Looks-wise, the RLC-1224A is plain white and nothing to write home about but I was determined to have at least one ultra-hi-res exterior camera in my repertoire and I’m not disappointed.
The hardwired (Ethernet) RLC-1224A is really hi-res – 12Mpx and has a large aperture F1.6 lense. The full description is UHD PoE camera with color (USA spelling) night vision. Up to now, every Reolink camera I’ve reviewed has been very good but no-where near this resolution. This one is a fixed camera with no auto pan or tilt but it can run from 12v OR from PoE (Reolink can supply inexpensive PoE adaptors) – the camera is wired, not wireless so on simply connecting it to the router – it works. I’ve also noticed it appear in my Home Assistant installation. I’m currently testing it out in the garden with the single RJ45 network lead attached – at the other end it’s connected to my router and a simple POE box to supply power down the same lead.
The RLC 1224A camera is often on offer on the Reolink site – could be worth a peak. The camera boasts person/vehicle/pet detection and can handle up to four easily set up privacy zones in the image area.
The first place to try for me was the Reolink APP on my Android phone. Initial impression, rock solid imagery. I also noted a decent frame rate – most of my other cameras have slow frame rates – usually the hi-res 2.4Ghz WiFi cameras.
Any aliasing you see above is from my screen-shot. There is of course a certain amount of fish-eye effect as the lense is wide-angle.
The camera features a really bright spotlight (you can turn it on and off remotely of course) and as you’d imagine, 2-way audio. Image resolution can be set to low and “fluent” – not sure why it isn’t just called high – on the Android APP, once you switch to “fluent” it shows as “high” anyway. Of course this would be irrelevant on the internal network but important when you (the user, not the camera) expect to be on a slow connection. Note that as I watch the camera on my phone in high res mode, the bitrate is indeed high at 8140Kbps.
Day and night mode control allows you to use colour at night, auto or black and white.
You can take snapshots and videos. I tried viewing the timeline but as I forgot to put an SD card into the camera “you may not access playback feature”. I soon fixed that.
For settings – there are many…
DISPLAY menu includes: flip horizontal or vertical, stream bitrate, anti-flicker, day and night, brightness, camera name position in the image (or none), date position or name watermark or none and you can control the privacy mask settings, you have brightness and contrast control for both day and night modes and finally under an advanced submenu, you can control colour and mono switching thresholds.
I just tried the SOUND controls and the camera let out a quite loud alert sound – probably terrified the cats 🙂
The RLC-1224A of course has both IR and white lighting and you have full control over all of that.
Under DETECTION there are a number of controls, one being object size threshold, another alarm delay, sensitivity and more.
You can turn push notifications on and off, email alerts on and off, FTP control, siren control and you can optionally control time lapse (needs an SD in place to do that).
Ok, SD in – issues?: No SD detected – and I could not find any way to format the SD. Worse… when I went to format the SD in the APP, there were no formatting options that I could see… the APP instructions and SD location info are utterly inappropriate for this camera. In reality, the RLC 1224A has a small cover under the lens with 2 screws which, once removed give you access to a single (not supplied) SD. So I removed the SD and put it in my PC – nothing – turned out to be a duff SD card after all that. I put in a second card into the PC, formatted it – that worked just fine. Put it back into the camera – card is not formatted – format? Yes, problem solved – I have both manual video and video automatically stored when I moved. GOOD. But they do need to check the APP. I’ll write now.
In summary – if you want a wired, quality, non-pan-tilt security camera – especially at discounted pricing – the RLC-1224A is a good option.