference Image	Not available	Reference mode with signed sensor data
Chip	A19 Pro	A20 Pro on a 2-nanometre process
GPU	A19 Pro	Up to 40 per cent faster than A19 Pro
Memory bandwidth	A19 Pro	50 per cent more than A19 Pro
Vapour chamber	Previous generation	Three times the surface area
Sustained performance	Baseline	Up to 40 per cent better, per Apple
Dynamic Island	Two Live Activities	Smaller, up to three Live Activities
Front glass	Ceramic Shield	Ceramic Shield 2, three times more scratch resistant
Speedometer 3.1 (measured)	51.7	65.3

Comparison figures are Apple’s stated claims except where marked as measured.

Who is it for?

There are three answers, depending on what is in your pocket.

If you are on an iPhone 17 Pro, keep it. This is not your year. The 18 Pro is more capable, but it is not a big enough bump. The camera will take better photos, but it is subtle stuff. What it really does is give the camera system more levers to move in hardware. If it is dark, it can open the aperture wider, let more light in, and rely less on ISO or a slower shutter to brighten things up, which is where blur comes from. Left in automatic, it will quietly help your photos. If you are a creative person who wants to adjust these things yourself, that is a different and more exciting proposition.

The black colour and iPhone 18 Pro size is very pocketable. Credit: Valens Quinn

If you are on an iPhone 15 or 16 Pro, this is the easiest yes I have given in a while. Coming from a 15 Pro, Apple claims up to 50 per cent faster CPU, a faster GPU and up to 11 additional hours of video playback. That is substantial.

If this would be your first Pro, answer four questions for me. Have you ever changed a camera setting manually, on any camera? Do you edit your photos, or post them as shot? Do you shoot video longer than ten minutes at a stretch, or game for more than half an hour? Do you know what a histogram is for?

Four noes and you are paying a premium for hardware you will never trigger. There is a standard iPhone 18 coming, though Apple has not said when. It could be late this year or early next. The iPhone 17 is on shelves now, and it usually gets cheaper once a new Pro lands.

One thing cuts the other way. The battery is the one Pro advantage everybody feels, whatever they shoot and whatever they do on the phone. And if you simply want the best one, that is a fine reason on its own. Just know what you are paying for.

What does variable aperture do on the iPhone 18 Pro?

It physically changes the size of the opening in the main camera lens, from f/1.48 to f/4, using six laser-cut blades. Wide open it gathers about 50 per cent more light, which the camera can spend on a faster shutter for sharper moving subjects. Stopped down to f/4 it puts more of the scene in focus and produces a six-pointed sunstar on point lights.

Does the variable aperture work on all the iPhone 18 Pro lenses?

No. It applies to the main camera, including the built-in 2x. The ultra wide is still a fixed aperture, so none of it applies at 0.5x.

How much does the iPhone 18 Pro cost in Australia?

The iPhone 18 Pro starts at A$2,099 RRP including GST and the iPhone 18 Pro Max starts at A$2,299 RRP including GST. Both come in 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB.

Is the iPhone 18 Pro worth upgrading to from an iPhone 17 Pro?

For most people, no. The camera improvements are real but subtle in automatic use, and the performance gains show up mainly under sustained load. If you shoot manually and want hardware control over aperture, that is the reason to move.

Is Siri AI available on the iPhone 18 Pro at launch?

It is rolling out in beta with iOS 27, in English to start, with more languages in October. It is not available on iPhone in the EU at launch. Features that run in Apple’s cloud have undisclosed daily limits, and Apple says expanded access will be available for a fee in future.

GadgetGuy’s Valens Quinn attended the Apple launch event in Cupertino CA as a guest of Apple Australia.

iPhone 18 Pro & Pro Max

An excellent camera upgrade and a powerful, class leading phone, with impressive performance and battery life, but you may not need all it delivers.

Performance

9.7

Features

9.1

Design

9

Value for money

8.5

Positives

Additional battery life is a welcome upgrade

Variable aperture camera offers more creative options and more realistic photos

Loads of pro photo and video capture features that compete with high-end equipment

A20 Pro chip delivers amazing performance and efficiency

New thermal design means less heat in your hand when playing games or long content captures

That burgundy

Negatives

Variable aperture feature may not be noticed unless you look for it or want the manual settings

Siri AI features may require additional fees and still in beta

The Pro model is the only choice for those who want the latest iPhone

9.1

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Stylish 2026 Asus Zenbook 14 lasts up to 33 hours on one charge

If there’s one thing that’s benefited all of us from the silicon battle in recent years, it’s better laptop battery life. It wasn’t that long ago that an all-day battery in a Windows PC was a ludicrous thought. But with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm duking it out, improving laptop chip efficiency in the process, 24 hours (and more) of battery juice isn’t such a wild idea anymore. And, if you take Asus’ word for it, the new Zenbook 14 can last up to 33 hours on a single charge.

That 33 hours is based on continuous 1080p video playback, a common testing metric used by PC and phone makers. Even though few people would watch a video for that long, it’s still a decent indication of longevity.

The 2026 model of the Asus Zenbook 14 (dubbed the UX3480) comes in various configurations, replete with your choice of chip provider. Launching now in Australia is the $2,099 Snapdragon X1 variant, which ships with a 512GB SSD, 16GB of LPDDR5X memory, and a 1920 x 1200 OLED 60Hz screen.

Komodo Coral is another subtle colour option. Image: Asus.

More models, including Intel and AMD variants, are scheduled to launch in Australia between November and December. With the top-end Intel Core Ultra and AMD Ryzen AI models, you get a 1TB SSD and 24GB of RAM.

Priced at up to $3,999, depending on the configuration, each Zenbook 14 has a 14-inch OLED display. Some are 3K at 120Hz, while others use 1080p at 60Hz with no touch functionality.

As seen at Computex earlier in the year, there’s a growing demand for different-coloured laptops. Using Asus’ “Ceraluminum” hybrid material, the new laptops come in Arctic Blue and Komodo Coral. They’re fairly light, too, with most variants weighing around 1.1kg.

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Replaceable lenses come to hardy DJI Osmo 360 II camera

360-degree video is taking off, and not just for outdoorsy types keen to capture all the action. It’s a format that embodies the shoot-first, edit-later approach, letting you get the shots you need in the edit suite. To capitalise on the trend, DJI has now launched the Osmo 360 II in Australia.

More a refinement than an entire overhaul, the $899 Osmo 360 II uses similar hardware to the first model, including the same two-inch touchscreen and dual 1/1.1-inch square CMOS sensors, with support for up to 8K video. DJI’s advertising says the two sensors combine to produce the equivalent of a one-inch CMOS sensor, the same size used by its Osmo Pocket gimbal cameras.

One of the new additions is support for HDR photography. Although the Osmo 360 II’s sensor is the same size, DJI claims the camera can use more of the sensor’s space, assisting with taking clear footage and more detailed photos. The company also claims longer battery life, courtesy of better efficiency and a slightly larger 2,150mAh battery.

Image: DJI.

Arguably the biggest change is the new replaceable lens. DJI’s original 360-degree camera wasn’t replaceable, so any cracks and scratches were there to stay. Now, you can replace the lenses yourself, with a dual replacement kit retailing for $49 from the likes of JB Hi-Fi.

Now available for $899, the DJI Osmo 360 II is a bit more affordable than Insta360’s flagship $1,049.99 X6 camera. Both record videos and take photos all around you, encouraging you to keep recording without worrying too much about framing in the moment. Instead, the focus is on framing shots while editing, with plenty of flexibility to resize footage to suit different video platforms.

What’s most impressive about these cameras is the software trickery that gets rid of any obvious fisheye effects. You could be watching a video shot on a 360-degree camera and be none the wiser.

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Privacy features your smart home security system must have

With so many devices online in your home these days, that’s a lot of data about you and your loved ones, from your daily routines to your actual floor plan. The privacy settings on your connected devices are important, especially when it comes to cameras. Which is why Ring’s privacy is worth understanding before you buy, rather than after.

You install a camera or a video doorbell specifically to protect your home and the people in it. The footage it captures deserves exactly the same level of care.

Ring (which is owned by Amazon) is one of the biggest names in the home security camera landscape, and its stated mission is to make neighbourhoods safer. That’s why, Ring says, it builds devices on three privacy pillars:

• Privacy and security (built in from the start);
• Customisation and control (made easy for the user); and
• Transparency (about what happens to your data, who can see it, and what gets done with it).

So that’s the mission, but how well does it hold up in the real world? Let’s dig into how Ring helps keep your data just as safe as your property.

What Ring camera privacy looks like in practice

When it comes to Ring cameras, privacy is a deep design decision, not a feature bolted on later or upgraded. Though, of course, your Ring camera and system can be upgraded as software improves.

Nevertheless, privacy starts with where your camera footage is stored. Ring cameras and video doorbells don’t keep recordings on the device, but rather upload them to the cloud. You access the footage via a Ring Protect subscription (Ring Solo covers a single device from $4.95 a month and Ring Multi covers unlimited devices in 1 location from $14.95 a month).

Yes, that’s an ongoing cost, but there’s a real security upside. If someone pulls your camera off the wall or scurries off with your Recording Hub, they’ve stolen your hardware and your footage. With Ring, your footage is still sitting in your account, and you can even watch the camera get stolen to help identify what happened.

Ring encrypts all video as it gets sent up to the cloud. But from September 2026, Ring is going further with TAKE (Throw Away the Key Encryption), a new standard for default video encryption and customer control in home security.

With TAKE, your Ring videos are protected with unique, rotating encryption keys. A copy of the keys is temporarily held inside a secure enclave in the cloud, but Ring can only access them to power the intelligent features you have active on your account, like Smart Alerts. After that, Ring throws away and deletes the keys. Only you, and any trusted Shared Users you’ve chosen to enable, retain the keys to your video on your enrolled devices like your phone, tablet, or computer.

Think of it like house keys. The company that made your lock doesn’t keep a copy of the key. You might give a spare to a close friend or family member you trust. And if a handyman needs to fix your sink, you lend them a key only for as long as the job takes, then get it back. TAKE works the same way: you hold the master key to your videos, and you decide who gets access and for what purpose.

TAKE will roll out in phases starting in September and will become the default encryption for all Ring customers worldwide when fully rolled out.

For those who want even more control, there’s also optional end-to-end encryption (E2EE). Ring was the first major smart home security provider to offer video E2EE back in 2021. With E2EE enabled, only your enrolled devices ever have access to your encryption keys. When you use this feature, nobody in the middle can decrypt those recordings, including hackers who might somehow breach the servers, and, for that matter, not Amazon or Ring either.

Now, this is an opt-in system rather than default because, since the key never leaves your phone, a few conveniences are switched off. Shared users can’t view encrypted video, you can’t pull it up on an Echo Show or on the web, and you can’t share clips as a link. The trade-off, however, is tighter security, which might be what you need, depending on your household. The important part is that this Ring camera privacy feature is there ready for you to use.

Ring camera privacy vs traditional CCTV: what’s different

Old-school CCTV (that’s closed-circuit television, to you youngsters) wrote everything to videotape, and today’s systems use a hard drive in a cupboard. That sounds like the private option, but in fact a recorder sitting on your home network (especially with a factory password) is a straight-up soft target.

Anyone who can reach the box can watch everything on it, and if the box itself gets stolen or the drive dies, your video footage is gone too.

With a modern connected camera such as a Ring, recordings are encrypted and held off-site associated with your account, and every sign-in to that account is checked. Yes, you’re trusting Ring with your video and privacy, so let’s look at how the control Ring gives you makes that work.

Setting up your Ring camera privacy preferences

Ring has your footage in the Amazon cloud, so it’s a good idea to be more than familiar with Ring camera privacy controls.

In the Ring app, these settings are accessed via the Control Centre. Here you can see who has access to your system, which devices are currently signed in, how long footage is kept before it’s deleted, and what your cameras have recorded. You can adjust all of these, and of course delete footage manually at any time.

An important feature is the ability to set Privacy Zones. You can black out specific areas of a camera’s field of view so these areas are never recorded. This means your camera can watch your driveway without also filming the neighbours’ front door or their back garden. Nobody likes a snoop!

This system also applies indoors. You can set up an indoor camera to monitor the hallway and the back door, while keeping other living areas out of frame. That important hallway (which will show who is accessing the house) stays covered, while your private life stays private.

Ring camera privacy doesn’t just rely on clever software, though. There’s a low-tech option too: Ring’s Indoor Camera (2nd Gen) and the Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera, both ship with a manual Privacy Cover.

It slides across the lens to block the camera, and it hits a physical switch to turn the microphone off too. So if you’re home for the weekend, just slide it shut. A real psychological benefit is that you can no longer see the unblinking eye of the camera lens. And when you go away, slide the cover off again, and the camera will go back to doing its job. Naturally, if you’re away from the property, you can check the app to see if the cover is on or off.

How Ring camera privacy helps you keep your household safe, together

Security works better as a group effort, so a system that only one person can operate isn’t the best fit for an entire household. No one wants to have to constantly call dad to check a camera or adjust a privacy setting.

You have a main Ring account that gives you total control, but you can also nominate Shared Users. These accounts are meant for partners, older kids, or even housemates, and let these trusted individuals check live views and recordings without needing to know the main account password. The main account controls which devices each Shared User can see, and you can use the Control Centre to add or revoke access at any time.

A small caveat: shared users can’t access footage protected by the optional end-to-end encryption setting, so if you switch E2EE on, shared users lose access to that encrypted video. However, with TAKE as the new default, Shared Users retain full access to your video, so you get stronger encryption without sacrificing the convenience of household sharing.

Ring camera privacy is heavily boosted by account security. Two-step verification is mandatory on every Ring account, so a stolen password on its own isn’t enough to get in. And when somebody does sign in, you’ll get a notification, and Ring blocks login attempts it doesn’t recognise. Control Centre also lists every phone and computer currently authorised on your account, so you can block anyone who shouldn’t be there, or any device you don’t recognise.

Transparency is Ring’s promise that camera privacy is a priority

It’s one of the tenets of the modern world: encryption and privacy zones can only be thought of as protecting your family if you can see how the company behind them operates. It’s important to always keep in mind: Ring camera privacy applies to a range of products, and all these products are cloud-connected cameras. Which means trusting Ring and Amazon with your video.

Ring publishes a privacy notice in plain English covering what its devices collect and why. That’s pretty standard stuff. Something a lot of people forget about cloud cameras is what happens when the police or other government agencies demand access to that footage.

You can see Ring’s camera privacy policies on this issue via the app’s Control Centre. There’s a Public Safety section setting out where the company stands on law enforcement requests. Generally, footage isn’t handed over without a valid legal order, with a narrow exception for emergencies involving a risk of death or serious injury.

Another important issue is how long your camera gets security updates via patches and firmware. Ring commits to software security updates for at least four years after a device stops being sold as new, and again, the app Control Centre shows you the status for every device on your account.

At the end of the day, if you’re relying on a Ring camera for privacy, you know what’s collected, how long it sticks around, who can ask for it, and whether or not the cameras themselves are still safe to use.  

A comprehensive privacy ecosystem

Home security is worth taking seriously, and the hardware is only half of it. A camera that watches your front door but treats your data casually isn’t doing the full job; it’s just moved the risk somewhere else.

What you need is privacy built in from the ground up. That means encryption on by default, real control over what gets recorded and how long it’s kept, clear management of who can see what, account security that doesn’t just require a good password, and a company willing to tell you how long it will keep supporting the device.

Ring camera privacy means all of those things and more. It’s a coherent multi-layered system of hardware, software, and security policy. That means you can protect what matters most, without compromising your privacy to do it.

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