I’m slightly overdue to review the Reolink RLC 1224A 12MP UHD PoE Camera with colour night-vision but please bear with me. I’m in the UK over Christmas to visit family and in the beginning to get a cataract removed from one eye – for the uninitiated that means making a hole in the eye, dissolving the cataract, replacing the lens (all of which takes a few minutes under local anaesthetic) then comes the hard part – weeks of no flying and the old glasses prescription is dead.
In the end I compounded it by taking the opportunity, when offered, to have both eyes done. Second op coming up near the start of January. In in the middle of all of this and don’t you know – it’s hardly stopped raining since I got here – not ideal for writing glowing image-filled reviews of security cameras – along with having immense difficulty actually proof-reading my writing. Looks-wise, the RLC-1224A is plain white and nothing to write home about but I was determined to have at least one ultra-hi-res exterior camera in my repertoire not to mention keeping an eye on the dead bodies in the large graveyard around the back of our house here.
The RLC-1224A is just that and up to now, every Reolink camera I’ve reviewed has been very good. The new one is a fixed camera with no auto pan or tilt and it can run from 12v OR from PoE (Reolink can supply inexpensive PoE adaptors) – the camera is not wireless.
So more on that when I can see what I’m doing. To compound matters, here at our place in the UK we rely on 4G (we are on one extreme edge of town) and the currently trendy fibre company in the area (B4RN) can’t be bothered to fit fibre on our side of the river bridge so by today we should have had reasonably-priced broadband with a (new to me) company called OneStream. Sadly they sent their modem via a UK courier called Yoda which should have delivered around December 14 – it’s now late December 24 – no router and you can imagine the chances of seeing that, this side of 2025. We would not be the first people to have trouble with Yoda deliveries though at this point I can’t prove the delay is their fault.
The service is actually connected, just no router and despite having a decent TP-Link 4g LTE router feeding a relatively slow but reliable 4g-sourced signal to a decent (WiFi 6) GL-iNet main router, neither handles DSL. My wife has been onto OneStream customer services several times over the last week or so and they keep saying “we’ll email you back” but they never do – typical UK Internet Provider tactics. I wouldn’t give most of them a job selling ice-cream and I speak from decades of painful experience with various Internet providers.
Thankfully after maybe an hour of wasted breath with OneStream chat, I stumbled on one of their human assistants who was up for it and advised me on compatible modems so off I went to eBay and picked up a S/H compatible modem for £20 – free delivery on 28th. Assuming all goes well, I’ll tell OneStream to scrap their (very late if it even arrives) shipment and should be back in the medium speed Internet game again wherein I can maybe add a short video of the RLC 1444A camera to this entry along with some useful info.
In the meantime have a LOVELY Christmas and Happy New Year to all my subscribers, especially those of you who write in from time to time.
