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- Dazzlingly bright floodlights
- Crisp 180-degree 5K images
- Widely adjustable light/camera mount
- 240V mains power only
With Reolink’s new Elite Floodlight WiFi outdoor security camera, we are straying deep into the realm of pro-level surveillance and security kit. This is a mains-powered camera with two lenses that, together, produce 5,120 x 1,552 resolution images, and that has dual floodlights capable of throwing out up to 3,000 lumens.
Despite its professional ambitions, though, the Elite isn’t priced prohibitively high at £199, and it comes with a wide range of adjustability, including dimmable floodlight brightness, so it can easily be dialled down to suit a suburban setting.
Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi: What do you get for the money?
The Elite is a significantly larger device than your average domestic security camera. The main unit weighs 1.3kg and measures 174 x 184 x 295mm. Unobtrusive it is not; screw it to the side of your house and the neighbours will definitely notice – as will those with felonious intent.
The unit consists of three distinct modules, each permanently attached to the mounting bracket. At the top are the two floodlight modules while below is an unusual-looking dual-lens camera.
The whole enchilada is rated IP66 against water and particle ingress, which means it will stand up to a jet washing and the ingress of dust and dirt.
On the bottom of the camera module is a screw cover that conceals the reset button, the MicroSD card slot and a USB-C port. The card slot takes cards up to 512GB in capacity, while the USB-C slot is for set-up purposes only. To be clear, you cannot power the Elite in use via the USB-C port.
How easy is it to set up?
The Elite is no more difficult to set up than Reolink’s Atlas, and that was near the top of my list of the easiest security cameras to set up. Initially, you power up the camera via the USB-C socket (Reolink supplies a USB-C cable but not a charger), download the app or desktop client, and press the power button.
Once you’ve heard the voice cue from the speaker, you scan the QR code on the camera, enter your Wi-Fi password (the Elite supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 6), and you’re good to go.
Once you’ve done the initial setup you need to connect the whole thing to a three-core mains power cable. The live, earth and neutral cables at the back of the camera unit are helpfully long and come pre-stripped and Reolink also supplies wire nuts to simplify the splicing of the cables.
Mounting the unit is a simply case of screwing a weatherproof bracket in place, then attaching the camera/floodlight unit to that. There’s a cut-out at the bottom of the housing for the power cable to exit, so you don’t need to drill a hole in the wall behind the bracket to get power in.
Turning to the physical side of things, I found all the housings, joints, and brackets to be well-designed and solid, and Reolink supplies all the screws, raw plugs, washers and cable connectors you need.
With the camera connected to Wi-Fi, power and mounted on the wall, the only thing left to do with the camera mounted is to align the images produced by the camera’s two lenses. This involves adjusting the distance to the primary object in view and then tweaking the horizontal and vertical gain until you can’t see a join. It’s a straightforward operation and takes but moments.
As I’ve said before, the Reolink mobile app is one of the better-designed security camera apps. The landing page is clean, with big toggles at the bottom to enable the two-way talk function and launch the playback menu. And the latter is a very straightforward linear timeline that supports both slow-motion and high-speed playback of recorded video clips.
Reolink also offers a Windows desktop client, which adds more features, including the ability to adjust the colour saturation, contrast and sharpness of the video feed.
Smart home compatibility is limited to Google Assistant, which will leave Apple HomeKit and Alexa users feeling left out. But Reolink is a member of the ONVIF standards group, so the Elite should play nicely with home hubs and products from other member companies.
What does it do well?
Eye-watering levels of illumination and a super-wide field of view are the Elite’s party pieces. To start with, the 3,000-lumen floodlight array chucks out a seriously impressive amount of light.
Forget a domestic yard or garden, these puppies could light up a big warehouse yard without any problems. Reolink says it can emit “bright light” at up to 12m from the source, and I’d go along with that.
Fortunately for those with more modest living arrangements, it is possible to adjust both the brightness and the colour temperature of the floodlights, which means as well as being able to change the light to suit your preferences and requirements, you can also use the Elite for ambient outdoor lighting instead of just a security light.
Image quality from the two 1/2.7″ CMOS sensors is impressive. The resultant 5,120 x 1,552 (8 megapixels) images are sharp, detailed and colourful, while video is captured at 20fps, which is all you really need from a security camera.
If you prefer to see in the dark without a “Let there be light!” moment, the infrared system works equally well, producing high-contrast and sharp images over a large distance. Incidentally, night-time colour imagery without either infrared or floodlight getting involved is also very good, but I’m not sure you’d ever need that particular capability with lights this bright.
And I also loved the sheer adjustability of the camera assembly. In the case of the floodlights, they’re each mounted on double-jointed arms, which means you can move them to throw the maximum amount of light forward, to the sides, up or down, or have one face forward and the other to the side, depending on the shape of the area you are surveilling.
The camera module itself can be adjusted up/down or left/right across an even wider range, and it can be rotated through 360 degrees. This means its 180 x 59-degree field of view can be positioned either horizontally or vertically, the latter useful if you want to look along a narrow alley or path, or you have a particularly narrow garden.
Elsewhere, the Elite’s speaker does a good job of relaying voice communications – the microphone has pretty effective built-in noise cancellation – while the 105dB siren is more than loud enough to deter intruders and wake householders.
When it comes to software features offered for free, Reolink does well, so even without any form of cloud subscription, you can still get “AI” features such as people, vehicle, and animal detection, as well as motion zone loitering alerts. If you don’t pay a subscription, your video clips are recorded to a microSD card, installed in the camera body. Cards up to 512GB are supported.
For those wanting the added security of an off-site cloud storage service, Reolink has two offerings. The basic plan supports five cameras and 30GB of storage and currently costs £3.49 per month, while the Premier plan supports up to ten cameras with 80GB of storage.
There’s also a host of other granular controls and non-essential features, including the ability to adjust the time the floodlight stays on after detecting motion (between 30 seconds and 15 minutes) and an option to adjust the size of an object, person or vehicle that will trigger the system. This means it can be set to ignore your dog but detect next door’s cat, assuming the latter is a good bit smaller than the former.
You also some rather neat timelapse presets that can be used to automatically record the sunrise or sunset, or flowers opening. The first, for example, shoots a frame every 5 seconds from half an hour before local sunrise to half an hour after, while the last shoots a frame every five minutes for ten days. You can set your times, durations, recording quality, and frame rates if none of the presets work for you.
Finally, the Reolink Elite is one of the fastest cameras I’ve tested when it comes to notification times and opening a live feed from the app. In everyday use, the app reacts pretty much instantaneously to alerts from, or instructions given to, the camera.
What could it do better?
Finding a fault worth mentioning with the Reolink Elite wasn’t easy. One mild complaint is that it’s a bit of a shame you can’t set the floodlights to be permanently on for ambient lighting.
Granted, having to switch them back on every 15 minutes is hardly the end of the world, and if you’re in the garden there’s likely to be enough motion to retrigger the floodlights, but a simple manual override wouldn’t go amiss. Other than that, I simply can’t think of a reason to criticise this setup.
Reolink Elite review: Should you buy it?
In many domestic settings, I suspect the Reolink Elite will be overkill. Most British gardens and yards are not larg enough to require a 12m-throw 3,000 lumen floodlight or 180-degree 5K video capture. That said, I firmly believe that it’s always better to have more features and capabilities than you need rather than fewer.
Of course, the Reolink Elite is not aimed at those of us living in terraced or semi-detached properties where the likes of the smaller, cheaper, solar-powered Atlas is more than sufficient.
Rather, it’s being punted at business users or people who live in detached or rural properties with large gardens, yards and/or driveways. For those folk, the Reolink Elite is bang on the money. At £200 all-in, it’s not overly expensive, either.
