Battery-powered 24/7 recording: Why it’s such a big deal

Continuous, 24/7 recording has been on the top of every battery-powered security camera owner’s wishlist for years, but as you might imagine, non-stop surveillance isn’t exactly energy-efficient. Most battery-powered cameras need recharging every three to six months, and that’s just with motion-triggered recording.

However, last year that dream came to fruition with the release of the Reolink Altas PT Ultra—the world’s first battery-powered security camera with continuous recording. On the downside, the battery could only maintain 24/7 surveillance for around four days on one charge. Good for keeping an eye on things while you’re off enjoying a long weekend, but not necessarily ideal for those who want to record every minute of every day, all 365 days a year.

That was the exact feedback Reolink received and heeded, reworking the Altas PT Ultra and adding two new models to the lineup (the Altas, a 2K bullet camera and the Altas PT Go, a 2K pan-tilt camera with 4G connectivity). The result, announced today at CES in Las Vegas, is a trio of cameras capable of 24/7 recording for up to seven days on a single charge. Plus, each camera comes with a 6W solar panel, which can keep the camera powered—even in continuous recording mode—forever, with as little as two hours of sunlight each day (or just one with a 12W panel, sold separately).

Of course, other considerations come with cameras that record 24/7—namely, storage. Recording that much footage takes up a lot of space—it’s why most wired camera systems come with a DVR or NVR with multiple terabytes of storage. Reolink’s solution is the Home Hub, a base station that can be purchased separately or together with two Altas cameras in a kit. The Hub comes with 64GB but can be expanded to 1TB using two 512GB microSD cards, and each camera can hold its own 512GB microSD card, allowing for weeks of footage to be stored and kept before being overwritten.

So, the ultimate question: Is 24/7 video recording really necessary? The answer isn’t a clear-cut “yes” or “no”. Motion-triggered recording is power-efficient, storage-efficient, and much easier to sort through when you’re watching back events. But it’s not foolproof, and I can count dozens of times my own battery-powered security cameras have failed to capture a motion event. 24/7 recording is kind of like an insurance policy. Sure, most of the time you won’t need it, but when you do need it, you’ll be glad you had it.

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