Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi review

Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi: Introduction

Reolink is fast becoming one of the names to watch in the smart security camera space, and the new Elite Floodlight WiFi shows just how confident the Chinese brand has become in the past couple of years, taking the its unique dual-lens design and building it into a hardwired light fixture.

Sitting somewhere between a traditional garden floodlight and the existing Argus 4 Pro, the Elite Floodlight WiFi model gives you that same ultra-wide 180° panoramic view, but adds a serious hit of illumination with a whopping 3,000 lumens floodlight onboard.

It’s aimed squarely at users who want a wide area coverage without the clutter of multiple cameras, both day and night, and without handing over a monthly fee.

Like other Reolink models, everything’s processed locally, from event detection to playback, and video is stored directly to a microSD card.

I’ve had the Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi bolted to the outside of my garden office for the past few weeks, read on for my full review.

Design and installation

At 1.3kg and measuring 174 x 184 x 295mm, the Elite Floodlight WiFi is quite a beast.

Design wise it’s essentially the Argus 4 Pro mounted on a base with a couple of floodlights stuck up top. It’s a similar form factor to the likes of the Arlo Wired Floodlight Camera or Ring’s Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, only chunkier, and without the subscription baggage.

Before you attempt to stick it on your wall, it’s a safe option to make sure it works as it should, and that you can get it synced up to your home network first.

The good news is you can actually power it temporarily via USB-C for setup, which is a neat trick. This won’t give the camera full functionality – don’t panic if the video feed looks slightly pink on the app when doing this – it’s just the camera running in low-power mode until you wire it up properly.

The USB-C port can be found with the microSD slot and reset button, inside a small compartment sealed behind a couple of screws, helping protect them from the weather… and thieves; Reolink doesn’t always secure where the microSD is stored, but it’s always welcome when it does.

Security-conscious folk will be pleased to know that you don’t need to sign up for an Reolink account when adding the Elite to your home network, although will need to do so if you want to make use of certain cloud features, or sync it up with your Google Home.

When you first power up the camera you’ll hear it say “Welcome to Reolink, please install the Reolink app” in a bunch of different languages.

As with previous Reolink cameras, it’s simply added to the app by scanning the QR code on the device from your phone in the app. It’s a very easy process that only takes a couple of minutes.

A big win for the Elite, common across many of Reolink’s cameras, is that it has both 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi so you can tap into that faster 5GHz band, should you have an access point near enough to reach it. It’s also got Wi-Fi 6 tech on board.

Installation is pretty DIY-friendly, but – beyond the initial USB-C setup – you will need to hardwire it.

The idea is to reuse an existing outdoor lighting fixture. It can be wall or ceiling mounted and is even designed to sit on an existing junction box too, although that’s not compulsory.

Whatever method you go for, Reolink’s app walks you through the process step-by-step, complete with clear wiring diagrams. The device itself uses standard colored wires, and you’ll get a set of wire nuts in the box to make connecting easy.

There’s even a small bracket wire designed to hold the unit while you’re connecting the power, which is handy given the weight.

Once you’ve mounted it, you secure it to the base with a couple of screws that are then hidden away by a couple of rubber covers.

All three ‘devices’ mounted on the base are adjustable. You can angle the camera to capture the exact area that you require and the floodlights can both be positioned as you want to.

Features and the app

The Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi, once synced, lives in the ever-improving Reolink app, which is actually much easier to navigate now than it was in years gone by.

As I warn though, with all of my Reolink reviews: the level of customization and the wealth of options on offer inside the app are huge, and it will take you a little while to work out what everything means and does, especially if you are new to the brand.

With Reolink cameras you get a level of control that is pretty much unrivalled across other security camera brands. But that does also mean that you’re going to have to get to grips with some pretty comprehensive options to get the Elite configured exactly how you want it.

With this model though, it’s not as complicated as the brand’s track or pan and tilt cameras, as your main task is simply setting the areas you do and don’t want to be alerted about.

Because it’s hard-wired, the process of setting up exactly what you want recorded and when isn’t quite as laborious as it is with Reolink’s battery-powered cameras, as you don’t really have to concern yourself with anything to do with battery life.

So things like continuous recording, floodlight use, streaming quality and the like aren’t things you need to get bogged down with.

Playback, once you’ve chosen how you want clips recorded, is pretty straightforward. The timeline view makes scrubbing through your clips easy, and Reolink’s new Smart Event Search feature lets you filter by detection type; person, vehicle, animal, or the newer “crossing” and “loitering” triggers, which have been introduced on the Elite.

As with all Reolink cameras, there’s no need for subscription fees, thanks to the microSD storage, unless you specifically want cloud storage.

If you do want cloud access then, in the US there are cloud plans with 1GB of free storage (7-days of history), and also paid options at $3.49, $6.99 or $10.49 monthly. It’s £3.49 or £6.49 a month in the UK.

That gets you 30 days of history (60 days for the top tier), plus 10, 50 or 100GB of storage space respectively for 5 to 10 cameras. This is a fraction of the cost of the likes of Ring Protect or Nest Aware.

One of the key new features of the Elite is a new AI-powered local video search system that runs entirely on the device.

We’ve seen the likes of Arlo and Ring unveil AI searching smarts in the past few months, but these are both cloud-based ,and you need a premium subscription plan in place to use them.

Reolink’s offering, which launched on the Elite Floodlight WiFi, is all processed on the camera itself at no extra cost.

Dubbed Local AI Video Search, it lets you type in a phrase – think “man in blue t-shirt” or “white truck”- and the idea is that you will jump straight to the relevant footage without having to scroll through a timeline of clips.

In practice, it’s very much a work in progress and isn’t super detailed. You can’t be too abstract and time-related concepts such as “yesterday,” “this week,” “morning,” or “afternoon” don’t work either. But if you want to quickly find clips of a fox in your garden, or of a person carrying a package it works well and will only get better over time.

The footage itself comes from the dual 8MP lenses , which capture a stitched panoramic view at 5120 x 1552 pixels at 20fps. You might notice a seam at first where the two videos merge, but it’s easily fine-tuned in the app with horizontal and vertical alignment tools.

The floodlights can reach up to 12m and are fully adjustable for both brightness and color temperature, from warm 3,000K to a crisp 6,000K daylight tone.

You can set them to always off, always on at night, motion-triggered, or on a custom schedule. Motion triggers can even be filtered by object type: people, vehicles, or animals. There’s also IR night vision if you’d rather keep the lights off.

Performance

The panoramic view remains the star here. It takes a moment to adjust to the ultra-wide perspective, but once you do, it’s hard to go back to a single-lens camera. The 180° coverage means you can monitor an entire driveway, garden, or side yard with one device, with no blind spots and no need for secondary cameras.

Image quality is crisp, with natural color and excellent sharpness even after zooming in on details. The only real compromise is that 20fps frame rate, which makes fast movement look a touch choppy, but that’s not uncommon for 4K security footage.

The floodlight itself is powerful to the point of excess. Reolink’s “up to 12m” claim feels conservative; in testing, it comfortably illuminated my 30m garden. It’s perfect for security but not really designed as ambient lighting, since you can’t set it to stay on continuously, only always-on at night.

The light trigger delay is a touch frustrating; there’s about a one-second lag between motion detection and the floodlight activating, leaving a brief dark moment as the IR mode hands over. Once it’s on, though, the scene is crystal clear.

Night vision works well even without the floodlights, and when they do kick in, the extra light makes it easy to spot details like number plates, faces, or in my case, my cat enthusiastically digging up the vegetable patch.

Final thoughts

The Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi is big, bright (literally), and pretty uncompromising. It’s for people who’d rather wire something in once and forget about it than fiddle with batteries or subscriptions.

Installation is more involved than a stick-up cam, but the Reolink app guides you through every step, and once it’s running, it feels like a full-fledged surveillance setup rather than a smart home gadget.

It’s not cheap though, coming in more expensive than Arlo and Ring’s wired floodlight cams, but there are no hidden extras and it offers a wider view, local storage, and finer lighting control.

The lack of Alexa support stings slightly, but Reolink has a habit of adding that later.

If you’re already in the Reolink ecosystem, this is a natural upgrade. If you’re not, it’s an easy way to escape subscription fatigue, and light up half your garden while you’re at it.

How we test

When we publish our reviews, you can rest assured that they are the result of “living with” long term tests.

Smart security cameras usually live within an ecosystem, or a range of products that – supposedly – all work in harmony. Therefore, it’s impossible to use a security camera for a week and deliver a verdict.

Because we’re testing smart home kit all day, everyday, we know what matters and how a particular camera compares to alternatives that you might also be considering.

Our reviews are comprehensive, objective and fair and, of course, we are never paid directly to review a device.

Read our guide on our review process for smart security cameras to learn more.