REOLINK ARGUS B340 (5 MP) - WIRELESS IP CAMERA

Battery power means event recording, not round-the-clock coverage

The Argus B340 runs on an internal battery over Wi-Fi, so it needs no cable at all — and everything else follows from that one design choice. Most of the time the camera sleeps; a passive infrared sensor wakes it when it senses the heat signature of a moving body within roughly ten metres, and only then does the sensor spin up and recording begin. That means there is no all-day archive here: storage holds individual clips built around events, and the first fractions of a second of movement can be lost while the camera comes back to life. For a private yard, a holiday house, a warehouse door or a garage that is a perfectly sensible mode — you care about someone approaching, not about the empty background — but for a shop that needs unbroken coverage of the till, a battery camera is the wrong tool entirely. If continuous footage is the requirement, this catalogue carries wired PoE models such as the P324 or P334, and it is more honest to plan the cable now than to be disappointed by the recording logic later.

Runtime, charging, and the solar panel that is not in the box

The battery holds roughly 21.6Wh, and how long that lasts is a question about your site rather than the datasheet: a quiet yard with a dozen triggers a day will run for months, while a shared entrance where someone passes every few minutes will drain it in weeks. Three things eat runtime faster than anything else — frequent triggers, night clips with the spotlights firing, and long live-view sessions in the app. Charging is over a standard USB-C cable, and for permanent operation the camera accepts a Reolink solar panel, which is not supplied with this particular listing and has to be bought separately, so budget for it from the start if the camera is going somewhere awkward to reach. A panel also changes how you use the camera: with one attached you can afford higher sensitivity and stop rationing recordings, because daytime charging offsets the night's activity. Expect worse numbers in winter — lithium cells lose capacity in the cold and short days give the panel less to work with, so once a season you will probably still be taking the camera down for a top-up charge.

A 5MP sensor, a 105° view and colour after dark

The 1/2.7″ sensor delivers 2880×1616 frames — close to five megapixels at 15 frames per second, enough to make out a face at the door or see who walked into the yard, although that frame rate is marginal for stepping through fast movement frame by frame. The 2.8mm lens covers 105° horizontally and 55° vertically, giving a wide general view that takes in a gate with a stretch of fence, a driveway or the end wall of a building in one shot. At night the camera has two modes: eight infrared LEDs produce a monochrome image out to about ten metres, while two white spotlights switch on when needed and turn the frame full colour — and colour is what lets you say the jacket was red rather than merely dark. The compromise is plain: every spotlight burst costs charge, so on a battery-only installation it is wiser to reserve colour night vision for the one area that matters instead of firing it at every trigger. Keep the distance in mind too — ten metres of infrared is not the thirty metres a wired model offers, so the far corner of a plot simply will not be visible after dark.

PIR plus person, vehicle and animal classification

Detection works in two stages here, and understanding that explains the camera's behaviour: the PIR sensor reacts to heat first, and only afterwards does the analytics engine decide whether it is looking at a person, a vehicle or an animal. The double check pays off in practice — the camera barely responds to branches, cloud shadows or falling snow, the things that drive owners of cheap pixel-change detectors to switch alerts off entirely. A separate animal category matters to anyone with a dog or a cat: the pet can be excluded from notifications while alerts for people stay on, and the stream of messages suddenly becomes meaningful again. PIR does have built-in blind spots worth knowing: it responds poorly to someone walking straight at the camera, because the thermal contrast barely changes, and it loses sensitivity in heat when air temperature approaches body temperature. The practical conclusion for mounting is simple — position the camera so the typical path crosses the frame sideways rather than running along the lens axis.

Wi-Fi, a microSD card and two-way audio instead of cabling

The camera joins a dual-band network on either 2.4 or 5GHz: the 5GHz band gives better throughput for live viewing, while 2.4GHz travels through walls more reliably and is the sensible choice at the edge of coverage. Footage is written to a microSD card of up to 128GB, and with event-based recording that goes a very long way — hundreds of clips of a few dozen seconds each, which translates into weeks of watching before anything is overwritten. The built-in microphone and speaker provide two-way audio, so you can hear what is happening in the yard and answer a courier or warn off a stranger straight from the app without opening the door. One limitation gets overlooked regularly: a battery camera cannot feed a continuous stream into a recorder, so the NVR relationship is nothing like that of a PoE model and the card or the cloud remains your primary storage. That also sets a requirement for the network — where Wi-Fi is weak the camera takes longer to wake, longer to upload each clip and drains the battery faster, so check signal strength on your phone at the exact mounting point before you drill.

Where this camera belongs and where it will disappoint

The B340 exists for places where running a cable is unwanted or impossible: a holiday house, a garden gate, a garage at the back of a plot, a shed wall, a temporary site, or a rented flat where drilling is off limits. The 191mm body carries an IP66 rating and shrugs off rain and dust, so it can go straight onto a facade, a post or a tree — the supplied bracket and strap exist precisely for that. It performs best at medium range: a person at the door, a car pulling into the yard, movement on a driveway five to ten metres out. Avoid it where continuous recording is the point, such as a till or a production line, where the subject is tens of metres away, or where something is constantly moving in frame — a busy street beyond the fence will flatten the battery through sheer trigger volume. The -10…+55°C operating range deserves a thought as well: in hard frost on an exposed wall runtime drops noticeably, and the camera is better placed under an overhang.

How it compares with the neighbouring battery Reolinks in this catalogue

Its closest relatives here are Argus models in other shapes and resolutions. The B310 with a 3MP sensor is the entry model of the family and noticeably cheaper: fine for a gate or a flat door, but with less detail for recognising an unfamiliar face, and the gap shows most clearly at night. The B330 uses the same five-megapixel sensor in a compact cube body — the choice when the camera sits on a shelf or a small bracket rather than on a facade. The B430 adds motorised pan and tilt so it can follow a subject and survey a far larger sector, which makes sense on a big plot, though the mechanism consumes charge and adds moving parts that wear over time. If you want the widest possible view without any motors, look at the B740X with its two lenses and 180° panorama; and if the site has no internet at all, only the Go series with LTE and its own SIM will work, because a Wi-Fi camera would have nothing to connect to.

Tell us where the camera will go and whether the Wi-Fi reaches that spot, and we will advise whether a battery model is enough or whether a solar panel or a wired camera is the better investment.