Reolink is giving us a nice glimpse of how smart home is changing in 2024, revealing at its new outdoor home security camera that promises to not only deliver a 180-degree panoramic feed but also provide footage with minimal distortion, offering better coverage of your outdoor space.
The Reolink Duo 3 PoE, a 16MP UHD home security camera, which launches during CES 2024 (Jan. 9-12), utilizes its two lenses and Reolink's image stitching algorithm, to capture two images from slightly different angles and combine those two images together to produce a panoramic image with minimal warping.
While it isn't exactly a new technique and Reolink has yet to share the details on how its stitching technology works, most of the home security cameras and even the best video doorbells suffer from what is known as a fisheye effect - an unfortunate result of their trying to deliver a wider view to provide as much coverage of your space as possible. This doesn't necessarily have a huge impact on your overall security, but it still degrades the image quality around the edges.
What Reolink is trying to do here is ensure that you're getting a crisp and clear image throughout, which is something that can come in handy especially if there's an incident in your home, and you need to provide video evidence to the police.
A security camera like any other
Though it captures footage unlike any other home security cameras, the Reolink Duo 3 PoE still comes with all the trimmings necessary to ensure your safety. It includes motion detection and tracking, alerts, app support, and night mode in full color, made possible by its eight built-in spotlights. We're told that it also works with Alexa and Google Assistant, although we're still confirming the details of how you can control it with these voice assistants.
One curious feature it comes with that you'd be hard-pressed to see on other models is that it's able to "present the trajectory of the detected person for a convenient preview by overlaying the person's movements over time into a single image" to give users an overall snap of an event. How that works exactly and how it's advantageous to your home security, will have to wait until we get our hands on a unit for testing.
Because it is a PoE (Power over Ethernet) camera, however, it does need to be connected to a PoE Injector through a network cable. The good news though is that it doesn't require professional installation, which means you can set it up yourself. If you prefer a cable-free experience, Reolink is also slated to release a battery Wi-Fi version, likely later in the year.
It's more affordable than you think
Though its dual-lens setup and 180-degree panoramic capture are something of a novelty in the smart home security world, the Reolink Duo 3 PoE is surprisingly more affordable. At 179.99 / €239.99 (we're still confirming UK pricing), it's more affordable than the Arlo Pro 5S and the Ring Floodlight Cam Wired Pro, two of the best home security cameras on the market.
The Duo 3 PoE is slated for a February 21, 2024 release and will be available in the US, UK, and Europe.
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