Reolink Elite Floodlight WiFi Review

Introduction

Reolink has been quietly climbing the smart security ranks over the past few years and, with the Elite Floodlight WiFi, it feels like the brand is really taking the fight to the better known names in the space, such as Nest, Arlo and Ring.

The Elite takes everything that was great about the Argus 4 Pro – that 180° panoramic dual-lens view, smart local detection, and microSD storage – and hard it into a floodlight setup bright enough to double as stadium lighting.

It sits somewhere between a traditional floodlight and a high-end camera system, giving you full 4K coverage and powerful illumination without handing control over to the cloud. Like Reolink’s other recent cameras, everything from detection to playback is handled locally, so you stay in charge of your footage.

I’ve had the Elite Floodlight WiFi mounted outside my garden office for a few weeks now, running day and night, through rain and random wildlife appearances. Here’s how it performed.

Design and installation

• Large with dual floodlights
• MicroSD card slot
• Full installation kit

At 1.3kg and roughly 7 inches tall and 12 inches wide, the Elite Floodlight WiFi is a serious piece of kit.

Picture an Argus 4 Pro bolted onto a chunky base with two floodlights on adjustable arms and you’re not far off. It sits in the same bracket as the Arlo Wired Floodlight and Ring’s Floodlight Cam Pro, but it’s noticeably beefier, and you won’t find any hidden subscription hooks here.

Before you start drilling holes, it’s smart to get it paired and running first. For this, you can power it temporarily via USB-C to check the feed and run through setup, though you’ll notice a pinkish tint during that phase, which is totally normal, it’s just the camera in low-power mode.

The USB-C port, reset button, and microSD slot all sit neatly behind a small sealed compartment secured by screws, which helps protect them from both rain and tampering.

Unlike most of the big-name rivals, you don’t need to create an account to use the Elite, unless you plan to add cloud storage or connect it with Google Home.

Once it’s powered, the camera will say, “Welcome to Reolink, please install the Reolink app,” and from there, it’s just a matter of scanning the QR code in the app. Setup takes just a few minutes.

Like other recent Reolink launches, the Elite has dual-band Wi-Fi with both 2.4GHz and 5GHz support, plus Wi-Fi 6 compatibility. As long as you’ve got decent coverage outside, the faster connection makes a difference.

Wiring is straightforward, assuming you’re replacing an existing outdoor light. It’s designed to mount on a wall, ceiling, or straight onto a junction box.

The Reolink app walks you through each step with clear visuals, and the camera even comes with a temporary hanging wire so you’re not left juggling the unit mid-install.

Once in place, a couple of hidden screws lock it all down.

The dual-lens camera and both lights can be individually angled to suit your space. It’s solid, adjustable, and feels far more “pro install” than plug-and-play.

Features and app

Once it’s up and running, the Elite Floodlight lives inside the Reolink app, which has quietly become one of the most capable camera control platforms around.

It’s not flashy, but it’s deep and, if you’re new to Reolink, you’ll probably have to spend a bit of time figuring out what everything does.

The trade-off is pretty much unrivalled smart security camera control. You can tweak almost every aspect of how and when it records, what triggers alerts, and even how each detection zone behaves.

The app is cleaner and faster these days, and because the Elite Floodlight is hard, you don’t have to worry about power-saving tweaks or throttled recording like you would on a battery camera. You can just set it and forget it.

Playback is simple thanks to the timeline scrub bar, and the Smart Event Search tool is a proper upgrade; you can filter clips by people, vehicles, animals, or new AI triggers like zone crossing and zone loitering.

You can choose motion-triggered clips, turn on continuous recording, or mix in the Pre-Recording mode, which buffers 2–10 seconds of footage before an event.

Storage, as is always the case with Reolink, is handled locally via microSD by default, and you’ll never need to pay for that. You can also team it up with a Reolink home hub or even use NAS or FTP storage options too.

If you do want cloud storage, plans start with a free 1GB option (7-day history) and go up to $10.49 a month for 100GB and 60 days of footage across multiple cameras.

The big new feature debuting here is Local AI Video Search, which’s is text-based search for clips, powered by the camera’s onboard processing.

You can type things like “fox”, “white van” or “man in blue shirt” and it’ll pull up matches without sending data to the cloud.

It’s not perfect yet and it doesn’t handle vague phrases or time-based queries like “yesterday” or “this week” but it works surprisingly well for finding clips fast.

Video quality comes from twin 8MP sensors stitched together into a single 5120 x 1552 feed at 20fps. You might notice a small seam between lenses at first, but it’s easily fine-tuned in the app.

The floodlights themselves push up to 3,000 lumens, and you can tweak both brightness and color temperature from warm 3,000K to daylight 6,000K.

You can keep the floodlights off entirely, have them come on with motion, or run them on a fixed schedule. Triggers can also be limited by object type; for example, people or cars only.

There’s full-color night vision with the lights on, or traditional IR if you’d rather stay dark.

Performance

• Ultra-wide panoramic view
• Clean daylight footage
• Bright, floodlit night footage

The panoramic view is still Reolink’s secret weapon. Once you get used to the ultra-wide perspective, single-lens cameras feel like blinders. You can cover a full driveway or backyard without dead zones, and the clarity is impressive even when zooming in.

Detail retention is excellent, license plates, faces, and movement are all easy to make out. The lower 20fps frame rate gives motion a slightly stuttered look, but it’s not a dealbreaker for security use.

The floodlights are powerful… arguably too powerful. Reolink says 12 meters, but in my tests, they lit up nearly my entire 30-meter garden. It’s security-grade lighting, not ambient mood lighting, and it can’t be set to just stay on permanently except overnight.

The only real annoyance is a small delay between motion detection and the lights firing – about a second – which means a brief moment of IR-only footage before full illumination kicks in. Once they do, though, the scene looks fantastic, especially for events up close.

Night vision remains excellent even with the floodlight off, but when it activates, the added clarity makes all the difference for identifying movement or small details, like catching a fox crapping on your flower bed.

Should you buy it?

FAQs