It states that it has a sd card in the kit. There was not one and had to order them separately. Very misleading advertising.

I’ve tried 10-12 Security Cameras and this as well as the REOLINK RLC-511WA – 5MP Security Camera, that they discontinued after my return, were the best. The only issue with the 511WA was the mounting style, it needed to be improved as it did not hold position. Hopefully they improve it and reintroduce it as I believe it’s picture quality, ability to zoom X5 & day-time night shots with white light & acting like a security light are the advantages over this model, RLC-510WA.

The advantage of this model is:
1. being black – Less obvious | inconspicuous
2. All outdoor cameras should have an option for dark brown or black. White stands out. Depends if you want people to know you have them.
3. The absence of night-time lighting makes it inconspicuous or invisible to others at night. Less chance of being deactivated or plug pulled.
4. One of the best in the industry of developing time range vs. sensitivity level. During the day the sensitivity should be mid-hi to High. During the night this would record 2 times a minute for the whole evening due to bugs flying. In the winter you could fill up an SD card 256 GB in 2 days. With the sensitivity function I set a range from 6 am-7 PM, then 7PM-Midnight & Midnight to 6 AM. This significantly reduces false activities such as fire flys, bugs, spiders, etc. This took my timeline from looking like all black, recording 2-times/minute to only action, motion & light changing events. Now my 256 GB card can go 25 days.
5. Designed for you to only use as an:
a. Home security system with your own network & storage devices or
**b. or only with an SD card without Cloud subscription & no Ads – the best in the industry.
6. Includes the best PC desktop software that can startup with your PC automatically in live view.
7. The PC & Mobile Playback feature allows you to isolate Time, General motion, people & Cars. Beta for animals is coming. This works excellent. A few times at night some cars fall into the general motion but you get a feel that it’s a car when the motion timeline icons show some light in the timeline clip. I just may have to adjust sensitivity at night to get them to go into the correct basket. But it’s only a few.
8. You have the ability to do time laps photography. Would be good on sky-scraper of an entire city, a work site building from the ground up or even a storm.
9. Viewing options have 3 settings: Clear, balanced & fluent. Or high quality to low quality. I assume is to save data when viewing over Cell | Mobile data.
10. The Brightness & Brightness & Shadow settings are important to setup correctly to have contrast during the day & night time to optimize the capture of cars & people & not noise.
11. Detection alarm:
a. The detection zones alows you to zero out trees in the front or neighbrs yard that my trigger the motion to capture video. by blocking them out, you have less false triggers. Easy to use the paint & erase features. You may also want to blot out a birds nest on the porch of an active nest.
b. Sensitivity motion allows you to setup more than 3 sensitivity time zones. Like daytime & night time & other? to avoid false detection. One of the best features that make most Security cameras fail in my opinion.
c. Smart Detection – Sets sensitivity for People & cars. Works well.
12. Has the ability to alert you thru notification, e-mail with clip of Picture or video or FTP for All motion, cars only or people only. Excellent feature to isolate each components.
13. To sum up: This camera & it’s brother if they come out with a new & improved mounting are Feature rich, for do-it-yourself-ers & a definite KEEPER.

I had high hopes for this camera and was eager to make it work. Currently, I own three other WiFi cameras that are more budget-friendly and successfully connect to my mobile hotspot for internet access. While some of their accompanying apps may not be the best, I have managed to set them up and have been using them reliably for an extended period. However, I encountered a roadblock with the Reolink camera as it requires an ethernet cable connection for initial setup, which is not possible with a mobile hotspot.
My other affordable WiFi cameras, which are priced at less than half the cost of the Reolink, work seamlessly with my hotspot.
I was particularly interested in the 2.4/5GHz feature of the Reolink camera.
I am disappointed

Pros: See headline. I assume you’re here looking at wifi cameras specifically otherwise if you have a PoE capable deployment just go search for those variants (rlc-510a) and save yourself 20 bucks.

Not cheap plastic. High quality bullet-style stuffed with 18 LEDs for a *crisp* night vision capture. Ensure the firmware is updated to latest version which will expose a fixed frame rate setting.

You can avoid the reolink ecosystem altogether and just record footage via ONVIF or rtsp. I capture the main and substreams using NVR software. Just look for any that mention`ONVIF Profile S`compatibility

Cons:
only supports Base/Main/High profiles of H.264. eventually cameras this feature reach and of this quality will hit this price point AND support H.265 but until then this does the job.

2dbi gain in their provided antennae. Currently experimenting with some higher gain antennae i had laying around. Camera is situated in a noisy RF area so it may or may not help, results tbd.

I have unfortunately bought over 100 of these cameras (don’t ask why) over the last 3-4 years. DONT BUY THEM!, I have had some that have lasted 3 years, but most, I say about 2/3 of them die within the first few weeks or few months. Its either the wireless in them dies, or in most cases, one day you notice one stops working, after you investigate you realize it somehow reset itself. So then after you re-configure it again, set it up, in about 1 to 5 days it does it again, and again and again . . . . and will keep doing it, once again a dead useless camera.

If you don’t believe me then look into why REOLINK recently (summer 2023) changed their return policy from 90 to just now 30 days, uuuuh huh

Install was easy, outdoor under the eves of the house. Connected to WiFi. Up and running, great photo quality. One month in we had our first rain and it died. Have done all the trouble shooting recommendations but it’s simply dead! Extremely disappointed. I have several other Reilink cameras that work great.

The app is horrible. My broadband is a strong 500 gig connection. The camera was 15 feet from my 5ghz signal. Would not connect. My Amcrest cameras have no issues. So it has to be the Reolink camera.

Make sure you have an ethernet cable because one is not included and one is required to initialize the camera. Other than that, this is another example of a quality Reolink product. Aluminum housing, great quality picture, wired and wireless, but you will need to use the power adapter because PoE is not supported to power the device.