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Credit: Amanda Blum
There’s more to consider when purchasing a wireless outdoor security camera than whether it functions as a decent camera—the solar generator has to work well too, even under less than ideal conditions. In my experience, this is a tough standard to excel at.
Reolink’s newest model, the Argus 4 Pro ($219.99), is a wireless outdoor camera and solar generator, and I had few complaints about my experience testing it. It’s Wifi 6 ready, offers great color night vision, and requires no subscriptions. The app is a little unfriendly when pulling up the camera, and it lacks pan and tilt capabilities, but is has a broad enough field of view to make up for it. All that, and the solar generator does the job.
A pair of eyes
The Argus 4 Pro is made up of two parts, the camera and the separate solar panel. The camera design is worth discussing; it looks like a white plastic pair of eyes mounted outside your home. The solar panel comes with a separate mount and a substantial amount of USB cord to connect it to the camera, so you can position the panel in a location that gets a lot of sun.
Both the camera and the panel come ready to be installed right out of the box—all that’s required is to pop in a microSD card (optional and not included) and charge it indoors to give the massive 5000 mAh battery a head start. Of all the outdoor cameras I’ve mounted, this was certainly the easiest, involving no complicated connections and just a few simple plastic brackets.
A few unique features among outdoor cameras
The Reolink app is easy to set up too, and the camera paired quickly on the first try via Bluetooth and then Wifi; since it integrates with Google Home and Alexa, I also connected it to my multi-hub in under a minute.
The Reolink app offers all the standard options I’ve seen in other outdoor security cameras—the ability to set a schedule, enable notifications, and determine the quality of camera and audio recording—plus three unique features. First, you have the ability to set up an FTP address for backing up the videos. This is interesting, since FTP protocol is not encrypted and feels like an easy vulnerability for hacking. (In fact, the app advises only using FTP to a home network.) Secondly, the Argus doesn’t set motion zones, opting instead for “privacy zones” that allow you to block areas from being recorded (in your recordings, you’ll see black boxes for those zones instead of images). Lastly, you can use an AI feature to define a size of objects you’d like the camera to pay attention to, and it will ignore everything smaller or larger. My cameras tend to record a lot of wildlife, so I was able to tell the app to ignore anything smaller than a cat, which cut way down on extraneous notifications. You could also set it to ignore everything bigger than a person, like a truck going by.
A ton of backup options
Most people’s relationship with their security cameras involves being alerted to activity that is unlikely to be a threat (like a passing mailman, or maybe a squirrel), and following the notification to view the recorded activity or check out a live view. My appreciation for a camera is mostly based on how fast and reliable that interaction is. Most days, I was able to pull up a clip by clicking on the notification, and connecting to the live view was quick provided I did so routinely. When I left the camera alone for a few days, pulling up the live view took about five minutes.
The Argus 4 Pro was less reactive than other cameras in the same position, meaning I wasn’t bothered constantly with alerts for non-events like the wind rustling trees or people passing outside the main line of view. The Argus only captures clips when motion is detected, and stores them via the microSD card, FTP, a Reolink hub ($99,99) or network attached storage (NAS). You can also sign up for a cloud storage subscription from Reolink, starting at $6 a month for 30GB.
Exceptional video quality and power
The camera’s 4k ultra high definition video is bolstered by exceptional color night vision, which can recording your yard at what looks like dawn, even in the darkest hours of the night, and with excellent depth of field. The camera does an excellent job capturing items within 100 feet of the camera with great clarity.
The solar generator also works sufficiently well, even in terrible weather, to keep the camera functional. Granted, the panel is physically larger than those included with any other camera I’ve tested, trading form for function.
A slightly awkward app experience
My biggest issue with Argus 4 Pro is the app experience. As noted, the camera can’t pan and tilt, but the Argus has wide 180 degrees of vision, with almost 50 degrees of vertical vision. That makes for a giant ,landscaped field of view, and the company hasn’t quite figured out how to display that well on your phone.
Each time you open the app, you’ll see a small preview if you’re holding the phone vertically, and using your fingers to zoom in doesn’t do the video quality justice. You have to hold the phone horizontally to get the most out of the resolution—but when you do, you’re stuck with a bunch of icons overlaying the video that allow you to use the intercom on the camera, turn the light on and off or take a screenshot or video recording. Not ideal.
The bottom line: A reliable buy
The Argus 4 Pro is an impressive piece of hardware, with all the features you’d see in other top brands, including high video resolution and good depth of field, great battery life, and a good solar panel. It excels in offering a wide variety of options for backing up your footage without a subscription. Despite some shortcomings in the app, it’s a good buy if you’re looking for a stationary camera and don’t care about pan and tilt functionality. (That said, for about the same amount of money, you could also get my current favorite outdoor wireless camera, the Eufy Solocam ($199.99), which has an even wider field of view via pan and tilt.)
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