Reolink OMVI X16 Review – 16× Optical Zoom Tested at 300 Feet!

Mark here and today we're going to look at Reolink's new Omv X16. So I did a video on the Omv 3i a couple months ago. This one here is its bigger brother. Quite excited to open this up. I've had this a couple days but I've been busy and I just want to get my hands on it and get it out of the box and start playing with it. So the difference between the Omv 3i and the Omv X16, there's a couple small differences. The main one being the Omv 3i has a digital zoom, so meaning you can zoom in digitally to it. Whereas the X16 has a 16x optical zoom. So, that is going to be a game changer as the Omv 3i is probably one of the best resolution cameras at distance that I have tested. So, if this is what I think it is, we're going to see quite a drastic improvement. So, eager to get into this. Open it up. I haven't actually looked at it yet So here we have the full lineup of the cameras by Reolink. We have a small box here with some cables in it. And here it is. We'll just get rid of that. All right. So this is your standard pack of your decals and such. Probably warranty card in there in this little box. And the top here looks like a power cord. Okay, so here we go. We have a power cord and we have a transformer here. Okay, so it looks like this is for PoE. So it's a PoE power booster or PoE converter or however you want to look at that. On the bottom here, so it has two plugs here for your network. One of them is your LAN, so your LAN in, and then you have a PoE data out. It shows here 60 watts. Okay, so that's good because I do have an extra PoE switch that I was going to put in place of that. But, it comes with this, so that is good. So we'll set that aside. We will now get into this here. Here it is. Grand opening. And this is it. Pretty exciting. All right, let's remove that. This I just don't need. And we've got the camera. And we have, looks like a network cable in here, and some mounting screws. So that will be helpful. Okay, here it is. Let's get into this. They packaged it a little too well. Thank you. All right, so this here is a three lens just like the Omni 3i. Looks bigger. It is metal. That is a Thank you. really nice thing to see. There's a sticker here. We'll just peel off the reveal. Veal. This one here is 180 degree to camera so this will sit facing out 180 degree wide and the bottom one here is your pan and tilt that does where is it where are you here it is 360 degree seems a little bigger is there but of course the bottom's got to be bigger because of the optical zoom So getting into some of the differences of this, the top camera here, the previous Omni 3i was twin 5 megapixel cameras. So 10 megapixels on the top and 8 megapixels down here on the pan and tilt turret. This camera here still has the 8 megapixels down below but of course it's got that optical zoom. Up here they've upgraded this camera or these two cameras To 16 megapixels. So now each of the three cameras is essentially a eight megapixel camera. So without further ado, I'm gonna take this out and set it up. I have out at a barbecue area just out on the driveway. I've got a standard kind of test bench area where I test all my cameras. There is a really good run down the driveway. This one is really going to put it to its test in distance. Normally I kind of end it, hold a license plate, do an audio video test. I usually end at about 60 feet. With the 16 times optical zoom, I'm probably going to end up going to my property line, which is I would say roughly 220, 230 feet down the driveway. So it'll be exciting to see what this thing will do. Audio-video test at 20 feet. Audio-video test at 40 feet. Audio-video test at 60 feet. Audio-video test at 80 feet. Audio-video test at 100 feet. Audio-video test at 120 feet. Thank you. So that footage was taken about a month ago and I've learned a lot about the camera and the little tweaks that you can make to make it suitable to your environment. So it does have really good clarity at the 300 foot mark. I could have gone another roughly 50 feet to the property line, but as you can see, You can clearly read the license plate. So, since then, I've pulled a bunch of different footage. One of them was of a prime Amazon delivery driver that drove in the driveway. And one interesting thing is we have a cream separator, an old-fashioned cream separator, on display just out, just along our fence line. And the way the base is, it's got this kind of A-frame and comes up, and it looks like He looks like a little man. And the camera does get confused at times, and it does think it's a man. So what I've had to do is I've had to play around with the settings a little bit. What I may even do is just go out and put something decorative by it at the bottom of the A-frame so it doesn't look like it's two little feet. So that was interesting. Everybody's setup is going to be different, of course, and you'll want to just tweak those little settings. Now, this is a pre-production or pre-release camera, so the hardware is all there, and it's pretty rock solid. There are a couple little tweaks on maybe focusing and tracking speed. One of the things that was was brought up that I've heard in the community is the tracking speed isn't What I actually did is in the settings you can adjust the tracking speed so I cranked it right up and that pretty much eliminated all of my problems. Here's the footage that I took of the Amazon driver coming in to deliver a package. So as you can clearly see, the little man I was talking about at the edge of our fence. Now the Amazon driver did go up and kind of disappear into the trees and went up on the front porch to make a delivery. Probably talked about the animals with my wife because usually all the Amazon drivers that come in are pretty amazed by our little farm that we have here. So I have it to return back to its original monitoring position at the 30 second interval. So that's why you had that kind of jump. Where it saw that the guy left, 30 seconds went by and it went back into its home position. But then once the Amazon driver got back into his vehicle, backed out, then we picked back up again and followed him out down the driveway. Now the focusing and zoom, it takes some time but you have to kind of realize it is doing a lot of work by zooming and focusing. I imagine software updating can aid in that as well. So I took some general footage, some day, some night footage, just to give you an idea of what you can expect with this camera in those two scenarios. And they turned out pretty good. So I went out during the day, went out during the night, I drove my car in. I just wanted to get some real life camera recording so that you can see what you can expect. So now that you've seen the footage, the day, the night footage, the tracking, the zoom, let's dive into the app and just take a look at some of the options in here. So here we are in the app. We're going to go into menu. There's been some recent changes in here. You can see smart detection. PTZ settings as well as the camera recording. They've brought those up into the foreground just to kind of streamline the app. I like it, I like the view of it. And this is pretty much across the entire board of all of the cameras. So looking into smart detection here. You have a person, vehicle, animal, you can go in here and as I mentioned before, you can adjust these settings to suit your area. I actually turned this up quite a bit and then it really started finding that little man beside my fence. So I pulled it back a little bit. It seems to be a lot better, although it still does pick that up from time to time. If we go out of here and out of the bottom here, we've got our perimeter protection. So this is more so if you maybe live in the city and you have a border line saying the sidewalk. You don't want to pick up people walking by your sidewalk. You don't want to be zooming in on your neighbors across the street. So you can actually set up zones and perimeters to avoid that. Forgotten object, this is in beta, object removal. So this is something that Reolink's been working on. I know with my doorbell, I've been getting notifications when Amazon comes, drops off a package, they'll put it down. It recognizes that a package or some kind of object that looks like a package then appears. And when it leaves, it says, oh, a package has been picked up. So, Porch Pirates. You know, it's an ongoing thing, we all know. But knowing when you have a package come in is pretty important and picking that up as soon as possible. Getting out into the PTZ settings here, this does have an auto-run patrol route. So what you can do is you can put in a number of different settings for locations and zoom, and you can have this camera patrol those routes. So in here we have our sync track, and if we go into the settings, we can see here our tracking type. So getting into this, you can select, I've got everything selected. Maybe you don't want to check out the box that says animal. Maybe it's just vehicle or person, or maybe it's just person. You can adjust that, and then you can also adjust the priority. So here I've got the priority set for person. If I grab that, hold it, I can pull it down. And tell it to prioritize vehicles. In my opinion, persons should be the top. Which is why when the Amazon driver came, it saw the vehicle. But then it said, oh, wait, there's a person. That's my priority. I'm going to go take a look at that. And then it kind of came back to the vehicle. So those are your settings there that you can set up. And, of course, here is the time to stop tracking, which I mentioned earlier. I've got it set for 30 seconds. You can put it all the way up to 60 seconds on both settings when it disappears or it stops moving. Then you go back out and we look at the camera recording. So you can do continuous recording on this. I've got the post-recording duration of 30 seconds. So it will record post 30 seconds or before activity happens. It would just run that in a buffer memory and then start reading that if you don't have that on continuous recording. Of course, another nice thing is with Reolink, you don't necessarily have to have a subscription. You can record everything locally. You can choose to get a subscription if you'd like for a monthly fee, but you can have it record directly to a micro SD card. It will take 512 gigabytes for a memory. What I have is I've got a Home Hub Pro. which has a I believe it's got a four terabyte hard drive in it. You can expand that up to 16 terabytes record everything locally here. So we get into where we at here we have the Okay, right here it is here. So this little button here shows you, this is the, what I like to call the turret camera, or the pan and tilt zoom camera. If we click that little button, we can see another little camera icon, and we can adjust the view of the 180 degree wide angle. Electrically, or automatically, or remotely, with the Omvi 3i, it's a manual. You actually reach up and you have to tilt it. But with this, there's just a little slider here that we can push. We can slide that view down, or we can slide it way up if we want. Just to get a view, to tweak this camera for your environment. Of course, depending on the height it is, then you'll have to adjust it accordingly. I don't want to look at the sky so much, but I want to keep things in the foreground. If we go into playback, and we can get in here, there is something that Reolink has come out with in the last 12 months or so. It's called ReoMira. Now, ReoMira is, there's a little search button with a little asterisk or a star, whatever it is there at the top, and this is their search engine, their AI search engine. Now, keep in mind this search engine does not require internet access. It's all done locally on site, so that's pretty important if you're worried about the privacy. of your information being out there you can have everything locally here so if we get in and we go what do we want a red car let's just check check for a red car there is a date setting up at the top here that we can click on And it'll bring up a date range. We can adjust that accordingly. If we had a red car we were concerned with at some point, we can figure out when that date was approximately and then confirm that and we'll do a search. So now what the system is doing is it's using AI to scrub through all of the footage and look for a red car. And here we have a bunch of red cars, 10 24, 10 24, 10 22. 24, 10, 24, 10, 22. Okay, so if we click on the first one, we have a look at this. We can see here is a car. There's a little box that shows up around the playback view so you know what you're looking at and what it's detecting. And I think, It may, let's just see if it comes over my little man there. Yep, there it is. Yeah, it saw the little man. It's got a box around him. It's a little confused. And then it says, okay, no, we're going back to the car. So, as you can see, that is just something I have to work with in my environment. So anyway, that is it for this video. I hope you enjoyed seeing the footage and learning about it as much as I have. It's a wonderful camera. I think I will probably leave that in that location. If you are interested in this camera, I will leave all of the information down below. down below in the description and if you have any questions like always please put them down in the comment sections. I do read all of the comments and I do get back to everybody that leaves a comment down there. If you want to say hi that's great. I love to see and hear from you guys and I appreciate that. So I hope you enjoyed this video and I hope to see you next time. Take care and have a wonderful day.