****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
... depends a lot on what you have to start with.I ran Digi-Watcher for twenty years on a WinMe Dell Dimension with a Microsoft LifeCam that, for most of its life, served no other purpose. Loved it, because it did a common thing uncommonly well: motion-sense, e-mail notification with pix, stored video and sound, etc. It was exceedingly flexible and exceedingly reliable. I could easily disconnect it from the network when I didn't care to be live-streamed.My old Dimension finally kicked the bucket, leaving me with a gap in my indoor home/office surveillance coverage. Enter the Reolink E1. I found it much less flexible and only marginally more capable than my old system, but I finally made it work in a way that suits my needs.I was wary of downloading an app to my phone just to set up another device. I would have preferred to use a browser, but the E1, unlike higher-end Reolink cameras, doesn't support that. Reolink provided a lightweight APK file that asked for only limited permissions, which I found encouraging. I also discovered later that I would use the phone app much more often than I would have expected during my comings and goings.Thanks to the commenter here who advised using an ethernet cable connection to perform the initial setup of the E1. I've got several WiFi networks available to me at this location, and l use them to isolate certain devices and applications from one another. Nevertheless, my E1 couldn't find any of them at first. I needed to connect a cable from the E1 to the desired network and to get my phone on that network at the same time. Afterwards, the E1 was able to connect to WiFi without the wire and to be controlled, of course, irrespective of which network the phone was on.The E1 makes a fuss if a network's password contains any non-alpha-numeric characters. I wasn't about to change that password for one device. Somehow after multiple tries, I got the E1 to accept it. Entering that long password also took multiple tries due to mistyping. There was almost no way to confirm what I had typed before hitting Enter, so I could never be sure of the cause of a failed connection: mistyping, weak signal or something else. (The use of the ethernet cable simplified those possibilities.)To send e-mail notifications when it detects motion, the E1 uses a single e-mail address to send a message to itself! This means that it wants to know your e-mail password! I ended up setting up a new single-purpose e-mail address for the E1. It recommends Gmail or Yahoo(!) (My Thunderbird client receives and categorizes incoming e-mails for multiple accounts all-at-once.)I was accustomed to taking my old camera off the network when I didn't need it, but that's not the easiest option with the E1. It can be finicky about finding the WiFi network later. Now I might just use the PTZ function of the phone app to point it toward a wall that receives no direct sunlight when I am home (and make sure its microphone is off.) This arrangement does not provide the same level of isolation as I am used to, but in casual use it beats fiddling with the network router or disabling a WiFi network extender (for now.) Even so, it sometimes produces dozens of spurious notifications/day due to the sun moving in and out of the clouds. I am reluctant to decrease E1's motion sensitivity any further than I already have. Ultimately, the easiest solution seems to be to place something decorative and opaque (like a hat or a sock or an inverted flower pot) over it when monitoring is not needed. The cover is unambiguous, and it obviates the need to use the app's PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom, though the E1 does not zoom) feature to reposition the camera constantly. It does still seem to “phone home” once per night at 2:00AM if nothing else has been going on.So, in the end, I spent many hours setting up my first E1 for the most basic functionality and then configuring it and the network to suit my work habits. If it remains stable, convenient and secure, it will be a good tool. If I decide to add additional Reolink cameras, I'll probably devise a way to connect and disconnect them to and from the network as a group (probably using a network extender with a unique WiFi SSID.)
