Pet Cam, Baby Cam, Security Cam? Reolink Magicam Tested

Mark here, and today we're gonna talk about the Reolink Argus MagiCam. Now this is compact security that goes wherever you need it. It is roughly about 100 grams in weight, so it's pretty small. You can take it anywhere, really, and you can use it in multiple scenarios. So a good example is babies, children. Of course our children have grown up, so I don't need a baby cam, but a lot of you do use baby cams to keep an eye on the little one. Now we do have little ones, but they are actually out in the barn, and I like to keep an eye on our kid goats from time to time, especially if we're having mamas that are expecting. So I often use Reolink cameras, not just for home security, but for keeping an eye on the little ones. Now some of you may have animals, pets, dogs, cats, even fish, I would imagine. There's people out there that like to keep an eye on their fish. We have nine black cats here, and I set up the camera by their feeder, and you can get some nice images of the day and night, and just keep an eye on them. Maybe you're the kind of person that wants to talk to your animals during the day. Make sure that they're okay, and everything is good. You can do that with this. So there's multiple scenarios. I even took this camera and attached it to a birdhouse that we had renovated, because it's been over 10 years, and it was looking a little sad. We put a new roof on it, and we set up this camera to keep an eye, just to see, is it being used, and who's coming by, and what's going on. I thought this was a great opportunity to do that. Now the Reolink also has a time-lapse feature. You can find this on most of their cameras. I actually use this quite a bit in my day-to-day making videos, because having a time-lapse is just an easy way to show the audience what's going on in a short period of time. So I took this time-lapse of the farm. One of the pens we have, we are open to the public, so we had some people coming through and checking out the animals. Now one thing that I did notice on this is when you're setting up the time-lapse, 10 seconds per shot increments is the lowest you can go, which I thought was a little odd, because generally when you're taking a time-lapse of people, you wanna do probably around two-second intervals. So I imagine it's because the battery-operated camera, it is trying to conserve some battery. Now I'd really like them to change that and have the option to go to a two-second per interval, because this camera does run on battery, but it also has a plug that you can plug in and you can actually run continuous recording. So let's talk about the battery. So in the back here, you do get batteries that are sent with the camera. So you get a little pack of two AA batteries. Now what I ended up doing is I purchased, I purchased two, see that, two batteries, the rechargeable batteries. So I got a pack of four because I figured, okay, well, I put these in and I can swap them out and it just makes it nice and easy. Now Reolink does claim that this camera will run up to nine months on a single battery. And yes, up to if you're not really recording and if the camera's not waking. What I found, I did put this through its paces. I stuck it to our fridge in the kitchen and had day to day of recording and waking just to find out how much battery power it takes and how long it'll last with a heavy load of recording. What I found is the batteries did diminish at just over 16 hours of wake time, which is actually pretty good. Now, depending on your situation and where you put it, of course, if you put it with your animals at the feeding station, you're gonna get quite a bit of action coming back and forth. So just keeping that in mind, the battery life can last from 16 hours up to nine months, depending on its area of usage. So on the back of the camera, it does have a magnet, a pretty strong magnet. You can stick it to virtually any metal surface. Now, if you wanna stick it to a surface that is not metal, they do supply this little ring here, this disc with a sticky pad on it. So you can stick this to a surface that you may use the camera in a common area, and then you can just snap it to that. The other option that they do give you is this little stand here. So this stand has a swivel, and I did use this in a couple instances when I was recording, especially looking at the birdhouse. I didn't want the camera to fall from 20 feet up and break before I had a chance to show you the camera. So what I did is I screwed it down. There's two screw holes, and then it gave me the option to turn this. And you can turn this 100 or 360 degrees, and it has a metal surface inside it. So you can just snap it just like this. So if you had it in the house watching your animals or baby as the baby sleeps, you can just simply set that up just like this, and you can adjust it as you see fit, or you can turn the whole thing. So it's very versatile in that respect. So this camera does use the new Qualcomm processor. They're using that in all of their new cameras. And what it does is it improves the battery life by managing the power more efficiently. This camera is IP67 rating, so there's no concern with leaving it outside in the rain. So the big thing I like about Reolink is you don't require a subscription. And this is another camera that, again, no subscription fees. They do have a package if you want, but I prefer to keep all of my data here locally. So that's actually pretty strong. So the micro SD card in here slides in just above the batteries here. You can slide in up to a 256 gigabyte micro SD card. Now the audio and video coming out of this. I did an audio test both from the camera to the phone and vice versa. So what I'll do is I'll play the clip here. You can check out the audio. If somebody comes to your door and you have this mounted there, you can actually hear them. I am a home inspector and I've gone to a lot of homes and some of them have a camera that I just couldn't hear them. And I actually asked them, can you call me on my phone? Because I just couldn't hear them. This camera actually has very good audio as does all of the Reolink cameras. Audio test with audio coming out of the camera speaker. Audio test of the audio from the camera going to the phone. So this camera does work with Google, Alexa, and it works very well with Home Assistant. So if you're working on a smart home for your home and you use Home Assistant, these cameras do work very well and you have a lot of control over all of the features. So getting into some of the features. We look here, here's my camera setup. So we'll go into settings and under display, we will go on the stream. And the stream is locked in at 1080. So high definition at 1024 bitrate. You can click on this, but there's no changing, which is fine because for this type of camera that is very versatile in setting up in multiple locations, 1080 is really all you need. Now getting into some of the other features here. Quickly, we go into the PIR sensor. You can adjust this. And if you get into the detection alarm here, it will distinguish between people, animals, vehicles, as well as just general motion. And this is something that I really like about cameras. Now, keep in mind, this is on board. You don't need a subscription like a lot of other cameras to get these settings. I just received one that was sent actually in error. I was supposed to go over to my neighbors and I took a quick look at it. And one of the things is it's $299 a month for the basic, just to unlock these things. So I can't stress that enough. You don't need to pay for a subscription. You can save your money. And that can add up quite a bit over the year. So getting into here again, you can do your camera recording, 15 second. It was by default set to eight seconds. That was a little light. You can change this, keeping in mind battery life, and you can plug it in. So if you're using it as a battery monitor, or if you're using it to monitor your pets, you can have a little plugin station there and plug it in and not have to use the batteries. So the siren on this, if we go into the siren, it's currently off. We'll turn it on. There's the siren. It's kind of a standard siren. I think it's just gonna keep going off until I erase everything and save it. Okay, there we go. Now, one thing that I have noticed in their newer cameras is you can actually add a custom sound. So you can go in here and hit record. Get away from my house, burglar. Now it looks like it'll do up to five seconds. Get away from my house, burglar. Yeah, not bad. Get away from my house, burglar. So this video is sponsored by Reolink. And like always, I always give you the unedited video and audio for you to decide. I will put a QR link right up here for you to click on if you are interested in learning more about this camera. And we hope to see you in the next video. Take care. All the best. What are you doing? You coming up? Holy, there you go. Good job. Good boy.