Expert's Rating
Pros
- Stuffed to the gills with features
- Excellent video quality with no distortion
- No cloud storage plan required (or needed)
Cons
- Battery life doesn’t live up to the manufacturer’s promise
- No infrared night vision
- Physically large and obtrusive
Our Verdict
This big pan/tilt camera gives you a good look at your surroundings even when you’re entirely off the grid (if you spring for 3G/4G LTE service). But you’ll want to use the bundled solar panel, because its battery will drain much too quickly without it.
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Best Prices Today: Reolink Altas PT Ultra
If there’s a security camera feature the new Reolink Altas PT Ultra doesn’t have, you’ll have a tough time finding it. Reolink pulled out all of the stops and jammed everything it could find into this single box. Ironically, however, it also comes with a couple of significant caveats.
This is a big, beefy product—it’s probably the largest battery-powered camera I’ve reviewed to date. It’s a pan/tilt model, with a bulbous housing containing the pivoting lens attached to a lengthy base that measures 7 x 4 inches (LxW). The whole assembly weighs nearly 2 pounds. A long, articulated antenna rises from one side of the base.
The Reolink Altas PT Ultra delivers powerful resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, with a 110-degree diagonal field of view
Feature set
The Altas PT Ultra delivers powerful resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels, with a 110-degree diagonal field of view and very little visual distortion. The lens body can rotate 355 degrees horizontally and 140 degrees vertically. In the app, you can configure the camera to track movement as well as set a “home” position the camera will return to after a predetermined time. Up to 32 more “preset points” are also available. These are shortcut positions that move the camera to a point of interest with a button press in the app.
The ball-shaped Altas PT Ultra is a large device attached to an equally large mounting arm with an integrated speaker for two-way communication.
Christopher Null/Foundry
The camera lens is ringed by an LED spotlight that can, at the user’s discretion, be used to illuminate the scene when motion is detected after dark. This allows for much better color night vision, although images also look passable in very low light as long as there is some kind of light source around.
Unusually, the camera does not have the more typical infrared night vision. In nearly complete darkness and with the spotlights off, videos came out wholly black during my testing. The Altas PT Ultra spotlights aren’t close to the brightness you’ll find on a hardwired camera, but they do provide about 20 feet of illumination in complete darkness before falling off.
The camera is equipped with both a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 adapter, but if your installation location isn’t within range of your Wi-Fi network, you can sign up for a 3G or 4G LTE service plan with a mobile provider and plug in a nano SIM card. A mic and speaker are in place for two-way audio, and there’s an integrated siren.
The camera is rated IP65 for weatherproofing, which our IP code guide indicates should make it impervious to dust ingress and wholly protected from water jets (short of a blast from a pressure washer, that is).
Reolink bundles a big 6-watt solar panel with the Altas PT Ultra, an accessory that sells for $40 if purchased separately.
Christopher Null/Foundry
The Altas PT Ultra includes a substantial 21,600mAh battery and offers significant flexibility in how it is charged. A USB-C port allows you to plug it into a wall socket (although no adapter is included), or you can connect it to the 6-watt solar panel that came bundled with our review sample.
This one feels a lot sturdier than the typical panel, and it sells for $40 on its own. Reolink says just 10 minutes of sunlight can keep the camera’s battery topped up for a day. The panel also includes its own mounting hardware and another short strap; its USB-C cable is hardwired.
Reolink promises that a fully charged battery can record video continuously for a week, a claim I find impossible to believe in the absence of a solar panel and plenty of sun. I set up a fully charged and unplugged Altas PT Ultra to record at 9:00 a.m., and by 1:00 p.m. the same day, the battery was down to just 30 percent. There’s simply no way this system would last for a week without being topped up unless it was rarely recording.
Fortunately, the solar panel seems to work pretty well. Even on a cloudy day, the panel was able to keep the battery in stasis, without draining. It even added a little extra charge when the sun came out. The company’s mere “10 minutes of sunlight” requirement to keep the battery charged seems as unlikely as the full-week-of-video claim. But if you have a reasonable amount of sun and relatively mild usage, it’ll probably keep the camera running indefinitely.
Installation and setup
Setup is not the device’s strongest point. Plug it in and it immediately erupts with verbal installation instructions on endless repeat in multiple languages. (Don’t worry, you can dial down the volume after setup is complete.) After a quick QR scan and a few setting choices in the Reolink app, you’re up and running.
A large antenna enables the Altas PT Ultra to connect to both Wi-Fi networks (it has a Wi-Fi 6 adapter onboard) and 3G/4G LTE cellular networks.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Screw holes on the bottom of the base allow it to be attached to a permanent mount that goes on the underside of a roof eave or vertically against a wall. This is important, because the camera can’t readily be used in standalone fashion, such as on a bookshelf, as there’s no way for it to stay upright on its own.
Reolink provides another mounting option in the box: A vinyl strap that can wrap around the base, allowing you to lash the camera to a post or a tree. Unfortunately, the strap is only 24 inches long, which means it was barely long enough to reach around my thigh, much less any tree I have on my property.
To test the strap idea on a tree in my backyard, I ended up using two bungee cords, which were more or less effective at holding both the camera and the solar panel in place. To say this setup looks haphazard, however, is a wild understatement. I can’t imagine Reolink’s strap solution would look any better. Users who want to strap the device to something instead of mounting it with screws will likely need to experiment.
Day-to-day use
Reolink’s app is reasonably straightforward though certainly in need of some polish. The top half of the interface shows a live feed, while the usual control buttons are lined up below. Pro tip: “Clear” is Reolink’s description of the high-resolution video setting, while the “Fluent” option drops clips down to just 896 x 512 pixels.
Pan, tilt, and zoom commands are on a separate screen, and while controls tended to lag by a few seconds, the camera never timed out during my testing. The clip playback interface is also on a separate screen. It shows a day-by-day collection of clips arranged on both a 24-hour timeline and with chronological thumbnails beneath the entries. These thumbnails are animated if the camera moved during recording of the clip, rotating through multiple images for each time stamp.
You can adjust the Altas PT Ultra’s motion sensitivity independently for people, vehicles, and animals.
Christopher Null/Foundry
Recordings can be stored on an internal microSD card (capacities up to 512GB supported, but none is included). Your other storage option is to subscribe to Reolink’s cloud service at a price of $7/month (30 days, up to 5 cameras, 30GB storage); $11/month (30 days, 10 cameras, 80GB storage); or $16/month (60 days, 20 cameras, 150GB storage).
There’s no hugely compelling reason to opt for the cloud service, since you can store far more data locally. About the only reason you might want it is to receive thumbnail images with the camera’s push notifications, which are otherwise text only.
I found it easy to locate the recordings I was looking for and downloaded clips to my phone when I wanted to save them. Unless the camera is buffering something else in the background, clips are quick to play back and do so without stuttering.
In my testing, most clips ended after about 20 seconds, but some stretched up to a minute. There’s no apparent cooldown time between successive clips. As well, 24/7 continuous recording can be configured by setting a timer that records at every hour of every day. These recordings show up as consecutive 5-minute blocks of video in the playback feed. Clips are tagged based on what’s in them: An “animal detected” alert, sure enough, turned up video of a squirrel digging in the yard.
The motion-tracking feature works well, provided the subject is moving very slowly. In most of my tests, I was able to defeat it by simply walking out of the frame, at which point the Altas PT Ultra stopped recording. Tracking is especially erratic in lower-light conditions.
Should you buy the Reolink Altas PT Ultra?
My final analysis of the Reolink Altas PT Ultra is mixed. It generally performs well, but its hulking size renders it more industrial than what I expect most homeowners will want attached to their home (or their tree). That said, there also aren’t any great comparisons given the Ultra’s high-end feature set, but its $220 asking price (solar panel included) doesn’t feel outrageous.
A more compact design (and the addition of IR night vision) would help to make the outlay more reasonable, but I can certainly imagine scenarios where this camera would be a boon, especially in remote, off-the-grid settings (if you spring for a cellular plan).
I’d also caution you to set appropriate expectations around its battery.
Don’t miss TechHive’s top recommendations of the best home security cameras.
Best Prices Today: Reolink Altas PT Ultra
Author: Christopher Null, Contributor, TechHive
Christopher Null is an award-winning technology journalist with more than 25 years of experience writing about and reviewing consumer and business tech products. Previously, he served as Executive Editor for PC Computing magazine and was the founder and Editor in Chief of Mobile magazine, the first print publication focused exclusively on mobile tech. In addition to covering a wide range of smart home gear for TechHive, he is a frequent contributor to Wired, This Old House, and AAA’s Via Magazine.