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Recently, I had the opportunity to review Blink Outdoor, one of Amazon's many smart security cameras. Without spoiling my other ideas, a prominent feature is the "early notification" option in the Blink app. This will trigger an alarm to detect instant movement, at least within your sensitivity setting. The technology is very fast. If you have a stable connection and are already looking at your phone, you can usually capture an event that lasts for a few seconds while the event is still in progress.

This is in contrast to most security cameras—whether from Ring, Nest, or other cameras—it usually takes a few seconds to send a notification, let alone open a live broadcast. The gap may be small, but it may mean all the differences in situations where fast action is important, such as scaring off a thief or catching it before an accident. Security cameras are most valuable when preventing problems rather than just providing a record of problems.

Not only are notifications on the verge of being rarer than they should be, but Amazon/Blink sales are also surprisingly low. There is no mention of advance notice in the company's marketing, and even in the app, the option is marked as "beta". How is this technology not the norm for smart security?

Admittedly, there is at least one obvious risk with faster notifications: battery consumption. Frequent quick alerts can drain the batteries that many cameras rely on. In the worst case, some people may complain about having to recharge or replace the battery every few months, leading to bad reviews and/or customers switching to different camera brands. Although people want speed, they sometimes desire convenience more.

Blink Outdoor is a bit "cheating" because although the camera itself uses two AA batteries, it broadcasts to a hub plugged into an indoor AC power outlet-many cameras use built-in Wi-Fi or 4G to communicate with the cloud, both of which are essentially More power consumption. Nevertheless, if these AA batteries can be used for half of the expected two years, it is not unreasonable for other camera manufacturers to keep up.

Related: The best wireless security cameras

Another bottleneck bypassed by Blink is object recognition. Many cameras can now recognize people, pets, vehicles, and packages, which helps to prioritize alerts. Nest devices go a step further with Aware subscription, distinguishing friends from strangers. Whether on the device or through the cloud, object analysis requires additional processing time-and cloud options are more common, which can cause additional delays in network traffic.

The final deterrent is the need to minimize false alarms. This may be why Blink's technology is still in the testing phase-if many of these alerts are not useful, people will start to ignore them, and the company will undoubtedly try to lower expectations until it perfects its algorithms. In fact, I did occasionally get "empty" recordings during testing, even with a limited detection area in Outdoor's field of view. But these are few and far apart, and can happen on any camera, so again there seems to be no reason to put early notifications aside.

For some people, a slight delay in notification may be acceptable. They may feel that they don’t have to react in a hurry, and they may be more concerned about battery life and alert quality. In other words, they would rather be told that a package has just arrived, or that a person is approaching the door rather than a bird, and ignore everything else. This is completely understandable-when I lower my head to write, I try to call up all the irrelevant content on the phone.

However, I think if you put extreme scenes in front of people-such as preventing others from smashing your car windows, or preventing your children from getting hot on the stove-they might insist that their cameras have a better response time . There is a small compromise between false positives here and here.

Read more: The best smart home devices you can buy

The solution I think is to put some versions of the Blink early notification option in the front and middle of each camera app, even if it is not turned on by default. If desired, manufacturers can disable object recognition while this mode is active, but it is likely that processing on the device will be fast enough in the next few years to provide the best of both worlds.