Reolink IP Cameras

[Arjun]

Don't repeat mistakes of others, buy from @EMPIRETECANDY or from ipcamtalk's store

 

[CamZerg]

Reolink is trash and it's obvious that you've never seen good picture quality. Every consumer system allows you to turn off P2P. Reolink is a lying scamming company and should be avoided at all costs.

Oh, I know they're not the best, but the quality of the recent footage was enough for the police to identify the face and license plate of the person who stole my trash & recyclable bins. /shrug

 

[CamZerg]

Don't repeat mistakes of others, buy from @EMPIRETECANDY or from ipcamtalk's store

I'll say what I like.

 

[fenderman]

Oh, I know they're not the best, but the quality of the recent footage was enough for the police to identify the face and license plate of the person who stole my trash & recyclable bins. /shrug

you went from "awesome" to "i know they are not the best" once again, they are crap in every which way and only an idiot would buy them. You simply have never owned a good camera so you are clueless.

 

[fenderman]

I'll say what I like.

READ. No one told you what to say, they told you what to buy and not to be stupid and fall for the reolink scam.

 

[CamZerg]

READ. No one told you what to say, they told you what to buy and not to be stupid and fall for the reolink scam.

Sorry, I read it wrong then, my sincerest apologies.

 

[CamZerg]

you went from "awesome" to "i know they are not the best" once again, they are crap in every which way and only an idiot would buy them. You simply have never owned a good camera so you are clueless.

It's what I can afford right now is what I'm saying. I know they're not the best because they were cheap. Hell, my whole NVR + 7 cams costs about as much as 1, maybe 2 good cams.

 

[CamZerg]

Don't repeat mistakes of others, buy from @EMPIRETECANDY or from ipcamtalk's store

I checked out @EMPIRETECANDY... I think the ipcamtalk will be more in my price range, that is IF we get our Christmas bonus this year). I have a feeling we're going to get shafted (feel like Clark Griswold in Christmas Vacation).

 

[fenderman]

It's what I can afford right now is what I'm saying. I know they're not the best because they were cheap. Hell, my whole NVR + 7 cams costs about as much as 1, maybe 2 good cams.

The price difference is minimal. You are not comparing apples to apples.

 

[SouthernYankee]

every see a reolink picture at night ? No why ? they are crap.

 

[fenderman]

These attached pictures are from my 2 year old cameras, they currently retail new for $40USD with free shipping.
Can you show me pictures of a comparable priced camera that is significantly better picture quality?

The nightime images are horrible, but more importantly, images, reolink has a firmware "feature" that artificially sets the exposure to 1/12 so the static image looks great, but any movement is a blur. Not to mention their other firmware issues like no iframe interval settings. Then you have the issues of spiders from the ir ring. If you want to buy crap from a company like reolink that lies to its customers, spams forums pretending to be an end user and passing crap onto consumers go ahead. There are hundreds of posts here with quality cameras and samples. Dont be lazy - thats why you purchased the reolink to begin with.

 

[fenderman]

The picture of reolink cameras is perfectly fine and easily competes with comparable hikvision and dahua which cost substantially more. I know, own a Swann with reolink cameras but am a contracted installer for the better regarded brands.
Picture quality is not the talk point for reolink, sure there is better but not at the price.

If you want to pick on the reolink product do it on actual real things.
The reolink, aka baichuan platform, suffers from
1)slow day to night switching. Likely caused by framerate change (eg 12.5 in night vs 25 in day). This kills the video stream for 1-2 seconds at switch.
2)NVR will sometimes record some frames from an unrelated stream in to a file, eg partially corrupting the data which can then confuse the decoder that attempts to play or transcode the h264 file
3)the hardware is not super reliable. Eg Swann era devices with sticky IR filter is common leading to pink IR saturated day video. But the hardware that gets past the first 12 months tends to run for many years.
4)official clients have issues with supporting all era of cameras. Eg old clients can't support new cameras but new client can't support old camera audio etc.
The official client has issues during transcode like wrong framerate for night mode, no audio for old cameras or file ended prematurely.
I have written my own opensource BC h264 splitter/converter to deal with its file format due to the poor performance of the official client.

Reolink has substantially improved the stability of the platform, a vast improvement over where Swann left it.

BC hardware has one I frame per 2 seconds. If you want more I frames vs your P frames lower the fps. Eg fps 25 will lead to a gop of 50, fps 12 will have gop of 24. But adjusting how big your gop is really isn't something 99% of entry level cctv users care about.

You have never seen a good camera from hik and dahua. Perhaps if you spent more than 5 minuets "researching" you would see what a quality low light camera with a good sensor looks like. You are clueless. Reolink is trashcan garbage. THE FRAME RATE CHANGES TO 12 AT NIGHT BECAUSE THE SCAMMERS AT REOLINK ARTIFICIALLY SET THE EXPOSURE TO 1/12 TO TRICK INEXPERIENCED USERS LIKE YOURSELF INTO SEEING A GOOD STATIC IMAGE. ANY MOVEMENT WILL RESULT IN A BLUR. You got scammed and dont even know it!

 

[SouthernYankee]

post your night video with motion to you tube for review.

 

[fenderman]

Fenderman you are being quite rude and escalating this conversion for no apparent reason. You need to calm down.
Comments about who I am like clueless, scammed and suggesting how much research I have done after I have posted a handful of posts shows more about how much you research and who you are than me.
All caps and bold - and you want to be an authoritative voice in a conversation?

I have done much research but please do answer my question of what camera that sells at retail for $40usd with free shipping is substantially better.

You all bold that reolink changes framerate at night to 12 to trick the user, what are you even on about?
I said the framerate drops, reolink say the framerate drops, yes it drops. How does that make them scammers or tricking anyone? It is clearly to increase exposure time to increase picture quality at the expense of blur of moving objects. iPhones and Android phones do the exact same thing with their cameras. Nothing wrong with that.

You want lots of knobs and dials to manual set settings which reolink doesn't offer. That isn't scamming, lying or tricking. It is the lack of a feature you want but the product does not offer.

There is plenty better products but are they at a comparable price? No one is claiming reolink is a high-end product, it is cheap stuff that performs according to its price point.
Show a comparable priced product that is doing better and perhaps your points would make sense.

I will post video once I get the chance.

I don't need to do anything. I don't care if you think I'm rude. I'm going to tell you like it is you're inept. the users here will not be suckered into using reolink. I don't want knobs and adjustments the scam is a deliberate 112 exposure adjustment which is useless in almost all scenarios. I understand that this is beyond the scope of your basic knowledge. Reolink also poses as end-users both on this forum and on their Amazon reviews which are fake as well. They lied to their users about why they did not offer and I frame interval setting. Sadly you know so little that you don't understand why the camera is crap. If you don't like my tone you can you can leave this forum it is not an internet safe space. If you can't figure out how to do that I can help you. I will always be the authoritative voice on my forum. It's written in bold so that your scam and reolinks scam is exposed. you're an idiot and don't even understand what the exposure setting does and why changing it to 1/12 is a scam. I will keep exposing reolink and fools like you.

 

[fenderman]

What scam am I running? Again you are making claims about me without any knowledge, it doesn't give confidence that you make accurate claims or research before giving your opinion to others.
I may be a misguided customer/user but I definitely am running no scam.

I do not need an internet safe place but I love a civil conversation where people use proof to back up their claims.

When you are explained the scam and keep running your inept mouth, you become the scammer.

 

[Steveee]

I had
Reolink 8CH Ultra HD 4K PoE CCTV Camera System, It is 4 8mp cameras and NVR. cost me nearly £600. So not cheap. I had this up for 2 weeks, before returning it.WHY ?

1. Ok, daytime video is quite good. But as others have said, and I have experienced, Night video is useless. Yes you get a nice crisp picture of your garden, but if some walks past, it is almost impossible to get a good picture of them due to motion blur.
2. Motion detection.
Yes you can block out certain areas, and yes you can adjust sensitivity. I spent 2 weeks trying to get this to work at a reasonable accuracy, to no avail. You either have it set to pick people up walking past, and get hundreds of false alerts from cloud shadows, leaves blowing or whatever. Or turn it down and pick up next to nothing. Whats the point of motion detection alerts, if you have to turn them off.
3. Playback.
options for playback, normal speed. Thats it.
who wants to sit watching hundreds of 30 seconds clips in real time to get to something that actually matters. Useless.
4. IR light.
Yes I can say the spiders absolutely loved them, and so did the motion detection (hundreds more false alerts). I must have cleaned them off about 4 times in the 2 weeks. I have had Dahua cameras up in same locations now for a couple of months, and I think I've had to clean a couple of them 1 or 2 times.

So unless you want to sit watching reasonably good DAY video live, this system is useless, and not worth the money.
Yes, its a bit cheaper than other makes, but thats because it is CRAP.

Edit : Found a night pic of Reolink cam at Night. Lovely Detail of car and bird Table. Good luck trying to positively Identify person walking.


Unfortunately, I must have deleted my other pictures from this system.
Edit: I forgot to say, outside floodlights are on in above picture.

 

[Steveee]

No one should buy this cheap stuff and expect much from it. It is not that the other companies are overcharging or ripping people off, it is that the Reolink product is super low end.

You are right,NO one should buy this cheap stuff. Because it will not function as they expect it to.
A bit like buying a car really cheap, then realising its broken and won't actually drive. Nice to look at, but won't get you anywhere.
If you spent a bit more, you'd have a car that actually did what you expected it to, and drove!!


With regards to the motion detection, it is not just tricky, unless you want hundreds of false alerts, it is useless.

 

[kuzco]

Gents,
have seen a lot of threads regarding reolink cams.
I am using several Reolink RLC-422 and in summary the day-view is good (enough), but the night view is scrap. That is the reason why I would like to replace 2 RLC-422 with new dome cams.
Due to the fact that I am using also a Dahua video system for my door (vto2000a-c), I would prefer also a Dahua dome cam with perfect night view (I need a range of approx 15 m).
Checking the dahua pages, I am confused now about all cams. I am based in Germany. Any recommendation is highly appreciated.

KR
kuzco

Edit: I do not need WLAN.

 

[fenderman]

Gents,
have seen a lot of threads regarding reolink cams.
I am using several Reolink RLC-422 and in summary the day-view is good (enough), but the night view is scrap. That is the reason why I would like to replace 2 RLC-422 with new dome cams.
Due to the fact that I am using also a Dahua video system for my door (vto2000a-c), I would prefer also a Dahua dome cam with perfect night view (I need a range of approx 15 m).
Checking the dahua pages, I am confused now about all cams. I am based in Germany. Any recommendation is highly appreciated.

KR
kuzco

Edit: I do not need WLAN.

see wiki,
You dont want dome, you want a starlight turret.

 

[kuzco]

see wiki,
You dont want dome, you want a starlight turret.

Many thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately I have 2 more questions:
1. Why is a starlight turret better compared to a dome (especially for night view)
2. Have already checked the wiki, but I have not found any information regarding cam recommendation for night view . Please advise.