Covering the whole front of a house usually takes two cameras, and whatever you most wanted to see always seems to happen in the gap between them. Reolink’s approach is to put both lenses in one housing and stitch their images into a single panorama, and that camera is among Amazon’s Prime Big Deal offers, where Prime members can get the Reolink Duo 3 PoE for $119 instead of $209 (43% off). Outside Amazon, the same camera is discounted on Reolink’s site for those who don’t subscribe to Prime.
Two 4K Sensors, One 180-Degree Picture
The Duo 3 PoE holds two 4K sensors side by side, each behind its own lens. Software joins the two feeds into one image that spans 180 degrees and totals 16 megapixels, which Reolink presents as a first for a dual-lens camera of this type. Mounted in the middle of a front wall, it can show the driveway on one side and the garden gate on the other in the same frame, without the gap that two separate cameras leave. All those pixels also leave room to crop into a corner of the picture and still make out a face or the shape of a vehicle.
Night performance relies on a wide F1.6 aperture, which lets in more light and keeps the image in color for longer, backed by six infrared LEDs with a stated range of up to 100 feet. The feature I find cleverest is called Motion Track. In place of a clip you have to scrub through, the camera produces one still picture showing the path a person or animal took across the scene, a summary of about fifteen seconds of movement. Checking what triggered an alert becomes a glance at a single image.
Detection separates people, vehicles and animals from other movement to cut down on false alarms, and alerts arrive as push notifications or emails. Through the built-in microphone and speaker, you can speak to whoever is in front of the lens from the Reolink app. Because the camera is powered by cable, it can record around the clock, to a microSD card of up to 512GB, to an FTP server or to a Reolink recorder. Playback can be sped up to 16 times, and a time-lapse mode condenses a long event, a building project next door for example, into a few minutes.
Installation is where this model differs from the battery cameras that dominate the category, and it deserves a clear warning. PoE means one Ethernet cable carries both power and data, which gives a steadier connection than Wi-Fi and removes batteries from the equation. It also means someone has to run that cable to the mounting point, through an attic or along a wall. The injector, switch or recorder that feeds the cable is not included, and neither is a memory card. Reolink adds that third-party recorders are not supported and that only some of its own models display the full 16-megapixel image. For a homeowner comfortable with a drill and a spool of cable, I’d call it a solid base for a permanent system. The camera is rated IP67 and mounts on a wall or a ceiling with the supplied bracket.
For the camera alone, the Reolink Duo 3 PoE costs $119 on Amazon against a list price of $209, as a Prime Big Deal reserved for members. Buyers without a membership can look at the offer on Reolink’s own store.