Description
From the brand
Product Description
Smarter Detection with Auto Tracking
Featuring rapid 360° Pan & 90° Tilt ability, RLC-823A locks & tracks targets with Human/Vehicle/Pet (four-legged animals) shapes.
Remote Access & Smart Playback
Instant Access to your property anytime & anywhere. On Reolink software, videos are categorized by human/vehicle/pet events for an easy playback.
Hands-Free Control
Tell your device to show the camera with a voice command, and live feed will appear on your Chromecast-enabled TVs. No extra subscription is needed.
See the Day in a Minute
Timelapse captures the dynamic processes frame by frame, such as sunrise, sunset, and flower blossom, then watch the entire process in minutes.
Installation in Fewer Efforts
Thanks to the PoE technology, this outdoor camera can establish a reliable connection via only one Ethernet cable. Note: PoE switch not included.
Flawless 4K Full-Color Night Vision
Question 1
Q: Which Reolink NVR will be compatible with this camera?
A: Reolink NVR with the hardware version of N2MB02/H3MB18/N3MB01 while under the latest firmware version support the smart detection/playback, two way talk, spotlights and siren functions for the 823A.
Question 2
Q: How to turn off the spotlights or get the spotlight stay on in schedule？
A: You could turn off the Night Mode of the camera via Reolink App/Client to turn the spotlights off at night, or set a schedule for the spotlights to let them stay on at the set time.
Former photojournalist –
GREAT daylight, poor night, playback can be difficultThis is an add to the top. On playback in the Reolink client, you can deselect showing the clips with just motion. I had complained about having to winnow through all of the pure motion events to get to the ones with people or cars, so finding this helped considerably.I have to upgrade support to 5 stars. I had an issue and they provided a good working solution within 24 hours on a weekend.Also, I got an update of the firmware and saw a review that said it will help night vision. Will post back on that.Initial observations are that I like the camera and will keep it, but it does not perfectly solve my problems. the main issue is performance at night.Setup in the phone app and Windows client was easy and pain free.The daylight quality is wonderful. I can position the camera zoomed to 5x and read most of the license plates leaving my cul-de-sac by daylight. Night time, no joy. I am going to experiment with some off angle IR illumination and will try to post back if I can get that to work, but I think it will be a stretch. The problem is the lighting on the cars is washing out the video, so I will need to overwhelm it from an angle that defeats the glare.It will not record video that would identify someone breaking into our cars at night. In daylight, no problem. Still objects are incredibly sharp at night in all modes, but anything that moves blurs out and it doesn’t have to be moving fast.The issue, of course, is that most of this crime is at night. That is my primary reason for adding the camera. Deputies pulled someone out of my car a few nights ago when I had forgotten to lock it. Lucky for me, they were staking out my neighborhood for this type of crime. I am concerned about the night they aren’t there on a stake out.My existing 9 camera Axis system is sited to protect the house and it is not good for where the cars are parked. Axis dropped their less expensive line of cameras and never offered a PTZ camera at what I could afford, so I was eager to see how this would do. At some point, I know I will have to replace the proprietary Axis system as it wears out and Reolink has a lot of interesting and well priced equipment, but night performance is critical and appears lacking across the board. I hope that by adding floodlights I can make them work using the night time color mode which seems better than the IR B&WThere appear to be some settings only available in the phone app, but I might not have found them yet in the Windows client. When possible, I vastly prefer to use a computer for this sort of work. A real keyboard and large monitor goes a LONG way.Compared to Axis Companion, the Reolink client playback is cumbersome. With Axis, it is easy to jump from clip to clip to move back and forth between them on the timeline. Reolink uses two interfaces to access playbacks, one with clips and the other just a time line, but neither is as fast and easy as Axis. I hope Blue Iris will solve this issue if I can find the time to beat it into submission. Reolink is somewhat easier to navigate in the phone app, but harder to see what is going on in the small screen.Playback stalls, especially when using the highest quality video on the PC which is very frustrating. My network is Gigabit throughout, so it should be fast enough for the transfer. I am using an SD card in the camera during testing. Perhaps an NVR would be faster, but it does not make any difference with the Axis cameras. It seems when you download a clip to download it in the quality you were viewing. Again, I may be missing a setting to make it download only in highest quality while viewing in a faster low res version.I may have missed another setting, but I had the impression that when the camera is set to the people/vehicle detection modes it would only record people and vehicles, but it appears to record all motion and then puts an icon on what triggered the recording on the clip.I had a tech support question which was initially answered in a somewhat pointless manner, but my follow-up got a good response, all within 24 hours which I thought more than acceptable and better than many companies.Focusing after a zoom is slower than I would like and more difficult at night.While the camera can track moving objects, if there are multiple objects moving, it can follow the wrong one. I did not try it at night, but suspect more issues with that. I could be a wonderful feature for covering an area that should not have any traffic, but not so good for a high traffic zone. I wish it could be set to zoom in on the identified person who triggered the recording, but that might be too tricky to get right.I plan to keep it and find some work arounds for improving night quality, primarily more white light in the area where we park. The camera spotlight helps, but is not enough for forensic quality images which is what I am looking for. While the deputies were hoping my cameras caught something the night they were here, they had their own imagery from their air unit.
Barry Batcheller –
Power DrawI have purchased a couple dozen of these cameras over the past several years and find them to be overall very satisfactory, especially because they bring pretty good value (what you get for what you pay for them). I use the cameras with home servers that I have built for various of my properties. I run Blue Iris 5 software on the servers. Blue Iris is an outstanding product in my opinion. With this setup I can see the cameras from anywhere in the world and also control them (use an iPhone).The only problem I have had with these cameras is that they have an unusual propensity to go into a restart and recalibration sequence spontaneously and not recover from it. I believe this is related to the amount of power they draw and the PoE switches that I use to drive them. They are stated to draw 28 Watts, (PoE+), but I am suspicious that they draw a bit more than that. I have “burned out” two PoE switches that have 8 outputs rated at 30W per output. The telltale sign is that one or more cameras will start beeping and spinning, stop and then repeat the process endlessly. This is the process that the cameras go through on initialization out of the box. I suspect that the PoE power drops below the threshold required to sustain operations and that drives the camera into the initialization mode. I have been able to fix this most times by replacing the PoE switch. Ultimately, I bought $400 switches that supply PoE++ on every line and the problem went away (one exception – one camera after doing this routine for several weeks never would recover). I have not had a recurrence since buying this super-duty switch.If you are using one or several cameras you should have a good experience I suspect.
Larry C. –
Awesome cameraI have used for a year with Blue Iris and the camera is simply the best. Bright lights and easy to control. Nice AI that tracks people car and animals like dog deer and fox. The best part of this camera is that it does not get spider web blocking the lens like the bullet style outdoor cameras. I don’t have to clean the web every week like the other ones. Highly recommend!
Mike –
Great Camera, mostly…This is a great REOlink PoE PTZ camera out of the box; now the 3rd expensive PTZ I’ve had to purchase for the same-exact installation location, so I have years of comparison history. But that’s really also my complaint here… so far I just don’t see any longevity from the more expensive feature-rich REOlink cameras:PROs:- Fantastic resolution; saved images are 7680px X 4320px (33MP)- Pretty decent zoom (5X)- Good audio (but loud camera movements)- Kind-of-cool motion-tracking capability- Fairly decent night-time images (worse using camera’s internal versus my external IR floods)- Has a pretty bright white-light flood when movement is detected at night (also my CON)- I like the 60-second return-home (also my CON)- Can turn IR-LED and White-Flood off in APP (other cameras I have can only be changed locally in NVR)CONs:- Works great out of the box, but I question longevity of REOlink PoE PTZ cameras- The contrast of images is strange; like there’s great resolution and I physically know the person on video, but I almost can’t identify them because it’s not natural. Contrast works pretty well for license-plates though- The nighttime motion-detection white flood light is bright, but I have two problems with its use:- – 1) The white light alerts evil-doers to camera’s existence- – 2) When motion is detected at night, you lose the IR/B&W image quality immediately and the Lighted/Color image takes a few seconds to equalize… so it basically alerts evil-doers to turn-around, and you completely lose what would have otherwise been good infrared video, replacing it with weak color video if the evil-doer is more than 10ft away. Nighttime IR has WAY BETTER distance quality than flood-light color- I’m actually not a fan of having IR-LEDs on a remote camera, because it attracts bugs / spiders to the camera lens. This would be a great night-time camera but-for the gimmicks. I don’t need/want flood-lights, I don’t need/want IR-LEDs, and I question how much power-drain it is on the PoE NVR when this stuff switches on (PoE NVRs have enough heat-issues without trying to light up the nighttime)- While I like the 60-second return-to-home functionality, I also really dislike it because the camera always moves right when you’ve finally got the camera positioned on something interesting- The night-vision is really good for static-objects, but seems like the slowest / smeared night-vision for moving imagery of all my cameras- One other flaw with the AutoTracking Detection is, when a vehicle enters my drive (and is successfully detected), the camera continues to track the car back out into the street, where the camera will track any vehicle driving by within 60-seconds instead of returning homeMy real problem here is that I have now had TWO RLC-423 PoE (4X PTZ) REOlink cameras die in the last 36-months, which is why I purchased this RLC-823a. The first RLC-423 just completely died after 15-months, and the 2nd RLC-423 lost audio within about 3-months before completely dying 12-months later. So I’m starting to get a bad taste for high-end REOlink cameras. But I can’t give this new RLC-823a a bad rating based on other previous cameras. For what it’s worth, I still have a (non-PoE) RLC-423WS in operation almost 5-years later, so I know REOlink has the capability for longevity…
Terry –
Works greatI’m new to installing security systems. I wanted a wired camera system because my wifi isn’t reliable. I love this camera its very easy to use and setup. The hardest part was running the cable. It captures all the activity on that side of the house. If I need to do it again I would buy the same system.
steve –
Need Tracking and Patrol mode to work togetherLove this camera….BUT….was expecting to be able to patrol and area and get people and animal direction and then have tracking kick in…..that would be a game changer……NEED THAT!!!!
michael white –
Much more to this camera than advertisedAlthough it took me a while to figure out this camera, it’s well worth it. I am still learning what this camera can do. I debated for a couple months not sure if I wanted to get this system and this camera. I had more than a few security cameras, so it took forever figuring out which one to get this time. I had a Swanns, LOREX , GW but so far, this REOLINk is superior but to be fair, when I had the last system, PoE (power over Ethernet) wasn’t an optiion. When you run the Cat5 Ethernet cable, if you have to pull it through walls, cement blocks, ceiling and floor joist, you better order the Cat7 cables now. Because it’s so easy to break one or more of the 7 small wires in the Cat5 cable. What’s really bad is you might not even know it’s broke because most the camera will still work.when my Cat5 Ethernet cable was damaged, the night vision in that camera went out and I thought it was the system that was bad. Good thing I kept working with it to figure out what happened. The Cat7 is heavy duty and a little more expensive it well worth the cost. Makes the reception better also.Now, back to the real ink RLC-823A camera, the camera can be programmed to turn in circles if needed or any way you want it. Since I put mine on the corner of the house I can view 270 degrees with one camera. I also programmed for the camera to patrol and follow if it sees anything moving , it will follow until the object moves out of the screen, then it will return to patrolling until something else moves. I can set the area to be watched. I have the inside of my fence constantly watched so if anything moves inside the fence, it will send me a picture of who or what it is. The camera also has sound with a speaker if I wanted to talk .the camera also has a spot light to add color to your night vision. . I honestly don’t use the light. The two things that I believe is a waste is that spot light and the poor ass sounding alarm.
Ryan Schnulle –
Nice camera but the TrackMix is betterNice camera but I did return it for a second TrackMix. The main reason I returned it was because the TrackMix does a better job following people up stairs. This camera would lose someone walking up my stairs unless they walked VERY slowly. Picture quality is amazing by the way!
D Kelly –
A Great CameraThis is a great camera. I installed it under a second floor roof overhang where it gets a 270 degree view. It’s at my weekend ranch house so I thought I would use it to look out for trespassers while I’m stuck in the city. It’s great for the intended purpose. I have it set to send me an email and an image if it detects a vehicle.Turns out its great for watching wildlife as well.I set it up to do a patrol that does a wide view that pans slowly cross it’s entire field of view so I can see what the weather is doing. It then pans down and goes in a little tighter and does another slow pan. Next it zooms in tight and pans to a a few key spots and lingers on each for a while. Running and watching the patrol has become part of my morning routine. The possibilities are unlimited, mostly.I keep it set at it’s “Balanced” video setting. It’s a little grainy but the video feed is smooth on my limited bandwidth. You can do a HI-RES playback if something happens that you want to seen in sharper detail. The largest SD card will hold almost a weeks worth of recordings.The uploaded image is a screen shot from a video clip of a couple of Axis Deer fighting over the water trough. A little dry this year. They are about 70 yards from the camera and this image is cropped pretty tight but is relatively clear.In addition to the 5x optical zoom it is possible to zoom in tighter when playing back recorded clips. My only complaint would be that it doesn’t have more optical zoom and that when manually panning it moves pretty quick and sometimes overshoots the intended target.I have a couple of inexpensive cameras that cover the porches and areas I can’t see with this one. I’m very happy with this one, I may get another one for the opposite corner of the house.
2LuckyDogs –
Nice PTZ for the costWe operate 36 PoE cameras on our property that includes eight (8) Amcrest 8k PTZs. This camera is not as good as the Amcrest but we dedicated this little cam to our basement and it’s perfect.This camera is Blue Iris compatible BUT NOT BLUE URIS READY!!! To be Blue Iris ready you need to toggle on the ONVIF setting for this cam to work in Blue Iris.Besides this, it’s a great cam for our basement.