It is hardly a state secret that I rate Reolink’s gear pretty highly. I have checked out five different units this year and they have all exceeded expectations. To round out 2025, I got to look at the Reolink Altas PT Ultra. And to tie all the units together, the Reolink Home Hub.
One of the key selling points of the Reolink devices is that the upfront price is WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get. There are no features locked behind a subscription pay wall, A subscription for cloud storage is available but there is absolutely no obligation to use it.
Stand-Out Features of the Altas PT Ultra
4K Ultra HD Video: It captures footage with 8-megapixel (3840×2160) resolution.
Mechanical Pan and Tilt: Offers a wide field of view with 355° horizontal pan and 90° vertical tilt, allowing you to monitor a large area without blind spots.
ColorX Night Vision: Vibrant, full-color video even in very low-light conditions, without needing to turn on built-in spotlights or infrared LEDs.
Exceptional Battery Life: Equipped with a massive 20,000mAh rechargeable battery.
Continuous Recording in Battery Camera: A rare feature for a battery camera. It supports 24/7 continuous recording.
Solar Power Option: It is compatible with a Reolink solar panel making it essentially a set-and-forget device.
10-Second Pre-Recording: Captures footage up to 10 seconds before a motion event is triggered, ensuring you don’t miss the start of any important action.
Dual-Band Wi-Fi 6: It supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 6 for a stable and fast connection.
Unpacking the Altas PT Ultra: Size, Installation, and Key Features
When I opened the box, the camera was chunkier than I had expected.
The pan tilt mechanism along with the glass of the camera dangles off the end of … what I suppose, looks like a large supporting plate.
Inside that piece is actually where the 20,000 mAh battery is located, rated for up to 16 months on a single charge – caveats apply.
Physical installation is simple, there is a metal bracket that can be ceiling mounted or wall mounted. Reolink provides a drilling template in the form of a sticker. For a change I did actually use this to mark off where I had to drill into the brickwork.
It is four holes, four screws into the mounting plate, and two into the camera to secure it to the mounting plate. Job done.
As always, it is recommended to fully charge the camera first before putting it into position.
Also to note, the Wi-Fi antenna does NOT swivel 360 degrees. If you need it to be in a certain position and you have mounted the camera a bit too close to the ceiling, then position the antenna first before locking in the camera to the mounting plate. Guess how I found out?
Adding the camera to the app was just like every other Reolink device I have reviewed. Extremely simple – scan the QR code, give it a device administrator password, wait for the system to come back completed.
I have done this quite a number of times now, and this process should take a minute or so, literally.
Real-World Use: Performance and HDR Imagery at Night
The Altas PT Ultra was put in to replace an existing camera that requires a subscription to be useful beyond basic notifications.
Like all Reolink cameras I have been using to date, recording is written to local microSD cards.
Honestly I did not quite think through where I mounted this camera. Not in the sense of I will just drill a bunch of holes in the wall anywhere and hope for the best way. It was more of the ambient lighting conditions I expect it work under.
I want to keep an eye on the ingress towards my garage area, as well as ingress to my back patio. People getting this far onto my property is definitely persons of interest, but I would also like to know when the neighbourhood cat comes around to annoy Tapioca and Mochi.
What I didn’t initially account for, is the ambient lighting condition at night.
At night on one side there is plenty of light spillage from my partner’s work area. Then over the wall and the other side is your standard night time scene. Dark, a bit of moonlight, unless the floodlights are triggered.
To add to the complexity, if I am working in the garage with the door open, the light from inside will spill out.
When I pulled up the imagery at night, I was in for an absolute treat.
Ordinarily if you are taking a photo, you compromise and decide which part of the scene will get the details, what will be washed out and what will be lost in blacks. Unless you are talking HDR (High Dynamic Range) photos.
What Reolink has done is essentially just that – HDR imagery where each segment is exposed correctly and then stacked together in a workable footage.
Truthfully it is more than workable. It was useful, and plenty good to make out the details everywhere. With Colour Night Vision, the footage is more than useable.
What it proves is that Instead of requiring two cameras to cater for the coverage, the Altas PT Ultra was more than enough to handle the job.
A key technical metric to be aware of, is that the Altas PT Ultra has a 3840×2160 (8 megapixels) resolution imagery, but video is captured at 15 frames per second.
If that frame rate seems slow, well yes it is if you compare it to standard video on TV. However in the security camera space, this number is an acceptable compromise that reduces the processing load, battery consumption, necessary bandwidth and heat dissipation. Remember at the of the day, the Altas PT Ultra is battery powered.
The Altas PT Ultra does come with a spotlight – a bank of 6 LEDs. Unlike other Reolink units that I have reviewed, no lumens numbers is published here. I know, I have looked.
Don’t expect it to be floodlights, they are more like a last resort fill in for when the scene is so dark that even the ColourX sensor is struggling. It is also a deterrent to a casual bad actor by illuminating them.
Other Features
I have covered the core Reolink camera features many times. In brief, there are privacy masks, horizontal limits for if you don’t want it to pan as far as looking at a brick wall and possibly a nice close up of a huntsman.
There is still the timelapse feature which whilst I don’t use often, is useful. The last time I used it was to watch my Kipfler potatoes sprout. I wasn’t sure if I left the tubers too long, and yes I could have looked out the window but I have a Reolink camera right near it!
The Altas PT Ultra also comes with a solar panel with a nice long lead so you can run it to where the sun does shine. All you need is to mount the stand and screw the panel onto it.
The Home Hub Advantage: Centralised, Secure, Subscription-Free Storage
If you have a few Reolink cameras installed, this is something you should consider investing in.
What the Home Hub does is to integrate all your cameras into a central storage point – instead of having microSD cards in every camera, you could just have centralised storage at the Home Hub.
This has the added benefit of not just exposing your recordings at the point of the camera and potentially losing the footage due to theft or tampering.
The commissioning of the Home Hub was simple. It was adding another device in the Reolink and adding storage to it.
There are two microSD card slots so you don’t necessarily have all your eggs in one basket and buy a single expensive large capacity card. You could just get two smaller capacity cards, and they do not need to be of the same storage size either.
Once the Home Hub is added to your Reolink app, you will need to add devices to it. You can transfer any existing cameras associated directly to the Reolink app to the Hub. Or if you have a brand new camera, you can associate it to the Hub directly.
The good part is, you don’t have to add all your devices to the Hub. You can pick and choose.
The Hub itself runs a separate WiFi network to talk to the cameras. This has the added benefit of separating the traffic from your core SSID, but it also means if you have a large area to cover, the WiFi coverage may not be the same as your existing setup, particularly if you are using a mesh.
The other perk of the Home Hub is that all battery powered cameras become visible for integration into Home Assistant. Without the Home Hub, only cameras wired into power can be integrated this way.
Reolink: A Company Focused on Responsive Product Development
As a tech reviewer who is always keeping an ear to the ground, often you hear complains about companies who don’t listen to users feedback.
In one of my early reviews of a Reolink camera, I comment that the app has no ability for me to snooze notifications. Say if I am working in the garden in view of a camera, it will constantly trigger alerts as I move around.
Guess what? As I was testing the Altas PT Ultra, I notice that when a motion detection notification comes through, I have the option to snooze it for an hour.
Bravo Reolink! Thank you for adding this feature!
Also worth mentioning, as I do have conversations with the Reolink team, they take their product quality seriously. Devices, even announced devices, will be held back from general availability until internal QA is met.
Final Verdict and Australian Pricing
Whether you are going with just the Altas Ultra PT, or adding a Reolink Home Hub into your Reolink ecosystem, both are sterling performers.
I appreciate that the Altas PT Ultra is an older product compared to the others I have tested, so the newer feature sets are not available.
The ones I do wish it does have is the boundary enforcement which is available in the Elite Floodlight Pro. Hopefully that may be available in a firmware update down the track.
It also seems based on my testing that the AI search is not available if the Home Hub is used to manage the cameras. Again, hopefully it will be rolled out in the future.
The Reolink Altas PT Ultra has a RRP A$359.99, but has a 20% off on Amazon at time of publish bringing it down to $287.99. The Reolink Home Hub has a RRP A$199.99 but is down to $179.99. They are also available on the Reolink website directly.
DRN would like to thank Reolink for their continued support.
