Reolink wireless cameras have almost everything

Not so long ago, a camera system in your home was a luxury. If you could afford this luxury, there were large cable trees running through your house. With the rapid developments of cameras, securing your home or office with cameras has become accessible to everyone.

Reolink

I did not know this party yet and I was offered a review set to test it. Founded in 2009, Reolink has offices in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, China. The company specializes in making security cameras that work wirelessly indoors and outdoors. I received the Reolink E1 Pro and the Reolink Argus PT.

Reolink E1 Pro

The Reolink E1 Pro is intended for indoor use, you put it in a cupboard, in the window frame or wherever you want it. You can also hang it from the ceiling or wall when needed. The camera itself has a 4 megapixel Super HD lens and it works with both 2.4 and 5 Ghz WiFi. The special thing about this camera is that you can move it so that you can view the entire room. You can control the tilt and turn from the app, which we will return to later in this review.

The camera has two-way communication so that you can talk to someone who is in the room via the app. If you want to keep these recordings, you can put an SD card in the camera and view the images from your smartphone. The camera also detects when there is movement in the room and gives a notification. This is especially useful when you are not present and someone enters the room. This SD card does have a disadvantage, because you can take it out or if someone takes your entire camera with you, you will still have lost the images. Reolink offers a cloud subscription, but unfortunately this is not available in our country, which is a point of attention. By the way, you can save images on your smartphone when you actively watch the stream, for this you click on the icon of the film camera in the app. Reolink’s system does not have geofencing.

You don’t really ‘use’ a camera. You place it where you want it and then you don’t touch it anymore. Operation and real use go through the application on your smartphone.

Reolink Argus PT

For the security of your garden or the grounds of your company you need a camera that you can use outside. This Reolink camera is made for this purpose and has an IP65 certificate, which stands for a dust-free and water-resistant housing. This camera streams and films in 1080p and can also be practically 360 degrees in both directions, just like the indoor version.

The Reolink Araus PT is completely wireless, you don’t have to pull any wires. You do have to make sure that the camera is within range of your WiFi signal, but that is easy to solve. The power supply for the camera is via the built-in battery or via a solar panel that you can buy. Reolink was kind enough to provide this, which is ideal when you don’t have to worry about the power supply.

If you only use the camera with the battery, you will have to charge it every few months. This can also be much less if you let the camera work continuously through the motion sensor. The solar panel is therefore recommended, it only costs 35 euros and is a purchase that you will not regret. As with the indoor variant, you can store an SD card in this camera so that you can save and view images.

The app

All these cameras work together with the Reolink app and you really need it to use the full potential of this equipment. You can operate the cameras via the app. This way you can talk to visitors in the room and you can listen to what they say and / or do. You can also turn the camera, take photos and start a recording. When you come across something suspicious, you can set off a siren to startle them. You can quickly switch between the different cameras you have connected or you can choose the block schedule where you see all cameras at the same time. When you go on vacation you can share one or more cameras with someone else. This allows the person to intervene quickly when something is wrong.

The smart home fanatics can also connect the cameras to the Google Assistant via the app. With a short command “Ok Google show the garden on [apparaat]”you can show live images on your television or your Google Nest Hub. If you can’t figure it out, there is an extensive (English) forum / knowledge base where you can find a lot of information.

The quality of the stream can be set in different qualities. For the screenshots in this post and the images in the video, it is set to Low, where the quality is clearly very low. You can adjust many things per camera in the settings such as white balance, anti-flicker, day and night mode, notifications and much more. You can also enable motion detection there. Not only the sensitivity can be indicated, but also the zones where the camera should or should not respond to movement. Very useful for minimizing the number of false reports. In the settings of the app itself you can set a dark mode and the times at which this dark mode should be active.

Conclusion

This set of two cameras hung at my house for two months. It is nice that I have not had any malfunction or other problem during this period. Whenever I needed the camera, I could rely on it. Since I mainly use the camera indoors to monitor my dogs, the fact that the cameras can rotate is a godsend. So I discovered that one of the two was slowly dissecting a slipper.

Buy Reolink

The Reolink Argus PT costs 159 euros and the Reolink E1 Pro 77 euros and they are available at Epine.nl and Bol.com. During the period that we are testing these cameras, the brand has added a number of new products to its range, these are also worth checking out.