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- Crisp 4K & 2K main cameras with active pan-tilt tracking
- Superbright adjustable LED floodlights
- Subscription-free storage and AI features
- 240V mains power only
- Nothing else of note
Reolink’s new TrackFlex Wi-Fi is not your typical consumer-level security camera. It’s packed with features you might normally expect from a professional device – it’s mains-only powered, has two lenses that can track and zoom in on the action and its dual-LED floodlights are capable of generating up to 3,000 lumens.
Despite its professional ambitions, the TrackFlex isn’t priced prohibitively high. Its list price sits at £229 and it’s currently on sale for £166, which puts in reach of any household looking to bump up security levels.
But just as important as the up-front price is there are no ongoing costs. Unlike some of its big-name rivals, there’s no need to pay a subscription to access your recordings once you’ve bought one, or take advantage of the camera’s more advanced features.
What do you get for the money?
The Reolink TrackFlex is significantly larger than your average domestic security camera, such as the Tapo C645D. Clad all in bright white plastic, the main unit weighs 1.2kg and measures 283 x 184 x 199mm (WDH). It’s a beast.
Inconspicuous, it most certainly is not. Fix this thing to the side of your house and everyone will notice – the neighbours, passers by and, most importantly, those with felonious intent. Which, of course, is rather the point.
The unit consists of four distinct modules. At the top are the two floodlights, at the bottom is a motorised camera housing, while joining them all together is a slightly flattened cylindrical body that contains the audio system, PIR detectors and sundry electronics.
The floodlights are attached to the main unit by dual hinges. These let you rotate each light up, down, left and right independently. There’s a mounting bracket at the back of the body, which is permanently fixed in place, while at the top of the body is a standard ¼-inch camera screw mount.
The whole unit is rated IP66 against water and particle ingress, which means it will stand up to direct jet washing and the sort of storms that enter folk memory and wash away large chunks of shoreline.
On the bottom of the camera module is a rubberised bung that conceals the reset button, a MicroSD card slot that takes cards up to 512GB in capacity, and a USB-C port, which is used to power the camera during set up but as it can’t pump in enough power to run those two big floodlights, the camera needs to be connected to the mains.
To provide the maximum coverage for motion detection, the body of the unit has three PIR detectors built into it, one facing forward and two facing sideways. This makes the TrackFlex difficult to dodge, thanks to its 270-degree coverage.
Like most outdoor Pan-Tilt cameras, the TrackFlex is designed to look down from high, so most of the tilt movement is in the downward plane rather than the upward. You can mount the unit upside down if you really want to, since the video feed can be flipped, but you may not be able to position the cameras to capture the scene in the way you want.
How easy is it to set up?
The TrackFlex is no more difficult to set up than other Reolink cameras (like the Reolink Elite and Reolink Altas), and they are both near the top of my list of the easiest network cameras to get up and running.
To set it up, you can power the camera temporarily via the USB-C socket (Reolink supplies a USB-C cable), but I jumped ahead to wiring it directly up to mains AC.
Connecting a three-core power cable is pretty straightforward. It has live, earth and neutral cables protruding from the rear of the camera unit and you join these to your existing mains supply using a standard terminal block that is fixed inside the mount. Reolink supplies wire nuts as well but the terminal block renders these rather superfluous.
Once powered up, you just download the app and press the power button. You’ll then hear a voice cue from the speaker telling you the camera is connected via Bluetooth, which is your cue to scan the QR code on the camera and enter your Wi-Fi password. The TrackFlex supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 6.
Mounting the unit is a simple case of screwing the weatherproof bracket in place, then sliding the camera/floodlight unit onto it. Usefully, there’s a cut-out at the bottom of the housing for the power cable to exit, so you don’t need to make a hole behind the bracket to get power in.
What’s the companion app like?
The Reolink mobile app has a clean main page with big toggles at the bottom to enable the two-way talk function and launch the playback menu, which is itself a straightforward linear timeline affair that also supports slow motion and high-speed playback.
Smaller buttons are situated at the top of the screen to sound the alarm, switch on the floodlights, open the system status and settings menu and put the video feed into Picture-in-Picture mode.
Once you’re into the video feed, you’ll see a row of buttons to pause the video stream, mute the camera, take a snapshot, start a video recording, switch the feed quality and go full-screen. You can’t swipe around to move the pan-tilt view, but doing so via the virtual touchpad isn’t too irksome.
There’s also a host of more granular controls, which include 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 Husky but pick up next door’s Yorkshire Terrier.
You also get a preset time-lapse menu that can be used to automatically record the sunrise or sunset, or flowers opening. The former, for example, shoots a frame every 5 seconds from half an hour before local sunrise to half an hour after, while the latter shoots a frame every five minutes for ten days. You can also set your own times, durations, recording quality, and frame rates.
As well as the mobile phone app, Reolink also offers a Windows desktop client, which adds even more features, including the ability to tweak the saturation, contrast and sharpness of the video feed. And while smart home compatibility is limited to Google Assistant and Alexa, Reolink is a member of the ONVIF standards group, so the TrackFlex should work with products like FTP/NAS servers from other member companies.
Do you need a subscription?
When it comes to free features, Reolink does well. Most importantly, recorded footage can be stored on a micro SD card and accessed via the app, without paying anyone. You also get free access to smart detection for people, vehicles, and animals, adjustable line crossing, 24/7 loop recording, zone entry, and zone loitering alerts.
Also free is the beta of a new AI facility that allows you to search your video clips by typing your criteria in plain English, like “white van” or “person in a hat”. This worked well with requests for recordings of “a black dog”, quickly bringing all the clips on my MicroSD card up that featured my greyhound, Mylo, mooching around the yard, and could save you time scrubbing back through your timeline if you’re looking for a specific event.
For those wanting the added security of an off-site cloud storage service, Reolink has two offerings. The cheapest plan will set you back £2.71/mth and supports one camera with 30-days of storage. Support for up to five cameras costs £13.52/mth, jumping to £27.05/mth for up to ten cameras.
How does the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi perform?
Image quality
Image quality from both cameras is good, though obviously the 3,840 x 2,160 8MP telephoto lens is rather sharper than the 1,920 x 1,080 wide-angle camera. Both cameras can record video at 20 fps, and when video is captured it comes as two files, one from each camera.
The digital zoom is particularly impressive, getting you up close and personal with whatever is in the view of the wide-angle lens with little degradation of image quality. And you can fix the zoom level in the app, so every time you open a live view or the system captures movement, the magnification from the telephoto lens is the same.
The static viewing angle isn’t as wide as the Reolink Elite’s, which stitches the view from two cameras together. However, with the wide-angle lens covering 104 degrees horizontal and 60 degrees vertical, and the motorised gimbal moving both lenses through 355 degrees horizontal and 50 degrees vertical, the TrackFlex doesn’t miss much.
Are the floodlights any good?
The 3,000-lumen floodlights throw out a serious amount of light to the point where they could just as easily light up a loading yard as your average suburban garden or driveway. Reolink’s official estimate is up to 12m from the source, and I’d go along with that and then some.
It’s also possible to adjust both the brightness and the colour temperature of the floods from a warm, homely and autumnal 3000K to a cold, comfortless and cheerless 6500K.
And there are various ways you can control how and when the lights come on. You can set them to come on at sunset and switch off at dawn, or activate between two preset times. This means you can use the TrackFlex as a porch light for ambient outdoor lighting rather than just as a motion-sensing security light.
Motion tracking
The TrackFlex’s tracking system not only works well, keeping targets firmly in the centre of the frame, but it is endlessly adjustable. You can change the speed of tracking as well as the arc over which it tracks.
You can also tell it to only track certain types of movement, and to stop tracking if a target stops or disappears for a predetermined amount of time.
Audio and siren
The TrackFlex’s speaker does a solid job of relaying voice communications, too, which come out loud and clear, while the 110dB siren is capable of almost painfully loud volumes. You can even replace the default siren alert with a pre-recording if you want. This is easy to do, but you can’t upload a sound file; you have to record it via the app.
The microphone of the camera is just as good, with effective built-in noise cancellation that’s great at suppressing wind noise. Handy if your camera is located in a wide open space prone to blustery weather conditions.
Performance and responsiveness
And, just like the Elite, the TrackFlex is a fast camera when it comes to notification times and how quickly you can get into the live feed, essential if you happen to notice a burglary happening in real time, while you’re out and about.
In everyday use, the app reacts pretty much instantaneously to alerts from, or instructions given to, the camera.
| Make and model | Time to launch live stream from app (Wi-Fi, secs) | Time to launch live stream from alert (Wi-Fi, secs) | Time to alert on motion (Wi-Fi, secs) | Time to launch live stream from app (cellular, secs) | Time to launch live stream from alert (cellular, secs) | Time to alert on motion (cellular, secs) | Total (secs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arlo Ultra 3 4K Security Camera | 4.0 | 1.9 | 1.4 | 2.0 | 2.1 | 1.5 | 12.8 |
| EufyCam S4 | 1.9 | 0 | 6.1 | 1.4 | 0 | 6.5 | 15.8 |
| Reolink Elite | 2.5 | 2.3 | 0.9 | 2.9 | 2.7 | 1.0 | 12.4 |
| Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi | 2.4 | 2.2 | 1.0 | 2.9 | 2.6 | 1.1 | 12.2 |
Should you buy the Reolink TrackFlex?
For the majority of home users, devices like the Tapo C645D are all the pan-tilt tracking cameras they will even need. But if you need to turn things up to 11 and don’t mind meeting the challenges of getting mains power outside (or paying a n electrician to do it for you), the TrackFlex is the obvious next step.
The Reolink can deliver external illumination beyond the wildest dreams of cameras like the Tapo, and the adjustable warmth and always-on facility mean it can double up as an external light divorced from its work as a security camera.
But it is as a camera that the TrackFlex really delivers the goods, with excellent image quality, smooth, reliable tracking and subscription-free access to all the good stuff, including that handy local-AI image search.
