Reolink WiFi Doorbell Review: Detailed Test Results
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This product was purchased for this review.
Tested with scoring system 1.0
What do these scores mean?
Learn about our data-driven scoring system.
Pros
✔ Superb camera clarity✔ Very accurate person detection
✔ Generous preroll captures everything that happens
Cons
✔ Rich notifications need a subscription✔ App can be unfriendly and needs polish
✔ No package detection features
The Verdict
The Reolink WiFi Doorbell Camera delivers in all the ways that matter for a security-focused doorbell. Superb video quality, reliable notifications that capture the right details, highly accurate person detection, and a long pre-roll video buffer that ensures everything that happens is captured - before and after motion is detected.
My tests didn’t uncover much of concern at all with this doorbell. Rich notifications could be a little faster, and the audio quality isn’t a perfect as some big brand consumer models, but it’s still very good. The most egregious omission is package detection - there is none - and the need for a subscription to get rich notifications. This requirement is odd, since you don’t really get anything else of value for your money, and setting up the account linking to the doorbell is way more painful that it should be for a feature that most other doorbells provide automatically.
On the other hand, Reolink has included a much asked for feature with little fanfare: continuous recording. When using a MicroSD card you can configure time periods where the camera will record non-stop if you so choose, and you can mix and match this with motion detection, person detection or visitor alerts depending on time of day.
Providing you can provide the doorbell with wired power, either with a doorbell transformer or the included plug-in power pack, the Reolink WiFi Doorbell offers excellent performance at a very affordable price point. If you don’t mind forgoing package detection, you’ll get better security coverage than any doorbell I’ve tested to date.
Type: Wired video doorbell with chime
Subscription: Yes for rich notifications and cloud recording
Price Segment: $$$$
Test Results
Each doorbell I review is put through a series of repeated test cycles over a 30-day period. These tests give me 32 data points that make up the 7 overall category scores above. These scores rate each doorbell key performance requirements like video and audio quality, motion capture performance, smart detection accuracy and the overall user experience.
Here’s how this video doorbell ranks compared to the average of other doorbells I’ve tested:
| Data Point | ||
|---|---|---|
| Video Quality | 10.0 | 7.8 |
| Night Vision Quality | 9.6 | 6.9 |
| Dynamic Range | 7.9 | 6.7 |
| Two-Way Talk | 7.1 | 7.6 |
| App Audibility | ||
| Outdoor Audibility | ||
| Recorded Audio | 8.9 | 9.0 |
| Notification Delay | 8.9 | 7.5 |
| Thumbnail Average | ||
| Doorbell Average | ||
| Text-only Average | ||
| Thumbnail Effectiveness | 10.0 | 6.9 |
| Day Success | ||
| Night Success | ||
| Missed Events | 10.0 | 9.3 |
| Day Misses | ||
| Night Misses | ||
| Camera Wake Delay | 10.0 | 8.1 |
| Frame Remaining Day | ||
| Frame Remaining Night | ||
| Event Capture | 10.0 | 5.8 |
| Record Start Day | ||
| Record Start Night | ||
| Package Monitoring | N/A | 5.6 |
| Package Features | ||
| Detection Success | ||
| Smart Detection | 7.0 | 6.9 |
| Smart Features | ||
| Day Accuracy | ||
| Night Accuracy | ||
| Live View Response | 9.5 | 8.6 |
| Live View Time | ||
| Doorbell Ring Response | ||
| Privacy Features | 6.9 | 8.2 |
| App Usability | 5.7 | 7.8 |
| Battery Performance | N/A | 7.9 |
| After 30 days | ||
| Time To Dead |
The Basics
Tech Specs
Power: Wired (AC or DC)Removable Battery: N/A
Can Use Wired Chime: No
Connectivity: Wi-Fi Dual Band
Resolution: 2560 x 1920
Storage: Local or Cloud
Weather Rating: Not Specified
Field of View: 130 degrees
Compatibility: Google, Alexa
Smart Detection: Yes
Footprint (WxH): 13.5cm x 4.8cm
Notable Features:
- 6s Pre-roll
- Continuous recording
- Built-in siren
- Chime included
The Reolink Doorbell Cameras (both WiFi and PoE) support data connectivity via Ethernet, with this WiFi model also supporting dual band Wi-Fi. Power comes from either the included DC plug pack, or conventional 12-24 Volt doorbell wiring.
The doorbell itself is quite compact, as is typical of non-battery models, and very light weight. This doesn’t give me the feeling that it’s cheap. The build quality and materials seem good quality, and everything connects together well. Indeed, the wall mount plate is solid metal, a far cry from the usual consumer plastic mounts I see all the time.
Securing the plate to the wall with the two provided screws allows the doorbell to be hooked on at the top, then pressed flush at the button yielding a satisfying click. A chunky security tool is provided for removing the doorbell again. Similar to a typical phone SIM tray tool but about three times larger, this is also gives a nice solid feel and makes it easy to press the release catch inside the button of the case.
Reolink advertises the field of view at 180 degrees, but this looks to be the (fairly useless) ‘diagonal’ field of view. I’ve measured the horizontal field of view at around 130 degrees. That gives a far better comparative number when looking at coverage between doorbell models. It’s a mid-range wide angle field of view that will serve most use cases fine, but if you need wider you’ll have to augment it with other cameras.
Video Storage
The V2 Reolink Doorbell is best used with local storage via a MicroSD card inserted into the back of the device. This supports up to 256GB of storage. You can also opt to use FTP to a local recording server or use Reolink’s own NVR hardware or subscription cloud service.
Chime Options
A wireless chime is included with the doorbell which automatically pairs with it and responds to doorbell presses automatically using a variety of chime options. Mechanical chimes are not supported.
You can also pair the device with Google Home or Alexa and use supported smart speakers as additional chimes.
Chunky removal tool releases from the bottom
Solid metal bracket easily hooks under the top
LAN port, wire terminals and SD card slot on the rear
Reolink Doorbell box contents
Camera Performance
I had some initial difficulty with this test due to the nature of how the Reolink app handles video playback. On any video view the app offers the choice of streaming resolution which can be changed on the fly, which is quite unusual for a doorbell. The options are labelled ‘Clear’ and ‘Fluent’, which doesn’t help much. This ability is useful for when you are away from the house on a low bandwidth connection, but the problem is that it defaults to ‘Fluent’ which actually means low - or at least variable for low bandwidth use.
Once I switched everything to Clear I unlocked the actual capability of this camera, and it was impressive. For the first time, I was able to get a clear read on the test chart from the maximum test run distance of 10m (30ft) and could likely have gone considerably further. The image was not only clear, but stable without any shifting compression artifacts. Obviously Reolink gets a perfect score for this test, and it’s well deserved.
Running the clarity test at night didn’t disappoint. While the camera clarity was a given, how good the infra-red illumination would be and how the infra-red processing displayed was still up in the air. Using infra-red alone did drop the visible distance quite a bit, although this is typical for any doorbell camera. The illumination is actually quite impressive as you can see in the sample below, and the native camera clarity helped get a good read of the test chart at 6.7m (22ft) which is still blows away the competition.
The night vision test score is calibrated around a lower maximum distance as this is always going to be shorter than during the day, but Reolink still managed to push the limits of the test range, achieving very close to a perfect score here as well.
Reolink’s camera doesn’t just deliver excellent clarity but handled the OECF dynamic range test just a well. This test uses software to evaluate how many of the grey swatches can be clearly determine in a still image from the camera with daylight behind it.
The Reolink Doorbell managed to get a clear read on 8 swatches with a good partial read on 3 more, only missing one swatch completely. This gives a score of 9.5 out of a possible 12, beating out the previous high score holder (the Eufy E340) by half a point.
Reolink Doorbell HDR Test Chart showing identified swatches
Audio Performance
I found that Two-way talk worked very well with good clear audio reproduction for both parties. The app user was able to easily understand normal speaking volume all the way out to the maximum 10m (30ft) of the test run, but the outdoor speaker was a little quiet. This meant I wasn’t able to hear the app user responding clearly beyond around 5.8m (19ft). Obviously, this is still more than adequate for addressing visitors and delivery drivers.
Audio quality was very good for both parties, although there was some slight loss of range in the voice reproduction making it a bit flat. While this did result in some loss of score for Reolink the impact was minimal to the user experience.
Audio captured in recorded video clips was up to the same standard as the two-way talk feature. Pick up by the microphone is excellent, capturing all outside sound easily with no distortion or excessive wind noise. A minor loss of dynamic range in the audio compression could be noted but had little impact on audibility of sound and speech.
Notification Performance
Now quickly a doorbell can alert us to activity is a particularly important factor in my evaluation. Slow notification performance can render a doorbell largely useless at its primary role of alerting you to people approaching the door. When using basic text notifications, most doorbells can do this in under 5 seconds. I personally think that’s a little slow but it’s useable.
Reolink manages to do better with a very good average text-only speed of 3.5 seconds. Adding in a thumbnail image, which greatly helps in quickly vetting a notification without having to open the app, the Reolink doorbell averages 7.9 seconds. That’s more than double the delay of the best performing models I’ve tested and starts to risk missing someone.
Thankfully if they ring the bell, you’ll get that alert in only 4.2 seconds either way. That’s also a little slow considering that it’s only text and the camera will have already detected them. This doesn’t affect the chime, however, and that will ring immediately when the button is pressed. A minor saving grace perhaps, but doesn’t help if you’re not in the house.
Overall Reolink manages a notification performance that is consistently decent and exceeds the average of my test results to date.
Getting a useable thumbnail - that is, an image which clearly shows the trigger of the motion event - is tremendously useful and can save a lot of time if you get many alerts. I would never opt to use only text notifications given the utility that thumbnails provide, but in most cases a doorbell will not always deliver something that is helpful.
Thanks to being a wired model, Reolink’s doorbell camera is always on and behaves more like a CCTV camera than a typical doorbell. This certainly gives it an advantage when processing motion events and resulted in catching me correctly 100% of the time under all test conditions. This is the first doorbell to get a perfect score on this metric in my tests, so it’s a notable achievement.
Unfortunately, Reolink requires a subscription to their cloud service to get rich notifications, even if you’re using a MicroSD card for local recording. This is disappointing as rich notifications have been a base inclusion of every other doorbell I’ve tested, including local recording models like this.
Motion Detection Performance
Again, we see the benefits of Reolink’s CCTV experience and the always-on recording of the camera. The doorbell didn’t miss anything, achieving a perfect 100% event detection rate and a perfect score on this metric. Sun, rain, day or night had no effect on this, making it a good fit for general security surveillance.
Reolink advertises a 6 second pre-roll buffer on the WiFi doorbell, but in my testing it seemed closer to 10 seconds. That’s very generous and ensures you won’t miss a thing in the recorded clips. Pre-roll completely mitigates any risk of camera wake delay since it’s recording before motion is detected. So long as the motion detection is not slow, and the pre-roll is long enough, you’ll always capture a person crossing the camera in full.
These conditions were met with this model, resulting in another perfect score for Reolink. The measured frame width in the Reolink app on my phone is 9.5cm, and the doorbell captured every crossing test in full for the whole 9.5cm distance.
Pre-roll greatly helps in general event capture performance as well, but this can still be limited by the distance from the doorbell that it can detect motion and trigger the recording to start. Reolink has absolutely no issues in this regard as I was able to get motion to detect at the full 10m (30ft) length of the test range. I expect the maximum detection range is considerably further than this, but 10m already exceeds both the measured range of any other doorbell I’ve tested, and the maximum scoring distance.
In the actual approach tests, the Reolink WiFi Doorbell was able to detect and record every attempt in full from beyond the maximum test range during day and night conditions. This is an impressive result and again shows the security camera chops of Reolink bleeding over into their doorbell products. Reolink gets another perfect score for this metric.
Smart Detection Performance
The black V2 Reolink doorbell does not offer any package detection features, and the 4:3 aspect ratio doesn’t quite give a decent view of the ground. At my (typical) test mounting height, I could only see the ground in front of the doorbell past 1.5m (5ft) which is a bit far out for reliable monitoring of deliveries. As this fgives the doorbell a feature score of 0, I’ve marked this test as Not Applicable.
Feature scoring:
✘ Visibility of the test package directly below doorbell.
✘ Visibility of porch area in front of the doorbell.
✘ More than 30 degrees off center visibility to the side.
✘ Presence of active package alerting feature.
✘ Presence of additional package alerts
The Reolink doorbell offers the two most important smart features that any doorbell should: person detection and custom motion zones. These two features provide the necessary utility to filter out noise and unwanted notifications so that you get meaningful, actionable alerts.
Reolink custom zones are actually quite different to most doorbells in that you literally paint the area of the screen you want to capture with your finger rather than dragging points on a polygon. This is kind of cool and provides unprecedented customization over other models. In addition to this, the Reolink app also allows you to optionally set minimum and maximum object sizes.
This is done by sizing a box on the camera view for each value (you can use both, or just one as you need) and will put a limit on the size of the object that will trigger a motion event. This is distinct from the more common sensitivity setting - also provided - which is more to do with the amount of movement that triggers a motion alert.
These settings give a good level of control, and the detection algorithm works very well. I achieved a 100% person detection success during my tests, and had zero false positives, even with some very windy days blowing my desperately-in-need-of-pruning shrubs around like crazy.
Reolink’s score here is the highest possible with only person detection on offer, and is only held back by a lack of other smart features.
Drawing an exclusion zone on the right side
The recording schedule is where you specify object types
Setting a minimum object size for recording
Feature scoring:
✔ Custom motion zones.
✔ Person detection.
✘ Animal Detection.
✘ Vehicle Detection.
✘ Facial Recognition.
Battery Performance
The Reolink Wifi Doorbell camera is a wired-only video doorbell product, so no battery measurement is possible.
App Experience
Pulling up the live with in the Reolink app is insanely fast. Measuring the response time here was a challenge, but at these speeds it’s virtually instant for all practical purposes. This is largely thanks to the camera being active at all times anyway, so there is no wake-up delay. The stream just starts very quickly, even at the high detail settings I used for the tests.
The same can be said for responding to doorbell ring notifications. The live stream starts right away, and you can begin talking to your caller immediately. The average wait here was a mere 0.96 seconds.
When looking at security options Reolink presents a more complicated picture than most doorbell apps. Reolink’s CCTV background means their cameras are designed to work with Network Video Recorders. Each camera therefore has its own password and user account scheme. You create an admin user when you first pair the doorbell with the app on your phone, and subsequently don’t need to log into the app at all.
A seperate account is required, and does need an app login, if you choose to use the subscription cloud service. This account supports basic two-factor authentication (via email), and regular password prompts to sign in after a time. This multiple-password arrangement can be confusing at first, and more so if you want to share the doorbell with another person.
You need to either set up a user account for them on the doorbell itself or share the existing admin password with them. The doorbell then needs to be paired with the Reolink app on the other person’s phone via a QR code on your phone, and the relevant password entered to give access. This is certainly messier than the typical invitation model most consumer camera brands use, and loses Reolink some points here.
On the device side, privacy controls are not too bad. A privacy zone can be created to block out sensitive areas you don’t want recorded, and both audio and video recording can be disabled easily with a simple toggle on the device settings page. There’s no way to disable live streaming, however, which might be a concern if you’ve shared access with others.
Overall the Reolink app is functional and largely straight forward to use, but initial configuration of your preferences can be difficult. This is mostly down to the arrangement of settings in the interface being a bit haphazard, there are multiple settings that can affect things like what to record, notifications, sensitivities and so forth which are under different sections, and the relationship between settings is often unclear.
One example is that if you want to limit notifications to just people, you have to select a tag under the Schedule section within Push Notifications. The same UI is found under Recording and there’s no indication that these are not related. There are other examples, and more options than other doorbells often offer. The plus is that you get a lot of control over exactly how you want the doorbell to behave, but it’s going to take a bit of poking around to figure it out.
Reolink has provided descriptions of most of these options in the app interface, but they’re very brief, and there’s no contextual linking to further information. Indeed, even going to the support website is not particularly helpful. The information is limited, narrowly focused to specific scenarios, and isn’t particularly well written in many cases.
As for retrieving recorded videos, this is fairly straightforward. Tapping on the doorbell in the app opens the live view screen immediately. On the controls section at the bottom is a Playback button that goes to a timeline view of recorded events. You can toggle between this and a more conventional list of thumbnails for a given date. The timeline presents a list of thumbnails for each recorded showing the time and duration, the motion type and even animates through a short selection of frames over time.
You can select between dates at the top by month and day to view the relevant list of events for one day at a time. You can swipe your finger along a 24 hour representation of where events were recorded to move through the list, or simply scroll the thumbnails horizontally. My only gripe here is that the list defaults to the start of the day rather than the most recent, so you inevitably have to scroll all the way to the right every time you want to check on a notification or recent recording.
Playback of the videos begins quickly most of the time. The main issue I encountered is trying to play a very recent event. If the event hasn’t finished recording yet, the playback simply never starts. How much of an issue this is depends on your recording settings.
Once you get it to play, you can select a point in the recording to start playback by dragging the position marker as with any video player, but this doesn’t update the video view in real time. Only when the position marker is released does it restart the playback from that position. Trying to scrub through a recording to find something specific gets tiresome pretty quickly.
The main settings page
Video recordings timeline view
Setting motion sensitivity with optional schedule
Smart Home Features
Support for using Alexa and Google smart speakers as doorbell chimes.
Extra Features
Siren - can be triggered from the live view screen at any time.
Video controls - Anti-flicker, day night sensitivity, brightness and shadows can all be adjusted to fine tune the video quality.
Scheduling - Specific times of day can be configured for both recording and notifications to control what type of motion triggers each behavior. This can also control when continusous recording is activated.
Email alerts - An optional email function is available that can email motion alerts. This could be used by automation systems to trigger other actions outside of Reolink’s ecosystem.
Time Lapse - An odd feature inclusion is the ability to set time lapse recording. This will record an hour or a day into a 1 minute video or slide show.
Alternatives
Package Security
Eufy E340
7.5 Overall Score
A dual camera design from major player Eufy Security provides far superior package security thanks to a dedicated package monitoring camera, built-in LED porch lighting, and the Delivery Guard feature. Delivery Guard not only detects packages and alerts you, but actively monitors them for interference and reminds you to collect them if you forget for too long.
HomeKit Support
Aqara G4
7.5 Overall Score
The G4 from smart home brand Aqara provides a wider variety of smart home integrations with Alexa, Google, and full HomeKit Secure Video support. You can use wired power, or regular AA batteries for surprisingly long life, and all without a subscription.
Fast Notifications
Ring Battery Doorbell Plus
8.1 Overall Score
Ring's more expensive battery doorbell plus has good video and audio performance, but with considerably better notification speed even when using thumbnails. The Ring app also offers a much better user experience, with a wide range of security features, and easy configration with plenmty of built-in help.
Common Questions
Can I use a wired chime?
Reolink does not support wired chime’s with this model. Jumper wires are included in the box to bypass any mechanical chime you may have and Reolink recommends doing this, or disconnecting the wired chime entirely during installation. The wireless chime included in the box is the preferred alternative.
Does Reolink need a subscription?
No, the Reolink doorbell can work completely locally using either a Reolink NVR or a MicroSD card for video storage. Reolink offers a cloud subscription if you want to store videos that way and is required in order to receive rich notifications with thumbnail images.
Can the Reolink WiFi Doorbell be powered by PoE?
No, the WiFi model doesn’t support PoE even though it does have an ethernet port. You can use ethernet to provide the data connectivity to the doorbell instead of WiFi, but not power.
Can the Reolink doorbell use 5GHz WiFi?
Yes, the Reolink WiFi doorbell is dual band, meaning it supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi.
See my video doorbell guides to learn more about other models, features, and options.
