Hello, I'm Tristan from Smart Home Point. In today's video I'm going to be comparing
one of Reolink's 4K cameras, with the Ring Floodlight Cam Plus, which records in full HD.
But of course, it's not just the resolution that matters, it's also the bit-rate, the lens that's
used, and also the frame rate. So I'm going to take a look at all this in this video.
Reolink were kind enough to send me their RLC-810A camera for me to test, but this is
a fully independent video - I'm not being paid to say nice things about Reolink's products.
Right, so the Reolink 810A camera is a 4K, 8 megapixel camera. We all know that 4K
is better than full HD, and you can clearly see in the intro that the Reolink cam has better image
quality than the Ring Floodlight. But why did I also mention the bit-rate, lens and frame rate?
Well, let's discuss the lens first of all. Many smartphones now have multiple rear camera
lenses - including my Samsung S10 which has three. One is a "normal" lens - which they call a 1x zoom
lens - and another is a 0.5x "wide angle" lens. The wide angle lens captures more of a scene,
which is very useful for a security camera of course, but it can also sometimes lead to a weird
fishbowl-type effect. I'm actually filming this video on a 16mm wide angle lens because this is a
fairly small room, and with a "normal" lens you wouldn't see too much of me.
The same is true for smart cameras. Ring's doorbells and cameras use wide
angle lenses - meaning that they capture a lot of the scene. You can clearly see the difference
in how much of a scene is captured by both. But there's actually a caveat here. Ring captures
a lot of a scene - due to their wide-angle lens - but then it's only 1080p resolution,
meaning that the recorded detail is almost watered down - or diluted. A wide angle
lens with a low capture resolution doesn't always make much sense.
Conversely, Reolink use a "normal" lens (and by "normal" I mean one that isn't
wide-angle, nor is it a zoomed-in telephoto lens).
It then records the scene in 4K resolution, which gives the captured items quite a lot of detail.
And that's the first key point here - Reolink's image quality isn't superior to Ring's image
quality purely due to the 4K resolution; it's also because less of the scene is captured, meaning the
detail isn't diluted. But of course, a wide angle lens can be very helpful for a security camera,
so Reolink's choice of lens here can be both a benefit and a disadvantage.
One of the other things I mentioned in my intro was bit-rate, a measure of how
"compressed" a video is, essentially. And it's actually THIS that determines the image quality.
A 4K video with a terrible bit-rate will look... well, like this. In-fact, full HD video CAN look
better than 4K video if the bit-rate is better on the full HD video. I've spoken about this topic
more in a previous video, but the main thing to know is that Ring's bit-rate is usually between 1
and 2 megabits per second, whilst this Reolink camera records at 8 megabits per second.
This is another reason that the image quality is better on the Reolink camera - the bit-rate
is 4-8 times more than the Ring camera (although this is partly to be expected, because 4K video
should naturally have a higher bit-rate than full HD video due to the extra detail that's capture).
To give a specific example, here you can see me holding a Dremel multi-tool box at
different points. The Reolink camera captures this reasonably well - especially as I move
closer to the camera - but the Ring camera struggles to show any real detail.
This can be a worry for crime detection if you only have Ring cameras, since you might
not always be able to make out great detail - unless the person is very near the device.
I also mentioned the frame rate in my intro. This is also called FPS (frames per second),
and it refers to how many individual images - or frames - make up a video each second. If the FPS
is too low, everything will seem quite choppy - and fast-moving detail (such as a car driving by
quickly) might not be captured properly. Generally speaking, recording at 24-30 FPS is fairly
standard in many cases, whereas sport and action footage is often recorded at 60 FPS. Going back
to the two cameras, Ring tends to record at 20-24 FPS whilst the Reolink camera defaults to 25 FPS.
As long as you're not using these to record sport, both of these are reasonable enough frame rates.
To show this further, you can see my car drive off. I actually set my Reolink frame
rate to just 15 FPS here, and you can see that the footage is a bit choppier than the
Ring footage. If I increase the FPS to 25 FPS, it looks a lot more seamless - as you'd expect.
Of course, a camera that records in 4K at 8 megapixels and 25 FPS will use up a lot more
storage - and internet bandwidth - than a camera recording at full HD, 1.5 megapixels and 20 FPS.
On average, my Reolink camera uses a lot more megabytes per minute - whereas my
Ring footage averages a lot less - as you can see on the screen.
This has to be factored in if you do want to use a proper 4K security camera.
One final example that I wanted to highlight is night-time footage. Night-time recording
is naturally harder for cameras due to the lack of light, so cameras will switch to a
night-vision mode powered by infrared light (hence the reflections you see on the car windows). Here
you can see a comparison of Reolink's and Ring's image quality - and again, Reolink wins the day.
If I then switch the Ring floodlight on, both cameras quickly switch out of infrared recording
mode, but again Reolink's image quality is (predictably) better. You can see a hardcore
career burglar who is... wearing slippers and pyjama bottoms, and appears to be duckfacing.
Unfortunately for all of us, Reolink's camera shows this duckfacing pyjama criminal in
decent enough quality, compared to Ring which again struggles to show any great detail.
And that just about wraps up today's video. I didn't shoot this video to bash Ring - I'm
merely doing it to highlight how a 4K security camera can massively outperform
a "full HD" camera (assuming the bit-rate and FPS are also good enough). I am impressed with
the image quality of Reolink's 4K camera, even though the lens naturally captures a
lot less of the scene than Ring's wide-angle lens. But overall, I wouldn't want to rely
on Ring as a SECURITY camera, but I would happily rely on Reolink for this purpose.
Where I like Ring is their convenience. The app works fairly well, as does the integration
with the Echo Show and Fire TV. Reolink doesn't currently support Amazon Echo, which is a pity.
Plus Ring's use of a wide angle lens means that you end up capturing a lot of what's happening
around your property - although granted, the zoomed-in detail isn't very good.
I hope you found this video useful. The other nice feature of this Reolink camera is that it's Power
over Ethernet, which is something I'm going to be covering in another video shortly - so make
sure you're subscribed for that. If you enjoyed this video, please click the thumbs up button
which will tell YouTube that more people should see this video. Thanks for watching!