Reolink Duo 3 PoE and Argus 4 Pro Dual Lens Cameras Review

Kudos: Image quality is fantastic; incredible coverage; easy to use app; solar power option; no monthly charge

Concerns: Argus 4 Pro’s connection and wake-to-record issues; vertical image coverage might not be enough in some applications

When I joined my business partner, Allen, at my CI firm back in 1998, we wanted to do things that were “fun and cool.” That meant distributed audio with control panels, automated lighting, and home theater. It did not mean security, which neither of us felt was fun or cool.

But times changed and we got pulled into security by builders and customers who wanted a one-stop shop, and so we now regularly do security and surveillance systems.

Even still, very few security or surveillance products would qualify as fun and cool. (Though, auto-tracking PTZ cams are getting close!) But after CES, Reolink reached out with news that they were releasing two new cameras that actually did seem cool and featured “world’s first” technologies. The first is the third-generation Duo 3 PoE, which utilizes dual lenses and captures images in 16MP (7680×2160) image quality, and the second is the Argus 4 Pro, which is a 4K dual-lens battery-powered camera. While camera reviews aren’t my typical jam, these seemed interesting enough to bring in for a look.

Who is Reolink?

I don’t really follow the surveillance world like I do AV, so Reolink was a new name to me.

The company was founded in 2009 and, according to the company’s “about” webpage, Reolink is “a renowned smart security solution provider…dedicated to delivering convenient and reliable security solutions for homes and businesses” with a mission of “making surveillance simple.” They also boast over 2 million users, so definitely not some new startup.

A glance around the company’s website reveals that the company has a comprehensive lineup of products including some unique offerings such as an 8MP pan/tilt battery-powered camera that can push recordings up to the cloud via LTE signals. Also impressive is the company’s pricing, with most models selling for well under $200. For example, the 16MP Duo 3 PoE reviewed here is currently on sale for $160, and a Reolink 8-channel NVR with PoE for all cameras and 2 TB storage is $190.

So, Reolink is definitely a strong value proposition, while offering some high-end performance features. And, with the product being available for sale at its own website along with places like Amazon, Costco, and Walmart, is clearly aimed at the DIY crowd.

However, I asked if it would be possible for the CI channel to become a partner, and the company replied, “If any installation firm is interested in partnering with Reolink, they may learn more and apply to be Reolink’s official installers [on our website.] After a successful application, any custom installation firm can purchase Reolink cameras with extra discounts and sell them to an end-user.”

I also found the company’s website to be rich with helpful how-to docs and videos, explaining literally any feature or option I had a question about.

First Impressions

Most cameras kind of look the same. You’ve got a bullet, a turret, and a dome. These Reolink cameras definitely have a different look to them. With its dual lenses ringed by LEDs and sharp angles and lines, the Duo 3 PoE reminds me of the rear of an Imperial Star Destroyer, while the rounded, smaller, “softer” looking Argus 4 Pro’s dual-lensed “face” gave off EVE vibes from Wall-E.

The Duo 3 PoE includes an adjustable mounting arm/bracket and hardware that allows you to either mount the camera to a wall or a ceiling, while the Argus 4 Pro has a ball-and-socket type mount that allows a lot of angling and pointing, along with a strap that can be used to secure it to a pole or tree.

Both cameras have microSD card slots in compartments on the bottom of the cameras that are sealed to protect against weather.

As the name implies, the Duo 3 PoE is meant to power-over-Ethernet, however, there is a breakout dongle where you could connect a separate 12-volt power supply. The camera includes a weatherproof Ethernet coupler. Also included is a 1-meter Ethernet cable. So, you know, if your camera is within three feet of your router, free cable.

The Argus 4 Pro charges via a USB-C connection, but if you don’t have an available outlet nearby, Reolink has you covered. The Argus 4 Pro ships with Reolink’s Solar Panel 2, a 6-watt solar panel that connects to the camera via a 4-meter USB-C cable. I’ve invested heavily in solar (I have like 30 panels on my house and a Generac battery wall), so I love things that embrace solar charging. Reolink claims that “about 10 minutes of charging can provide sufficient power for regular daily usage.”

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While there are a lot of plastic components to the casing, the Duo 3 weighs 1.5 pounds and both cameras feel “solid.”

Also, I personally suffer from app-charge overload, so I love that there is no ongoing charge for Reolink’s service.

Setup

The cameras offer a few different recording options, including a Reolink NVR, setting up an FTP server, or using a NAS like Synology. For my review, I purchased a couple of 128 GB microSD cards and inserted them into the cameras. (The Duo 3 can support microSD cards up to 256 GB, while the battery-powered Argus 4 Pro maxes at 128 GB.) This is an incredibly simple — and cost-effective — way to store your recordings, however, if someone stole the camera itself, you’d be out of luck.

By the time you read this, Reolink plans to offer its Home Hub, which will essentially be a pre-configured NAS to store recordings from up to eight cameras. This $99 device includes 64 GB of storage but has two additional slots that can support up to 512 GB microSD cards. The Home Hub will also create a local LAN for the cameras to connect directly to, helping to further secure recordings. For customers just looking to secure and offload recordings from the cameras, the Home Hub sounds like it will be a great alternative.

Since I don’t have any Ethernet cabling in my home that goes to any external camera locations — and didn’t feel like doing any retro — I installed the Due 3 PoE in my office at work and connected it to a PoE power supply. Since the Argus 4 Pro runs off battery, I located it on the corner of my garage where it overlooks my driveway and front of my house, and allowed a short run of wire around the corner for the solar panel in a location that gets the most sun.

Install posed no issues, just a couple of screws to secure the mount for both the solar panel and camera.

To see and configure the cameras, you need to connect them to a Reolink account, which you can do via the Reolink iOS, Android, or PC app. Once you’ve created an account, you can scan in the QR code on the back of the camera or manually enter its UID.

Since the Duo 3 was hardwired, it immediately appeared, but the Argus 4 Pro required a connection to my Wi-Fi. The Argus 4 Pro is Wi-Fi 6 compatible and also supports both 2.4 and 5 GHz signals. The 5G signal wasn’t strong enough to use at my install location, and kind of made me wish that the camera featured an external Wi-Fi antenna for increased range.

Once I could see the cameras, then I could point/aim them for best coverage. The first thing you notice is how insanely wide the view is. They both claim a 180-degree field of view, and I’d say that’s accurate. The real-world benefit here is the ability to use far fewer cameras to get full coverage. I think if you have four of these cams centered on each side of a typical home, you’d likely see everything you’d want to.

However, this incredible width comes at the expense of height. Comparing the image to my Ring Floodlight Cameras, the Reolink view is like ultra-wide cinemascope, and the Ring is more “fish-eye” 16×9. For practical purposes, the Ring covers from the roofline down to the bottom of my garage door while still showing my entire driveway and street, whereas the Argus just gets a sliver of my garage in order to still see the driveway and street.

In the app you can adjust a host of settings such as the resolution, frame rate, max bitrate, adjust motion detection settings and sensitivity, choose whether or not to have the spotlight turn on at night, whether or not to record audio, setting push or email notifications and schedules, etc. For the Argus 4 Pro , I can see battery usage over 30 days and check the state of the battery.

For the record, the Duo 3 has a max stream of 7680×2160, 20 FPS, and 8192 Kbps bitrate, while the Argus 4 Pro maxes at 5120×1440, 15 FPS, and a max bitrate of 4096 Kbps.

You can also adjust the focal point of the “stitching,” which is where the images from the two lenses join into one. In my office at work, which is obviously much smaller than the view from the garage-mounted camera, the image can get a little funky and “torn” in the middle as people get close to the camera, but otherwise, it’s not an issue. At nighttime, because of different reflections from the IR flooders, you can see a slight difference in shading in the very middle where images are seamed but, again, this is minor, and I can’t imagine it bothering anyone.

Both cameras also allow you to adjust how long they will continue recording after motion is detected, up to 1 minute for the Duo 3 and 30 seconds for the Argus 4 Pro . You can also set up schedules on whether it will record any motion, person, vehicle, or animal detection. With the Duo 3, you can set pre-motion record, but the Argus 4 Pro doesn’t allow for that, which was an issue for me as you’ll see later.

One of the biggest things missing from the setup is that the cameras don’t support any advanced motion settings such as line crossing rules, registering vehicles, or setting different motion zones. The extent of recording is by motion detection, giving you the ability to privacy mask or “paint out” areas you don’t want to trigger recordings.

The Duo 3 supports the ONVIF protocol, and I was able to easily add it to my showroom’s Luma NVR recording system. It appeared as a discovered device, I entered the camera credentials, and it popped right in.

Performance

I’m going to start with the good: The picture quality of these cameras is fantastic, particularly the 16MP Duo 3. The clarity, detail, and sharpness are all terrific. If someone walked onto your property, you would be able to clearly identify them. The picture is so good that I can just about read the text on a business card sitting on my desk eight feet from the camera.

Reolink says they developed “a groundbreaking 16MP image solution using two 4K sensors and the integration of a powerful quad-core SOC chip to maintain a broad field of view while delivering clearer image results, up to double the resolution of current models from competitors,” and I believe it. The Duo 3 delivers the kind of sharp, full-coverage camera images that people think they are going to get.

Outside of business hours, my office is pitch black with no lighting, and the Duo flips on its IR flooders and goes into black-and-white night-vision mode. If it sensed motion – or if I wanted 24/7 color – I could turn on its bright LED spotlight and get color images. However, this B&W image is still sharp and incredibly clear and more than adequate for any surveillance needs. With its spotlight on, images jump into color, but with less saturation.

The Argus 4 Pro’s 4K resolution flat destroys the picture quality of my Ring 1080p cameras. These cameras are located in roughly the same location, and we had a car in our driveway, and the Ring couldn’t resolve the front license plate, whereas the Argus easily did. The picture quality difference is even more noticeable at night whereas the Ring looks a bit hazy and images aren’t sharp, and the Argus 4 Pro with Reolink’s ColorX true color night vision tech is still clear and sharp. The camera has an F.10 aperture that gobbles up any available light and delivers full-color images all night long. To be fair, I do have my garage sconce lights on from sunset to sunrise, so there is extra light at that location, however, the Argus 4 Pro is more than capable of delivering great images after the sun goes down. The Argus 4 Pro also has a spotlight, but it isn’t nearly as bright or powerful as the Duo 3.

Both cameras also have a built-in microphone and speaker to record sound and enable two-way audio. I found this sensitive enough that you could hear what people were saying if they were talking up near my house, and you could easily have a conversation with someone if you needed to.

Another cool thing that both cameras offer is a timelapse feature that lets you capture images over a period of time with pre-created events like Event/People/Traffic, Moving Clouds, Sunrise, Sunset, Construction, and Blooming, or you can customize your own. You can create a start time, a duration of up to 830 days, a daily start and stop time, the interval of how often it takes a snap, and the picture quality. Each camera can have one timelapse event going at a time, and this is a cool and easy way to see things happening over a long period.

I found the Reolink app and desktop controller simple and intuitive. You can connect and see a low-quality view of both cameras and then open a single camera to get a high-resolution view. You can pinch to digitally zoom into images or recordings to get a closer look, take snapshots, or download videos to store or share.

In playback, you can select a day and then scroll through a timeline of recorded events that can be filtered by people, vehicles, animals, or motion. There are also little video tiles that show you a snippet of each recording and the length.

The Duo 3 has a feature called Motion Track that will email you an image showing the path of a vehicle or person moving across the field of view, along with timestamps. This would be perfect if you wanted to see a quick look at what someone was doing — say a delivery man — without having to load the video.

Now, the stuff I didn’t like.

First, sometimes the app can be finicky about connecting to the cameras, or the playback of videos would just refuse to load or be choppy. This happened much more with the Argus 4 Pro battery-powered camera as it would frequently just fail to connect, play a second or two of video, and stop, or just never load the video at all. One time I stood in my driveway for 10 minutes trying to connect to the camera to test the spotlight and could never get it to work. Fortunately, you can download recorded clips — after you do connect — and then view them without any issues.

In contrast, my four Wi-Fi Ring cameras connect instantly, every single time, with smooth and flawless video playback.

If you’re just wanting to check in on a vacation house or something, it would be fine, but for a mission-critical application where you absolutely, positively had to connect to the camera 100% of the time, I don’t trust it. Reolink commented, “We are working on the connection improvement now and will send a firmware update when it is available.”

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Second, after a couple of weeks, the Argus 4 Pro suddenly stopped working; I couldn’t connect to it and I couldn’t power it on or off. At Reolink’s suggestion, I pulled it down and connected it to a USB power charger, and the camera came back on and charged up and has worked without issue since. I have no idea why it suddenly stopped working when it would show that it was connected to power and charging via the solar cell, and I get about 9 hours of sun on the solar panel every day.

Third, to conserve battery life, the Argus 4 Pro camera takes a moment to “wake” and start recording when it senses motion, and it sometimes seemed really odd about what it would and wouldn’t record. For example, it would capture videos and identify nearly every car driving by on the street 150-plus feet away, but it would refuse to record my wife driving our full-sized Honda Pilot SUV in and out of the driveway directly in front of it. Other times, it would wake up showing it had recorded a person, but by the time it actually started recording, the person had already gotten into a car. I’ve had my car broken into in our driveway, so I’m pretty sensitive to this.

At Reolink’s suggestion, I upped the motion sensitivity from the default setting of 60 to 90 and I also changed the settings for person and vehicle detection and this seemed to really help. It now captures our Pilot, but sometimes it will be halfway in/out of the driveway when the recording starts. This is why the pre-event recording would be so helpful for this camera. Again, for mission-critical applications, the battery-powered camera probably isn’t the right option.

There’s a lot to love about these cameras. They’re inexpensive, they’re easy to set up, the app is easy to use, and — most importantly — the picture quality is terrific. If you can get an Ethernet cable to a desired location, the Duo 3 PoE is a terrific performer and will allow you to see more with fewer cameras. I also want to love the battery camera and solar panel, but I just don’t trust it enough to recommend it for serious surveillance needs. If Reolink can address the connection issues, it will definitely be worth giving a second look!

833-424-0499; REOLINK.COM