Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi review: A dual-camera dazzler

Best Prices Today: Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi

No matter how wide a viewing angle a given fixed-lens security camera might have, it will invariably suffer from this flaw: It won’t be able to see everything in front of it. And while some cameras try to solve this problem by employing a fish-eye lens to widen that viewing angle, the resulting image usually suffers from a degree of barrel distortion.

Reolink’s Elite Floodlight WiFi mitigates that problem via a clever hack. It uses two camera lenses instead of just one to deliver a combined (and relatively distortion-free) 180-degree field of view. It’s a concept that Reolink has pursued with several earlier products, including its Reolink Duo 3 WiFi, and which it improves upon here.

Specifications

Like most floodlight cameras, the Elite Floodlight is a hardwired device that must be permanently mounted on a wall and connected to a home’s 120-volt wiring. Reolink supplies everything you need to attach the camera to a standard junction box, but it can also be attached directly to a wall (or ceiling) and plugged in with a bare wire/pigtail extension cord (that connection should still be in a weatherproof box).

Reolink supplies wire nuts for either attachment method (along with various other mounting hardware), but I ended up using my own because the supplied ones felt a bit too small to be secure. Either way, once you use the three nuts to complete the circuit and ground the device, the unit is ready to be mounted to the wall. This is achieved via a mounting bracket that comes complete with a built-in spirit level.

Installation and setup

Christopher Null/Foundry

The first hiccup with the hardware install was that I found I needed to swivel both the camera housing and the two spotlights well out of the way to access the two tiny channels in which the screws that connect the camera unit to the mounting bracket are placed. (I could also have used a lengthy bit extension for my drill.) I must also complain about the poor quality of the screws included with the kit, two of which stripped completely during installation. Removing them later took more than an hour and a lot of headache.

The camera records to its own storage, so you’ll need to install a microSD card (capacities up to 512GB are supported) as a last step. No card is included, and the camera can’t record without one. (Reolink doesn’t require a subscription plan, and unlike other Reolink cameras, this device doesn’t even support one.)

Wi-Fi setup was painless in my testing once I got the blaring and endlessly repeating audio instructions silenced, and it’s additionally helpful that the camera supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks.

Using the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi

Once installed, I felt the camera was slightly more attractive than many floodlight-cam competitors, as it’s a little more compact and less obtrusive—although this is of course a matter personal preference. But overall, the design is similar to that of most other floodlight cameras, with two spotlights providing a maximum of 3,000 lumens of illumination, perched atop a separate camera housing.

Reolink

All three components can be positioned independently, and the entire device carries an IP67 weatherization rating, which our IP code guide tells us means the device is not only impervious to dust ingress, but that it can withstand being submerged in several feet of water for up to 30 minutes.

Intriguingly, you can not only set the floodlight’s brightness level, but you can also adjust its color temperature, from a somewhat warm 3,000 Kelvin to a daylight-equivalent 6,000K. The floodlights can be set to always off, on at night, on based on a timer, or on at night based on motion detection, a setting that can be further restricted based on person, vehicle, or animal detection.

A detailed scheduling system allows you to define when the camera records, which again can be restricted to types of motion if, for example, you don’t want to record every passing car on the street. Users can also define a “post-recording duration” to set how long to record after motion ends (15 seconds, 30 seconds, or 1 minute), and the camera can be set to record continuously (24/7 or based on a schedule), overwriting recordings at an interval you set (or simply deleting the oldest recording once the available storage is filled).

Don’t like the lights? The unit also includes infrared night vision that can be set to kick in if ambient light is dim and the floodlight is turned off. Other features include two-way audio, a configurable siren (albeit a very weak one), a time-lapse recording mode, and the ability to push recordings to an FTP or NAS device instead of storing them on the camera itself.

Camera image quality

The cameras 8-megapixel image sensor records 4K video (which Reolink defines as 5120 x 1552 pixels) at 20 frames per second, and that ultra-wide angle image takes a little getting used to. Watching playback in Reolink’s app all but requires your phone to be in landscape mode. In portrait view, the image is so small that you can’t see any details. Fortunately, all those pixels really do fill a wide screen, and you can zoom in impressively to catch quite fine details when you need to. One hiccup of note: The use of two cameras means that the image must be digitally stitched together, which creates a visible seam that runs down the middle of the picture, along with a slight visual glitch, invariably where you least want it to be.

Christopher Null/Foundry

The illumination power of the spotlights is solid, but I found the infrared night vision mode to be better from a recording standpoint, as I was able to make out figures further away in IR mode than with the spotlights on, even at full power. I have the opposite opinion when people were much closer the camera and recorded at night, as the floodlight makes up-close figures much clearer.

The camera was adept at detecting motion in my testing, and a sophisticated detection-zone system lets you define areas and types of motion within those areas that you might want to ignore. Clips are catalogued in Reolink’s Playback menu, which lets you scrub video on a 24-hour timeline, one day at a time, or you can choose from animated thumbnails below the timeline, showcasing each moment where motion was detected.

Each clip is even marked with a small dot to indicate where notable motion events occurred within the clip. The app can also be configured to send notifications of motion via push notification or email; but for the latter, you’ll need to configure mail server settings in the app, which might be more of a headache than most users want to deal with.

The camera’s onboard AI leaves much to be desired

Christopher Null/Foundry

A new feature (introduced in beta test mode just days before the product’s release) lets you search for recorded clips using natural language. This AI-powered search is a potential game-changer, letting you filter clips of people, vehicles, and animals (and only those three categories, not general motion), using written qualifiers.

For example: “Person in a blue shirt.” “Cat running.” “Red pickup truck.” My tests with this were all over the map, indicating the algorithm probably has room to grow. It works well with color queries, picking out clips of me wearing a black shirt with ease, but it didn’t find any clips of me “holding a bottle,” identifying just about everything else as a valid clip except the one where I was holding a bottle.

The system could find no clips of any person either “with a beard” or “without a beard.” (I have no beard, for the record.) And while it was successful at finding clips of my cat, it also tagged the same clips if I searched for “dog.”

As noted, Reolink has work to do on the AI front.

Should you buy the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi?

At $220, the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi is a reasonably priced and capable lights-and-camera combo. It’s also fairly compact and remarkably full-featured, producing high-quality, ultra-widescreen video that you won’t get elsewhere.

Apart from its onboard AI–which remember–is still in beta, it’s a solid product. And not having to pay for a subscription is icing on the cake.

This review is part of TechHive’s in-depth coveraqe of the best home security cameras.