No Monthly Fees Are a Killer Feature

The Reolink Battery Doorbell offers superb wide-angle video quality, reliable notifications, long battery life, and, crucially, local storage of captured video to a microSD card with absolutely no subscription fee required. If you want to modernize your doorbell or escape the mandatory monthly cost of well-known competitors, the Reolink Doorbell Battery is a great choice.

Reolink Battery Doorbell

The Reolink Doorbell Battery offers all the features you’d want from a doorbell, without the ongoing subscription fees. Live view and two-way chat is easy, along with custom quick responses if you’re not able to talk. The 2K footage is saved to a local microSD card or Reolink Home Hub, triggered by a button press or motion—and it’s highly configurable to suit your needs. Either wired into your existing chime or pairing wirelessly with one or more Reolink Chimes, you’ll never miss a visitor again.  

Pros

• Excellent video quality and wide field of view to not miss a thing
• Record custom messages for when you can’t talk
• Highly configurable event recording and notification system
• Simple, wireless install

Cons

• Yet another thing to charge every few months
• Smart home integration isn’t quite there

Price and Availability

The Reolink Battery Doorbell, which costs $130, will be available from September 17, 2024, in the EU and U.S., with a mid-October launch in the U.K.

Design and Fixing: Simple As Can Be

The Reolink Doorbell Battery measures 48mm wide, 170mm tall, and 28mm deep—though the mounting plates add a few millimeters to the depth. It features a sleek, rounded body and a basic dark grey color. On the rear, a rubber cover conceals the USB-C port and microSD slot. Most importantly, it’s instantly recognizable as a doorbell.

When affixing it to the wall, you can either have it facing directly forward or use the included angled plate to shift it about 30 degrees in either direction. It’s best to angle it so you don’t capture too much of the street and keep it focused on what’s important.

Mounting is an easy DIY process, but make sure you’ve chosen in advance whether to use the angled plate or not. Depending on your choice, you’ll use the template to drill two different holes. For the ideal viewing angle, you should place it at about 4ft (1.2m) from the ground.

There are three steps if you have opted to angle it: screw the angled plate to the wall (with wall anchors if needed); screw the standard plate to the angled plate; then slot in the video doorbell. Be sure to fully charge it through the USB-C port first and insert the optional microSD card for local storage.

Once inserted, the doorbell is locked to prevent theft. The package includes a long, thick metal pin, which you’ll need to insert into the hole at the top of the doorbell to release the latch when recharging.

Chimes: Wireless, Plug-in, and Customizable

While the Video Doorbell will default to chiming to your smartphone, you can add one or more Reolink chimes (which plug in to an AC socket on the wall), or wire it into your existing doorbell chime and power.

For some reason, my house doesn’t have a front door, let alone an existing doorbell, so I couldn’t test the hardwiring. I ended up fixing the camera to a side door that new delivery drivers tend to use when they inevitably can’t find an actual front door.

Then, I placed the chime in the downstairs corridor (the door is upstairs). You’ll need a spare AC socket for the Reolink Chime, but you don’t need to interact with it beyond the initial pairing, so feel free to use that otherwise useless socket behind the sofa. The Doorbell Battery might be battery-powered, but the chime isn’t. After a quick firmware update, the chime paired perfectly.

Even with a fair distance between the Reolink doorbell and chime, on a different house floor, and some walls in between, I had no issues with the signal.

Video Quality: Superb

The app functions in two main video modes: Fluent and Clear. Fluent is 1024px square, while Clear is 2048px, both running at 15 frames per second. On my small phone screen, Fluent is fine for everyday use—you can still clearly see any faces. But if you need to archive some footage or pass it to the authorities, you can download it in Clear resolution, which is a little higher than Full HD (technically, it’s twice the number of pixels, but that’s because it’s a square, not rectangular image). In the example screenshots above, I’ve zoomed in on the last one to show where the pixelation becomes more obvious.

Positioned at the recommended height of 4ft, you’ll get a clear view of the ground and any visitor’s full body, with their head visible in the top third of the footage.

Customizing Notifications: Doorbell, Motion, and More

You can customize the ringtone for both the chime and app from a selection of ten, but you can’t upload a custom one. You can also customize whether the chime sounds only upon the doorbell button being pressed or when it detects a human, vehicle, or package. So your chime can sound even if someone hasn’t pressed the button (each with a different sound if you want).

Since I already have several cameras that notify me when someone approaches, I set the Doorbell Battery to record all motion events, but only to notify me when a visitor presses the doorbell button. You can also set this as a Critical Notification on iPhone, bypassing any Do Not Disturb and mute settings.

Quick Response: Custom Pre-Recorded Messages

When someone rings your doorbell, you can start talking to them through the two-way audio system. You need to wait for the live stream to start, so I’d suggest leaving it on the Fluent setting, which has a lower bandwidth. The audio is clear on both ends, though latency will depend on your home Wi-Fi or internet speed if you’re away.

Or, if you suffer from a little social anxiety or aren’t in a suitable place to talk, you can play back a pre-recorded message. By default, these include:

• “I’m sorry, I think you’ve knocked on the wrong door”
• “Hi, we’ll be right there, please wait a moment”
• “Hi, please leave the package by the door, we will get it later”

Crucially, you can also record messages up to 10 seconds in length (a feature neither Nest nor Ring offers currently) and set one as an auto-reply to be played back after a set time.

Local Recording: The Killer Feature

Like nearly all of the Reolink security range, the Battery Doorbell can record to a microSD card, avoiding costly cloud storage fees or mandatory subscriptions for fundamental features. You can view the footage and live feed from anywhere worldwide without relying on third-party or cloud servers. Because it features local recording, you can store as much as you like at the highest possible resolution, with no limitations on recording length or age other than the size of the microSD card that you buy. New footage will overwrite the oldest.

The Doorbell Battery is also compatible with Reolink’s Home Hub footage backup system, which can be fitted with up to 1TB (2 x 512GB) microSD cards and encrypts all footage.

However, if you want a cloud backup of your video files, you can do so. But it’s entirely optional and, I would argue, unnecessary. If you’re worried about the camera being forcefully ripped off the wall during a home invasion, a well-hidden Home Hub would be the better option to secure the footage elsewhere in your home.

Smart Home Integration: Everything Except Apple Home

The Reolink Doorbell Battery is one of the first Reolink devices to support hands-free operation and live viewing on a compatible smart home hub, such as Google Nest Hub or Alexa Show (the Argus 4 Pro outdoor camera I reviewed a few months ago is another). Apple HomeKit is not supported.

Just head to the Smart Home tab in the app to view compatible cameras, and enable it there. You should then be able to add the Reolink Smart Home skill from your favorite platform and add compatible devices to your home.

I got the Doorbell Battery into the Google Home app on my smartphone, though it refused to display the feed and said it would only work via a Nest Hub. Even then, it was quite slow to activate, so I assume this one has to go via a cloud relay rather than directly over the local network. I have yet to come across a camera that integrates well with any smart home hub.

Should You Buy the Reolink Battery Doorbell?

The Reolink Battery Doorbell offers everything a video doorbell should but with one killer feature: no subscription required. At $130, it’s a little more than the previous Wi-Fi model, but well worth it and still the best value on the market considering the features offered. After two weeks of testing, the battery has depleted about 20%—and that’s with a lot of activity. I’d estimate around two months of battery life then, though you could extend that significantly by disabling motion recordings and only recording when the button is pressed.

The Reolink Doorbell Battery is most comparable to the Nest Pro Video Doorbell ($200), with a similar video quality, battery life, and feature set. The Reolink model is missing 3D movement mapping, but I suspect most people will never touch that. It also doesn’t have a sleek solar panel mounted behind the doorbell upgrade, which the Nest does. Reolink allows you to record custom quick responses, however, which is an oft-requested feature for the Nest. But the main difference is that the Nest Video Doorbell Pro won’t save any footage unless you pay $5/month for a subscription. They market it as “optional”, but I’d call that a basic, fundamental feature.

The Arlo Video Doorbell offers even fewer features without a subscription; you don’t even get motion alerts. The Eufy Security Video Doorbell E340 is perhaps the only viable competitor, with a unique dual-camera system for a better view of the floor, and 256GB of on-device storage. I’m not sure the extra view of the ground warrants the higher price, but that might be a deciding factor for you.

In any case, it seems that the Reolink Doorbell Battery is the only one currently offering all the features users actually want without ongoing subscription fees. If you’re sick of money draining out of your account every month for basic features like being able to save videos from a security camera you own, it’s the obvious choice.

Reolink Battery Doorbell

The Reolink Doorbell Battery offers all the features you’d want from a doorbell, without the ongoing subscription fees. Live view and two-way chat is easy, along with custom quick responses if you’re not able to talk. The 2K footage is saved to a local microSD card or Reolink Home Hub, triggered by a button press or motion—and it’s highly configurable to suit your needs. Either wired into your existing chime or pairing wirelessly with one or more Reolink Chimes, you’ll never miss a visitor again.