Loads of functionality and I can’t really fault the quality of the footage, nor the ease of use of the attendant app.
- Brand: Reolink
- Product: RAtlas Solar Power Security Camera
- Price: £139.99
- From: Reolink
- Tested by: Hannah for a month
Pros
- Easy to set up
- Long battery life/low sun demand
- Good quality colour footage day and night
Cons
- Quite pricey
- Reolink website is confusing to navigate
- Slow if you’re trying to intercept a delivery
The Reolink Altas security camera comes with a solar panel to power it, and provides colour footage day and night.
After a neighbour spotted some people sniffing around my garage in the middle of the night, I felt like perhaps a security camera would be a good idea. I’d also noticed that other neighbours used their video doorbells to intercept delivery drivers, which seems like a useful solution to avoid endless missed parcels, trips to the depot, or hunting around ‘safe’ places like bins. The opportunity to test this camera was then very welcome, despite the fact that I usually try to avoid tech as far as possible.
The 2k Altas camera comes with a 6V solar panel. Inside the box there is a choice of mounting options – you can screw the camera and/or panel into a wall, or use straps to join them to a tree. I enlisted a neighbour with a decent drill to bore into my brick walls. Apart from the need to be able to drill into a wall while at a reasonable height, it was pretty easy to get set up. I have it placed high up enough to be out of reach of anyone tampering with it, and within reach of an upstairs window for easy access to clean it or replace the memory card. In hindsight, the view is a little too top down to get good shots of any faces, but I wanted to cover the garage and my parked van blocks the view on the approach.
I have mounted it on a south facing wall, with the solar panel (almost) placed so it should get maximum light during the day. I did mess up slightly – by going for an aesthetically pleasing central point on the wall, I also placed it where a shadow falls towards the end of the day. So far it has been OK power wise, but I do wonder if this might be an issue come the short days of winter. That said, it is claimed that just 1 hour of sunlight a day will keep the camera running in Pre-recording Mode. The camera has a built in battery too, which it is claimed will last up to 18 months if you’re recording 300 seconds per day on the Motion Sensor setting, although that reduces to 2 weeks in pre-recording mode.
The Reolink website is rather confusing – lots of galleries that move around when you’re trying to read them, and for quite a while I was struggling to figure out if this camera came with a solar panel included, or if you had to pick it as an added extra. The printed instructions in the box are rather vague too, so it’s just as well this was a doddle to set up. I have tried and failed to get a different one of the Reolink PoE cameras to set up, and can’t tell if it’s down to my tech ineptitude, confusing instructions, or a product failure. PoE is not a typical home arrangement however, so choose carefully and make sure what you order is compatible with your home cabling.
The camera footage can be easily viewed on your phone. Download the app, scan the QR code on the camera, and it all connects up via your wifi. No subscriptions are needed, although you can sign up for remote storage if you want. It really was fuss free. Footage quality looks great, and it was easy to use my phone to try out different potential camera positions before choosing where on the wall to attach it.
If you want to add a privacy mask so you’re not recording your neighbours, it’s a simple case of drawing a box on the image once you’ve got the camera positioned. There are various AI settings you can use if you want to stop your cat from triggering the camera, and the recordings are tagged with ‘person’, ‘vehicle’, ‘animal’ and ‘other’ to help you try and locate particular incidents. There’s another setting you can switch if you’ve got a lot of waving branches that trigger false alarms too. It’s all very customisable.
The pre-recording mode means that the camera will save up to the ten seconds prior to the motion activation – so you shouldn’t get any clipped footage from any delays in the sensor triggering a recording. Each recording is marked with a little line the spot where something has been sensed, making it easy to fast forward to the action.
You can set the camera up to notify you by phone (via the app) or email, however I never did fathom out the email option (possibly more tech ineptitude at play). You can adjust the schedule for notifications so it doesn’t tell you – or record – while you’re home at the weekend, or when the kids come home from school. Apparently you can connect it to ‘smart home’ set ups, but since I don’t have any of these I didn’t test it. In fact, the lack of needing to integrate it with anything beyond connecting the app on my phone was a plus point for me.
Without a memory card installed (this is not provided) all you’ll get is live footage, unless you’re watching on the app. From in the app, you can ask it to record or take a photo, and these will be saved straight to your phone. The notifications of events are fractionally slow, meaning if someone knocks on your door but doesn’t hang around, there’s every chance they’ve already gone by the time you get the notification and open your phone.
Once you add a memory card, it will save recordings of any events. You can review these in the app, and delete them whenever suits. Or, you can set it to record over old footage on a range of schedules. Even setting it to record whenever there is movement (eg, when I’m home during the weekend and we’re all popping in and out the hose pretty regularly) the recordings have taken up very little space on a 32GB memory card. You could definitely get away with something smaller and cheaper and still not be losing important footage. Plus, you can download it to your phone if there are clips you really want to keep.
You can choose whether or not to record or play the sound as well as the video footage. You can also set the PIR sensor light to come on when triggered, or turn it on manually. There’s also an automatic option for triggering the siren/alarm, or you can trigger it manually. The alarm is not all that loud – loud enough to alert someone below that something is going on and they’re likely being filmed, but not so loud that it’s likely you wake neighbours in the night, unless they’re light sleepers.
If you want, you can use the app to speak to people through the camera. Deploy your best Joe Pesci voice and scare off intruders, or just ask the delivery guy not to leave the parcel out in the rain.
I did find that the camera had stalled after a while. It was still displaying footage, but it wasn’t sending me alerts, and when I tried to adjust settings I got error messages. I chose the ‘reboot’ option for the device and all seemed to be working well again. Having acquired a memory card, I then installed this (a simple task of inserting it into the slot – simple at least if you’ve placed the camera somewhere you can easily get to it). I still don’t seem to receive notifications on my phone every single time it records, but the footage is always there when I go back and look at the day’s activity. If I do catch someone at the door, there can be a bit of a delay while my phone app connects to the camera and offers me the chance to talk. If you’re hoping to use this as a ‘catch people in the act’ or divert couriers to helpful locations type thing, the delays may prove frustrating.
Overall
The absence of wiring needed to install this is great. I don’t have any external ethernet cables or power points that I could have used for wired options, and I’m not in any hurry to start trying to drill through walls or window frames to add wiring. Even in a shady location, with the 4m cable to the solar panel and the relatively small amount of sunlight needed to charge the system, I think it should be possible to deploy this set up. The internal battery lasts long enough that, if you really had to, topping it up via a USB C cable and battery pack wouldn’t be too onerous.
There are a lot of different tweaks you can make to the set up, and you can integrate different Reolink products together if you want to fortify a whole building or area. For many, there is probably more functionality than really needed. However, I can’t really fault the quality of the footage or the ease of use of the app.
Review Info
| Brand: | Reolink |
| Product: | Altas Solar Powered Security Camera |
| From: | reolink.com |
| Price: | £139.99 |
| Tested: | by Hannah for 1 month |
