Reolink 1212A mini review

This is going to be an uncharacteristically short review, in spite of the outrageous amount of time spent with and on this camera. I bought this camera after I bought the 510A, which will be a future post because it had a security light and was much higher resolution. I have had no end of issues with this camera. And while all of these could be fixed by firmware updates, I can’t keep an unusable camera, and that’s where it is at present, in hopes a firmware update may come. So the issue with this camera, and I have tried it in numerous locations to rule that out is motion sensing … I could not find any combination that either constantly detected, or missed everything. Reolink’s support has been good but there response was to disable motion alerting and only use smart detection, but the issue is, motion detecting is how the camera records, and how the camera turns the light on. So constant detection means the light goes on and off regularly pissing off the neighbors. Dialing down the sensitivity helped, but then it just only saw major stuff and would miss animals for example. So how bad was the detection? Well … it triggered on snow, rain, shadows a branch moving in the wind … At one point the camera stopped doing smart detection. reboots didn’t fix it, leaving me with only one choice, a full restore back to factory defaults. This resolved the issue, however, really? So after trying two different outdoor locations I brought the camera inside … the room was unoccupied, not a lot of airflow, but had a window … Low and behold, yet again it triggered on a shadow that came in through the window.

To add a little credence to this I replaced the 1212A with another camera (once with a 510, and once with a 811A) and in both cases, in spite of the new camera being in the exact same location as the 1212, neither had the same issues of constant mis detection.

While it is entirely possible I have a defective unit, I really don’t think so. I would guess that Reolink have not adjusted there algorithms for the much higher 12Mp camera. And with that, this one goes back, thanks to Amazon’s generous return policy! For reference here are the details of the camera. Here’s the details as tested.