The Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi has the specs, performance, and convenience to make it well worth the price.
Smart home cameras are just better when they’re wired. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass to install them, but if you can manage it, you’ll never have to change a battery or climb a ladder to get a camera down and charge it, or wait very long for its video feed to load in an app. If they’ve got a wired internet connection, all the better, but as Wi-Fi cameras with wired power go, the $220 Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi camera is one of the best.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi reminds me a lot of Google’s Nest Cam with floodlight, at least as looks are concerned, thanks to its curvy white plastic and two articulating floodlights with frosted white covers. One big difference is that the Elite Floodlight WiFi uses two separate camera sensors, their footage stitched together to form one long, 180-degree field of view.
It also uses 5GHz Wi-Fi, which means it can transmit clearer, higher-bitrate video to your phone for its live feed and to your local FTP or real-time streaming protocol (RTSP) server, if you’ve got such a thing on your home network. If you don’t, not to worry: the camera also saves footage to an SD card that you can access from the Reolink app.Great specs, but winter could be an issue
Initial setup involves powering the camera with an included USB-C cable, then downloading the Reolink app to your iOS or Android device and scanning a QR code on the Elite Floodlight WiFi. The app walks you through connecting to the camera and configuring its Wi-Fi setup—it uses 2.4GHz or 5GHz Wi-Fi 6—for a few minutes, then you’re ready to install the camera.
The camera’s app-guided installation is clear and straightforward, and very doable if you’ve set up cameras or floodlights before. It involves screwing a base plate onto the wall or soffit, hanging the camera from a hook on the plate, connecting it to your home using color-coded wires—ideally after you’ve shut off power to those wires so you don’t electrocute yourself!—and then screwing the camera onto the plate. All in all, I got the camera up and running within about 30 minutes.
After setup, I ran it through some paces and found that the Elite Floodlight WiFi consistently delivered motion notifications from the Reolink app within about four seconds. That’s way faster than any of the battery-powered cameras I currently have installed, including the Reolink Altas that I recently reviewed, which all frequently take 10 or more seconds to tell me they’ve spotted something or someone.
4K resolution never means you’re getting the kind of video quality you’d see in something like a decent smartphone camera, but the Elite Floodlight WiFi gets closer than most. Reolink bills it as a 4K camera, but you can ignore that as marketing speak—it records 5120 x 1,552 resolution video, which is not an apples-to-apples comparison to, say, a 4K monitor. Still, the image it shows you, even when streaming straight from the camera, is crisp enough to see details through the patio table in the screenshots above, day and night.
My backyard is always lit thanks to a bright street light next to my house, which makes it hard to tell much of a difference between the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s footage with and without infrared. That said, Reolink’s software brightens the dark area from the screenshots (below) enough that you could at least tell if a person is moving in that area. And the floodlights do a good job of lighting the space in front of the camera almost as well as daylight, although it can wash out details depending on where an object in view is, so you’ll want to be careful how you choose to angle them.
