INSANE NIGHT VISION SECURITY CAMERA – Reolink Argus 4 Pro Review

This shot was taken at 10:30pm, with no lights on. For some context, this is what the world looked like to our eyes. This is one hell of a security camera! This is the Reolink Argus 4 Pro, a face only an ant’s mother could love, but my god is it an impressive bit of kit. Specifically, this is a wide field of view camera, comprising of TWO 4K sensors, giving a full 180° field of view. Add to that LED spot lights, a passive infrared motion sensor, local SD card recording, a built-in battery so you don’t have to run wiring, and can even run from solar power too! Let’s take a closer look at the hardware, then we can talk features and quality.

Physically, Reolink likened this to the Apple Vision Pro, and the resemblance is remarkably uncanny. It has kind of an owl-like face, it’s kind of cute. Anyway, you’ve got these two very wide angle cameras, plus LEDs on each edge and in the centre. Just below that is the PIR sensor for motion detection. On the back you’ll find the USB C port for charging, along with the threaded mount to hold it up. Lastly, at the bottom, under the waterproofing flap you’ll find the power button and a microSD card slot. In the box you’ll also get a handy drill guide and an adjustable ball mount. While Reolink’s solar panel is technically an optional extra, for this camera I’d highly recommend opting for it. It has its own mount, a lengthy USB C cable, and importantly it’s actually a grommeted USB C header to help seal the camera while it stays plugged in. The panel itself is rated for 6W, which is plenty to keep these cameras charged with regular use.

One of the key things I personally like about Reolink cameras – and why I’ve got another video setting up their doorbell and pan-and-tilt cameras soon – is their approach to privacy and control. The fact that this camera has a microSD card slot built in means this does local recording with no cloud subscription required. While you of course can pay Reolink some money for cloud data storage, you don’t actually need to. For their wired cameras, you don’t even need to use Reolink’s apps, you can connect it straight to something like Frigate or Home Assistant and use it from there, although it’s worth noting that battery powered cameras like this use a proprietary protocol to help save battery life, and so can’t be directly connected to something like Home Assistant. Still, the inclusion of local recording is already a massive benefit.

Setup is really pretty easy. Reolink makes you scan a QR code of your WiFi network which can be a little finicky, but once it’s connected it’s nice and reliable. The app is pretty well laid out, with a live view monitor at the top and any controls and events below. We’ll come onto the video in a second, but first a quick look around the app. The function row below the stream allows you to pause the stream, listen to audio or not, take a snapshot, start manually recording a clip, change the video quality, and fullscreen the stream. Video quality has three options, clear, fluid and balanced, with clear being the highest bitrate and framerate. Above the stream is where you can sound the alarm, turn on the LEDs, and access the settings. Settings wise you can check the battery status, control the audio levels and LED brightness, enable the PIR motion sensor, and also enable push notifications. That’s pretty handy. You can also FTP into the camera to access your footage, which again comes back to the you-actually-own-and-control-this-thing design.

Let’s get to the main part here, the video quality. In the daytime, this is exceptional quality. The vertical field of view isn’t quite as wide as I had expected, but the width is exceptional. This is literally 180°, meaning if mounted correctly, this should capture everything. It seems to run at 15 FPS, with a 5120×1440 output resolution, and runs at around 2Mbps, give or take. Interestingly, where it stitches the two cameras together there is a bit of an overlap – here’s how I found that out…

The good news though is that the audio is frankly excellent. I was talking at a fairly quiet level considering we were outside and it picked me up with no problems at all. Really impressed there. As for the video, well during daylight it’s plenty sharp and remarkably vibrant – not qualities you usually associate with security cameras, but there you go. It’s certainly good enough to make out faces or vehicles, which is exactly what you’re looking for. 

Where this gets really impressive is at night. This shot was taken at half 10 at night, when, to our eyes, the world looked like this. This level of brightness and clarity is actually pretty impressive. Now the real trick here, of course, is motion. How does that look? Well, actually nowhere near as bad as you might expect. You should still be able to make out faces or vehicles, at least depending on how fast they are moving. Me just walking up the drive is still fairly legible, although I did notice something interesting. I suspect the way the camera is getting this level of quality and brightness is through post-processing similar to how your phone takes HDR images – basically averaging together multiple frames, possibly multiple exposures, to get that sort of brightness. That comes with the drawback of ghosting – look at the trail behind me as I walk. Realistically this doesn’t matter too much – the clarity is just fine – but it’s interesting to see how it’s achieving this result. 

If you were wondering about the battery life – with the solar panel connected and local recording the camera sits with plenty of battery life each day. I’m sure if you had it looking at a busier area with more detections, and therefore more recording, and in the dead of winter, you might need to charge it manually, but for where we have it set up, this is perfectly fine. The motion activated spotlight is a nice feature too – at night it’s plenty bright enough to serve as both a spot light and a camera, so it can pull double duty there too.

As a camera, this thing is rather impressive. The field of view is fantastic – at least horizontally. I’d prefer more vertical space too, with maybe a 21:9 resolution rather than 32:9, but for keeping an eye on basically your whole property (at least in the UK anyway), this seems like a great choice. The lack of a continuous feed is symptomatic of it being a battery powered camera, a tradeoff I think is well worth it for the incredibly easy setup of just screwing it in, and the image quality is pretty great too. The night vision is really impressive as well. The ability for it to be as locally controlled as possible is something I really like – it’s a big selling point for me, especially with security products like this. Local recording, FTP access, and local control all are great. I’d be tempted to say that for me I’d prefer to get the wired cameras just so it can be fully local control, but this isn’t a bad compromise. 

Price wise, this is £220 including the solar panel, although there’s apparently both a launch discount shaving £22 off, and they’ve given me a 10% off code I’ll stick in the description so that’s more like £178. That’s obviously on the premium end, although it’s pretty comparable to options like Ring’s floodlight camera, while not requiring any subscriptions and being solar powered too. I quite like it – but what about you? What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!