An incident does not pause and wait for you to be ready to record as it happens. If your security camera only kicks in after it detects something, you have already blinked and missed it. The Reolink Altas is here to change the narrative.
Preamble
Word on the street is that Reolink makes some pretty good cameras. I had a good chat with the team at Integrate 2024 and came away pretty impressed with the portfolio.
What has been getting a lot of traction is that for people sick of paying for subscription services, there is none of those restrictions here. Reolink does have a cloud storage feature, but it is strictly optional.
Your purchase of a Reolink camera, in this case the Altas, is a once off upfront cost that comes with all features enabled. Nothing locked behind a paywall.
First Impressions
The Reolink Altas is a big, hefty camera. That caught me a little by surprise but it does come with a 20,000 mAh battery.
On the underside of the unit are two heavy duty rubber plugs. One protects a heavily recessed USB-C charging port, the second covers the microSD slow and a power button.
The side of the unit sports a very solidly built wireless antenna that can swivel up and down next to the camera. You can’t rotate it horizontally though, it’s a vertical movement only.
There is a mounting point at the very back of the unit.
My review unit comes with a 6-watt solar panel, with it’s own mounting kit.
Getting Started
Setting up the Altas was probably one of the easiest devices I have done in quite a while. You (of course) need the Reolink app to start with.
I am really liking the current trend (at least on my review bench of gear) of not needing to create an account before I can do anything. You can imagine I work with a lot of products and brands and my password database is massive because I refused to use Single Sign-On. Not for me, no thanks.
You do have to agree to the Terms of Service before the app allows you to add a device. From power on to completing the device connection in app was less than 30 seconds via Bluetooth. As you can see in the video above, my cat loves to attack anything that is on speaker.
After this was to add in your WiFi SSID details. I have to point out here that the Altas specifically can support both 5 Ghz and 2.4 Ghz networks. So many IoT devices will only support 2.4 Ghz and have issues when the channels are not separated out. The Altas had no such issues.
I have a complex internal network with segregated IoT wireless SSID. My phone permanently have a custom VPN connection, and connected to my core wireless SSID. Usually at this point of the process, I have to connect to my IoT wifi and disable my VPN to get a device online.
However none of that was required with the Reolink. It appears they did not take the lazy way of piggybacking on the phone OS’ connection. They have actually programmatically accept my manual input of SSID and password and parsed it to the Altas itself.
You do have to create a device password – for security purposes you should give it a complex password and make a note of it. Next you name the device.
I did all this before mounting the camera. Reolink gives you some guidance on this to:
- avoid pointing to frequently moving objects
- pointing to strong light
- close to strong signal interference
- point to heat sources
- point to a mirror
Installation
Reolink does recommend charging up the battery prior to installation, particularly if you are to use it with the solar option. Just be aware that the USB-C socket is set quite deep into the unit and not every cable will fit. Reolink does include one in the box, but no power adaptor.
Depending on your charger, the 20,000 mAh of juice could take a little while to get filled up.
I was keen to see how well it can perform at the location I want to use it on. There is a particular area of my property that has no direct coverage, but is also in an awkward area for wireless coverage and power.
To be fair, it would take some effort to get into that space and avoid being caught on camera somewhere. Stranger things have happened and I have been specifically targeted before. But it is also one of those things, I know that is a vulnerability and I would not have footage of the beginning of an event if it does happen.
The good news is that there was some magic between my access point and the Altas and there was just enough signal coverage to make it happen. I will be honest though, it is pretty borderline and tonight’s heavy rain as dropped it out a few times but that just cuts out my live feed.
These are standard posts with a couple of screw holes. Reolink has included some dry wall inserts and some screws to suit. If you have the solar panel, then you have two mounts to install.
I cheated and drilled into the mortar as I know my brick tend to crack, but you do you. All up the physical part took me about fifteen minutes and I was done.
One thing to note is that there is no locking mechanism between the mounts and the camera and the solar panel.
In Use
The Altas is a security camera that pretty much works out of the box.
However the flagship feature – the up to ten seconds of smart pre-recording – is not enabled by default. Altas is not the only product out there with pre-recording capability, however due to the power penalty it involves, this feature is largely restricted to wired cameras for most parts.
With the solar panel in place I have no qualms enabling it. After all, it was the key feature that I wanted in this scenario.
You just have to dive into the camera setting, under camera recording, and turn pre-recording on. In here you can set it from two to ten seconds, at what battery level to stop pre-recording function, number of frames per second fron 1, 3 or 5, and set the schedule for when it should be enabled. Keeping in mind each of these settings will affect the battery life in some way.
Moving onto the image quality, after all, what good is your footage if it is completely unusable?
The Altas is a 2K camera with a 1/1.8″ CMOS sensor with resolution of 2560 x 1440 (4 Mp).
Reolink Altas day time
Reolink Altas night with LED
During day time, the footage has excellent clarity across the entire field of view.
The night time footage leveraging Reolink’s ColorX technology is actually quite spectacular. During the early stages of testing and viewing the footage on the phone, I had to do double takes to see if I was viewing daytime or night time footage.
Because I have a separate LED light source triggered by PIR in the area, I have the spotlight on the Altas disabled. The LEDs on the Altas is no match for my LED panel.
In the interest of thoroughness, I killed all the external lighting I had in the area and relied on the Altas. The LED makes a surprising impact on the overall brightness of the scene, although you do have to cope with the flare as it kicks in. It is not quite enough to wipe out the scene but it is pretty out there as you can see in the sample video. The brightness of the LED is adjustable in app.
Even without lighting, the ColourX technology does a pretty amazing job in the night scenes.
Looking over the footage is as simple as browsing the timeline. Events are highlighted so it is easy to find.
Other Features
Like many other security cameras, you can watermark your footage to head off allegations of tampering.
If you have the camera located in a more public space, you can add privacy mask to block off areas of the frame.
An interesting feature add is the time lapse mode. You can set the Altas to capture hour to days long event such as sunrise, sunset, construction and flower blooming at intervals as little as ten seconds to as long as six hours.
There is also a rich set of supports for notifications, including push, email, FTP and siren.
Something for Home Automation
Something I was really excited to read is that Reolink has official support for Home Assistant (or Hassio if you are old school like myself).
What is Home Assistant (HA)? It’s a free and open-source integration platform and smart home hub. It is brand agnostic and if you are like me with virtually nothing by the same brand across the home, it helps bring everything together. The best part of this is that you can break out of vendor lock ins, or limitations of say HomeKit, Google Home and Alexa.
Whilst many brands are actively sabotaging their device’s ability to hook into HA, Reolink has welcomed it with open arms and even publishes support documentation on their website.
The sad part is, the Altas is not currently supported (the Altas PT Ultra is). My HA instance saw it, but I can’t talk to it. Argh!
After reaching out to Reolink, they confirmed that the Altas is supported but via the Home Hub. If you have multiple Reolink devices, then the Home Hub offers you a centralised local storage of all your footage.
Gripes
The Altas feels pretty complete as a unit.
My one complain about it is around the timelapse feature. I get that it’s a value add, but it is kind of pushed aside in the settings section. Even the access the footage you have to specifically go into the timelapse section to find it.
Secondly, you can only schedule one timelapse at a time. So if you want to capture tonight’s sunset and tomorrow’s sunrise, you have to set up for the sunset first and allow it to finish, then schedule the sunrise afterwards.
Conclusions
The Reolink Altas on it’s own surpassed my expectations. Despite being at the start of winter, awful rainy days here in Melbourne with little sunshine, the 6 watt solar panel is getting enough to keep my unit fully charged. I have yet to see the battery dip down from 100%.
The lack of mandatory cloud subscription is a real winner in my view. So many competitors require a subscription and does not offer any free grace periods. With the Altas all you need is a microSD card and you own your footage.
Admittedly, it is simple enough with just a single device. If you have multiple Altas and you want to centralise the footage storage without subcription, you will need to purchase the Home Hub.
The Reolink Altas is now available in Australia with a 6-watt solar panel and retails for A$229.99 on Reolink.com. At time of publishing, it has been discounted to A$206.99.
DRN would like to thank Reolink for providing the review unit and happy 16th anniversary!
Stay tuned to the Reolink website as 16 to 22 June 2025 is Reolink week with exclusive celebration content and pricing.
