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.
Reolink Elite Floodlight Floodlight WiFi
Reolink’s Elite Floodlight WiFi is a easy to install wired camera with seemingly endless customization and no need for an internet connection.
Pros
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Crisp, clear video -
Tons of customizability -
Local video -
No subscription or internet connection required -
Easy setup and installation -
Stable, reliable Wi-Fi
Cons
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No microSD card included -
No cloud storage options -
FTP storage requires managing -
No wired internet connection -
Limited smart home support
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.
See REOLINK Elite Floodlight WiFi at Amazon
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.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi is nice and sturdy, with an IP66 weather rating that should mean it’s safe from dust intrusion and jets of water. Two violent wind-and-rain storms pummeled it during my testing, and it’s no worse for the wear; the camera portion didn’t even seem to budge on its ball joint. It also reliably sent me notifications while I was away on a camping trip—mostly about a rabbit that took our absence as an opportunity to dig around in our garden for tasty vittles.
If you live somewhere with actual winter temperatures, you might pause on hitting the buy button—the Elite Floodlight WiFi is rated to operate up to as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit, but only as low as 14 degrees. Incredibly—as I have learned (not first-hand, thankfully) since moving to the upper Midwest—break-ins still happen when the season is at its most treacherously cold.
No cloud subscription required—or available
Most of the big-name smart home cameras rely heavily on cloud services for their features, and in many cases that includes accessing your recordings. While some—but not all—offer local recording too, you may still need a subscription to access machine-learning-powered (or AI-powered, if you must) detection features that let you choose what actually triggers the camera’s notifications and recordings. That’s not the case with the Elite Floodlight WiFi, which handles all of that on-device, and isn’t covered under any of Reolink’s cloud subscription plans in the US.
That makes this camera a boon if you’re looking for a way to capture what’s happening around your home without shipping the footage off to some distant server you have no control over. Of course, you’ll want to at least put the Elite Floodlight WiFi on your home network if you want easy access to its recordings and live feed via the app, and it does need an internet connection for smartphone notifications.
As for storing the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s monitoring and recording, you’ve got options. The camera’s underside has a microSD card slot tucked behind a screwed-in panel that’s accessible in software using the Reolink app. You can configure the camera for exclusively events-based recording or for continuous recording, and there’s an option to encrypt its video files so that if someone happens by with a screwdriver and steals the card, they wouldn’t be able to view its recordings.
The Elite Floodlight WiFi also supports saving files to a computer or network-attached storage (NAS) via FTP, but you’ll need to consider storage space. The app can overwrite one file or alternatively overwrite between two files, but there’s no built-in mechanism for, say, overwriting the oldest file once your FTP server’s space has filled up. Instead, you’re left manually deleting files or hunting down scripts that can automate the process for you.
See REOLINK Elite Floodlight WiFi at Amazon
Setting the Elite Floodlight WiFi up to use RTSP requires using a PC or Mac; you can’t configure with the smartphone app. Still, that’s better than the Altas, which requires you to buy a $99 Reolink Home Hub to get RTSP operational.
While it’s nice that this camera is so useful without a cloud storage service, there are conveniences you’ll miss out on, like having a professional monitoring service that can contact the police on your behalf or even employ call center reps to try to ward off would-be intruders by talking through your camera to them. And although you can remotely access recordings saved to a microSD card inserted into the Elite Floodlight WiFi, that won’t work if your home internet happens to have gone down when you try to look. Then again, you also don’t necessarily have to worry about the camera volunteering your recordings for unpleasant police state-style surveillance, either.
Custom everything
The Reolink app is about as user-friendly as security camera software gets, with a main screen that shows you its live feed, complete with current bitrate and buttons for things like turning on the floodlight or manually recording a clip.
Go into the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s settings, and you’re treated to a staggering number of options. Like its battery-powered Altas sibling, the camera allows you to customize seemingly every aspect of its detection and recording, from the resolution of the videos to when you’d like it to record, alert, or notify you—and what triggers each of those things to happen. Video too bright or dim? You can tweak that. Think the floodlight is too intense or overly cool? The app has brightness and warmth sliders, too. You can even record your own custom audio for the siren, which is a very fun feature that I wish every piece of smart home tech that makes any noise had. The siren isn’t especially loud, but anyone in the Elite Floodlight WiFi’s field of view should be able to hear it.
With such a wide camera feed, it’s hard not to point the Elite Floodlight WiFi outside of the area you actually want to record, something Reolink handles with a feature it calls Smart Event Detection Zones. With it, you can set the camera to record or blare its siren only when someone crosses a virtual line, enters an area you’ve defined, or even loiters in a region of the camera’s view for longer than an amount of time you determine. And if you want to be a good, privacy-respecting neighbor, you can exclude specific areas from recording or even black out portions of the feed.
At the risk of making the Elite Floodlight WiFi sound like a person trying to describe their greatest weakness in a job interview, Reolink almost offers too many options. The menu system feels a little convoluted—some of the options, like for the floodlight, should all be in one place, yet they aren’t—and it’s hard to remember where everything is, but easy to make a change that has an unintended consequence. I wouldn’t give up any of the options, but they stand to be better organized.
Also, if you’re hoping to connect the Elite Floodlight WiFi to the smart home system of your choice, prepare to be disappointed. This camera only connects to Google Home, which is a shame if you, like me, are already too deeply invested in a different ecosystem to turn back. Still, Reolink offers a robust enough set of features in its own app that I only sometimes missed having all my camera feeds in one app.
Worth it if you’re tired of the cloud
The Reolink Elite Floodlight Camera is a great, reliable way to cover a huge region of your home’s yard or the area around a business. Its onboard object recognition, speedy delivery of notifications, fast Wi-Fi connection, and deep well of customization combine with its cloud subscription-free and internet-not-required operation to be one of the best wired security cameras you can buy today.
Those who like the convenience of cloud storage may not find everything they want here, but they also might want to try anyway. Yes, it’s pricier, at $219.99, than similar floodlight alternatives offered by Arlo and Ring, but considering the ever-increasing price of those companies’ subscriptions, it may not be long before you make up the difference. Plus, with local storage via a microSD card that’s accessible even away from home, you may find that the experience of using it is nearly identical to that of more well-known brands, minus some of the trappings of cloud-based AI features or remote monitoring.
