An important thing to the GadgetGuy team is that we are independent and transparent with our reviews. We often get products to review before they are launched, and often they display issues that are subsequently fixed before mass availability. The Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight is a product I have been reviewing for six months, and I have three of them. Not because I want three, but rather it has taken three products and six months before I was prepared to write this review.
Fortunately, all ended well, but it took me some troubleshooting to solve some false trigger issues.
Table of contents
- Features
- Specifications and price
- Using the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi
- Who is the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi for?
Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi features
The Reolink TrackFlex is a mains-powered, weatherproof, Wi-Fi-enabled, dual-lens pan-tilt-zoom security camera with dual floodlights. The camera ships with a USB cable and mounting hardware to assist setup, but you will require an electrician to install it, as it requires mains power to operate.
The video footage is captured either on an optional local SD card, a Reolink home hub (external storage) or via the cloud. Connectivity for the video footage is via dual-band Wi-Fi 6, enabling fast, reliable streaming. You are limited in the camera’s position to ensure the camera has a good signal from your home Wi-Fi.
The security camera has three passive infrared (PIR) sensors that will detect movement across a 270-degree arc. This, in turn, allows the camera to pan to where movement is detected. Once found, the camera will continue to pan and tilt, following, for example, an intruder. You would need to mount the camera on a pole to take advantage of its 360-degree coverage.
The TrackFlex uses two cameras: one provides a 4K wide-angle view, whilst the other provides a 2K 6x zoom. This presents itself as two images, one giving the big picture view and one providing you with extra detail.
Let’s assume you live on a busy road and want a camera facing outward towards the street. What you don’t want is every car setting off an alert. With the TrackFlex, you can adjust detection settings by person, vehicle, animal, and motion detection. You could change detection to zero for vehicles, or alternatively, only give an alert if the vehicle is detected as stationary for, say, eight seconds.
Reolink cameras are particularly good for night vision, even in black and white, depending on the other light sources in the surveillance area. The infrared light is good for viewing up to 30m. Assuming you are using this as a floodlight, this feature is irrelevant unless you want to be stealthy and avoid the floodlight activating.
Since this camera is mains-powered, it can record until the storage capacity is exhausted or overwritten. (Once storage capacity is full, it will start recording over the oldest footage) Two features this supports are time-lapse, which will allow the recording of, say, progress on a building site, and continuous recording, which, whilst capturing everything, also marks any alert triggers so footage can be easily found.
Speaking of finding footage, Reolink has an AI search feature that works for both cloud-based footage and vision saved on a standalone camera. Reolink tells me it will be a future feature for the home hub. This allows natural language searching of all recordings, like ‘find any green cars’ or ‘show me recordings of someone carrying a box’.
Reolink cameras can be connected to Alexa and Google Assistant. In my case, I can ask Alexa to show me the image of my driveway on an Amazon Echo 11.
If you do detect an intruder, a 110 dB siren can be activated, and via two-way talk, you can communicate with them.
Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi specifications and price
| Resolution | 4K and 2K cameras |
| Brightness | 3,000 lumens via two lights |
| Storage | Up to 512GB internal SD card |
| Dimensions & weight | 28 x 18 x 20 cm 1.23kg |
| Price (RRP) | $399.99 |
| Website | Reolink |
| Warranty | 2 years |
Using the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi
I remain a big fan of floodlight cameras: they light up large areas, make a great deterrent, and make anything you capture on video easy to see in the well-lit footage. Having mains power means the floodlights can be bright and, in this case, provide 3,000 lumens (brighter than many competing brands), which is equivalent to a 250W bulb in the old scale and enough to light up 37 square metres. The floodlights can be set to run all night or only activate when movement is detected.
A feature of the AI search I like is that you can search if an object has been taken. For example, a parcel has been removed from the recorded footage.
Having a camera that can rotate means it can end up facing away from where you want it to focus. A guard position needs to be set by you, which then automatically returns to this view. In addition, up to 64 other preset positions can be set. For example, you may have a guard position viewing the driveway, but preset views of the front door and the road.
Reolink does offer cloud storage, but at a reasonable cost starting at approximately $45 per year. This will provide you with 30 days of video history, rich notifications, and AI search. Rich notifications label footage with extra information, like a person in a box wearing a red shirt. You can then use AI search to find every recording of a person with a red shirt. Some interesting detection features are also available, including detecting loitering, determining whether a person crosses a virtual line, counting people, and creating heat maps of where people stand.
Smartphone apps are how Wi-Fi security cameras are managed across all brands. The Reolink app is good, and all the functionality and views are as you would expect (The Amazon Ring app is the benchmark). What Reolink does differently from other brands is offer a desktop program that gives you the same access from your PC. It is much easier to view live cameras and recordings on a big screen. A handy weekly insights report also gives you an overview of what is going on.
I am pleased to say that after six months of working with Reolink, this camera is working as it should. However, this camera should work well from the default settings and in my case, it did not.
Many users will never play with the various fine-tuning adjustments to get the best result, and importantly, minimise false triggers. A false trigger is when you get a recording and an alert of something that you don’t want. Across all brands, the most common false trigger is a plant moving in the wind. I am pleased to say the TrackFlex does not suffer from that.
Instead, I had issues with insects and rain causing false triggers. I know Reolink will continue work on this via software updates, but in the meantime, I solved the issue by selecting ‘Detection Alarm’ in settings, then selecting ‘Motion Detection’ and reducing the ‘All-Day Sensitivity’ to 6. This has the effect of only detecting larger objects, such as people or cars.
Who is the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi for?
If you want a strong outdoor light that is also a sensor light and a security camera, then the Reolink TrackFlex Floodlight WiFi is a great option, especially if you want to view details within a security recording via its two cameras.
If you have an environment you want to monitor where a fixed camera is just too small, then the 270-degree sensors and the pan and tilt camera are a great way to ensure you capture incidents, but also allow you to have a good sticky beak of what is going on around a camera’s location.
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