One Name, Two Doorbells: Telling Ring’s Pro 2 From Its 4K Replacement, and Where the Wyze Cam v4 Fits

Ring sells two different cameras that a search for 'Video Doorbell Pro 2' can land on, at $129.99 and $249.99. Here is how to tell them apart, and what a $37.98 Wyze Cam v4 does instead.

A shopper typing ‘Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2’ into a search box in September 2026 can arrive at two unrelated cameras. Ring renamed the 2021 model ‘Wired Doorbell Pro’ in 2024, and its own FAQ says the change was nothing but a name. Then it gave that same name to a new 4K doorbell, announced on 30 September 2025 and on sale from 29 October 2025 at $249.99, while the older 1536p unit stayed on the shelf at $129.99. The Wyze Cam v4, the $37.98 camera these listings tend to get cross-shopped against, is not a doorbell at all.

What you are actually choosing between

• Ring’s FAQ states that the only difference between the Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2 and the Ring Wired Doorbell Pro is the name
• The 2021 camera: 1536p HD+, $129.99 on ring.com, marked down from $229.99
• The 2025 camera: 4K Retinal Vision at 3840 by 2160, $249.99, announced 30 September 2025, on sale 29 October 2025
• Wyze Cam v4: 2.5K, IP65, wired by 6ft USB, $37.98 on Wyze’s own store
• Tom’s Guide reports that a Ring subscription is mandatory to reach video recordings, and that the 4K model does not support Ring Edge local storage

Ring changed the name in 2024, then handed the name to a different camera

The 2021 doorbell was not discontinued when it was renamed. Ring’s page for it still sits at the video-doorbell-pro-2 address, still sells it, and answers the obvious question in its own FAQ: the only difference between the Video Doorbell Pro 2 and the Wired Doorbell Pro is the name. That much is tidy housekeeping.

What makes it a shopping hazard is the reuse. Ring’s 2025 flagship is also called the Wired Doorbell Pro, separated from its predecessor only by a ‘3rd Gen’ tag and the Retinal Vision marketing term. Third-party listings, older review pages and marketplace sellers have had no reason to rewrite their titles, so the words on the page tell you very little about the hardware in the box. The number that does tell you is the resolution.

1536p at 129.99 dollars against 4K at 249.99 dollars

The older camera is the value option and Ring still treats it as one: 1536p HD+, 3D Motion Detection with Bird’s Eye View, listed at $129.99 against a $229.99 crossed-out price. For a porch where the job is seeing who is at the door and whether a parcel arrived, resolution has never been the weak link.

The 2025 model buys detail. Tom’s Guide lists 4K at 3840 by 2160, a 140-degree field of view both horizontally and vertically, Audio+, 3D motion detection and dual-band Wi-Fi including 802.11ax, and says the 3rd Gen replaces the previous model in the lineup even though Ring has kept selling it. Best Buy had it at $249.99 on 1 September 2026 against a regular price of $276.51. The extra 120 dollars is worth paying if you expect to crop into faces or plates at the end of a long path, and hard to justify otherwise.

There is one thing the newer camera does not do that the older one did. Tom’s Guide notes the 3rd Gen has no Ring Edge local storage, so the more expensive camera is the one with fewer options for keeping video off Ring’s servers.

The Wyze Cam v4 answers a different question at a tenth of the price

It is a camera, not a doorbell. There is no button, no chime wiring and no visitor announcement. Wyze lists 2.5K QHD at 2560 by 1440, colour night vision using infrared plus 72-lumen spotlight LEDs, an IP65 rating, a 99dB speaker, a siren, two-way talk, Wi-Fi 6 restricted to 2.4GHz, Bluetooth 5.2 and a magnetic base, powered over a 6ft USB lead. It watches a porch. It does not tell you that somebody is standing on it.

Buying one is complicated slightly by Wyze itself. On 1 September 2026 the v4 product page rendered all three colours as sold out or unavailable while Wyze’s own camera collection page listed the same model in stock at $37.98. Both pages belong to Wyze. Check the collection listing before concluding the camera has gone.

Where each camera puts the video

This is the difference that survives past the first month. The Wyze records continuously to a microSD card of up to 256GB, sold separately, and no account tier is required for that. What costs money is recognition and cloud history: person, pet, package and vehicle detection sit behind Cam Plus, listed on Wyze’s service-plans page at $2.49 a month or $29.99 a year per camera, and the annual price rose from $19.99 in March 2026. Wyze’s plans page does not describe the free tier at all, so a buyer cannot check what they keep by paying nothing.

Ring’s arrangement is simpler and more expensive. Recording requires a plan: Ring Solo at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year for one device, Ring Multi at $9.99 or $99.99 for a location, and Ring Pro at $19.99 a month, which is where Familiar Faces, Video Search, Video Descriptions and Active Warnings live. All paid tiers hold up to 180 days of playback. With no Ring Edge option on the 4K model, there is no local fallback to buy your way out with.

Both companies have a record worth reading before you mount anything

Ring’s is on the public record at the Federal Trade Commission. On 31 May 2023 the Commission announced $5.8 million in consumer refunds, alleging that one employee viewed thousands of recordings belonging to female users over several months, that around 55,000 US customers were affected by hacking in which attackers taunted children with racist slurs and threatened a family with harm unless they paid a ransom, and that Ring suffered credential-stuffing attacks in 2017 and 2018 without requiring multi-factor authentication until 2019. The order compelled deletion of pre-2018 customer videos and of face embeddings derived from them, and the Commission voted 3-0.

Wyze’s problem is more recent and more mundane, which does not make it smaller. In February 2024 roughly 13,000 users were able to reach other people’s camera feeds and 1,504 of them did so, after a newly added third-party caching library confused device and user identifiers when devices reconnected at once. Wyze blamed an AWS outage; Dark Reading reported that AWS recorded no outage in that window, and that a smaller cross-account exposure had occurred only five months earlier, in September 2023.

Four checks before you pay

1. Find the resolution in the listing. 1536p means the 2021 camera; 3840 by 2160 means the 2025 one.
2. Check the price against the two Ring reference points: $129.99 on ring.com for the older model, $249.99 for the newer.
3. Treat the words ‘3rd Gen’ or ‘Retinal Vision’ as the reliable identifier, because the product name is not one.
4. For the Wyze, add a microSD card to the basket and decide up front whether you will pay $29.99 a year for detection features many buyers assume are included.

Sources: Ring · Tom’s Guide · Wyze · Federal Trade Commission · Dark Reading