Wireless Solar Powered Security Cameras 2025

Solar powered wireless security cameras are the fastest and easiest way to keep an eye on your property when you are away, but will they actually provide you with meaningful footage when you need it? Today I’ve got ten solar powered cameras ranging from $29 to $220 per camera and we’re going to test their motion detection, video quality, notifications, battery life, privacy, and reliability to see if any of them are worth using. As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel.

Camera Prices

The least expensive camera we’ll be testing is the $29.99 IHOXTX DF220 with 2K resolution, SD card recording, and a detached solar panel.

Next, for $39.99 is the ieGeek S1, another 2K resolution camera that records to an internal SD card but uses an integrated solar panel on top of the camera.

Also for $39.99 is the TP-Link Tapo 402C with 1080p resolution, SD card recording, and a mount that allows the solar panel to be integrated directly above the camera or mounted separately.

Jumping up quite a bit in price to $89.99 is the Wyze Outdoor battery camera with 2.5K resolution and SD card recording. The Wyze 2.5-watt solar panel is sold separately for $28.98 bringing the total price as tested to $118.97.

Next, for $149.99 is the Reolink Altas 2K, which as the name implies records in 2K resolution either to an internal SD card or to the optional Reolink Home Hub and I’ll be setting this camera up in standalone mode. The Altas 2K comes with Reolink’s Solar Panel 2, which is a large 5.8-watt panel with a long USB-C cable for optimal placement away from the camera.

I’ve also got the $179.99 Reolink Altas PT Ultra that records in 4K resolution either to an SD card or to the Reolink Home Hub and I’ll be setting this camera up with the hub. Like the Altas 2K, the PT Ultra also comes with Reolink’s 5.8-watt Solar Panel 2.

After that for $189.99 Is the Baseus S1 Pro 2 Camera Kit which comes with two cameras and a base station to store recordings locally. Each camera has two lenses, one wide angle and one telephoto lens each recording at 3K resolution. Each Baseus camera also has a motorized solar panel mounted on the top of the camera that can track the movement of the sun for more efficient charging.

Then for $239.99 is the Soliom Solar Pan and Tilt 2 Camera Kit that comes with two cameras and a base station for local recording. Each camera records at 3K resolution and has a mount that can integrate the solar panel directly above the camera or the panel can be separately mounted away from the camera for more optimal positioning.

Then for $339.99 is the Aosu P1 Max 2 camera kit that comes with two cameras and a base station for local recording. Each of the Aosu cameras records in 4K resolution and has an integrated solar panel on the top of the camera.

Last, the most expensive kit in this video is the $469.99 eufy S3 Pro kit that comes with two cameras and a local recording base station. Each of the eufy cameras records in 4K resolution and has a solar panel integrated into the top of the camera.

Motion Detection

To start testing, the first thing that every security camera needs to be able to do is capture events. While wired cameras can usually be set up to record 24/7, battery powered cameras rely on low power PIR motion sensors to wake the camera up and start the recording process. That sometimes means they miss a large portion of the motion event.

To test this, I set up each camera viewing the exact same area and synced each camera’s recorded footage with my wired security camera to measure how much of the event was recorded. During this test, all the cameras were set to their optimal surveillance mode, which increases the length of each recording and decreases the trigger time between recordings. In the bottom corner of each clip, you can see the total time that each camera recorded.

You can see that during the day, the Reolink Altas PTZ that was set up to record to the Reolink Home Hub had the most footage of the event, recording 62 out of a possible 68 seconds, and the worst performers were the ieGeek, eufy, and Soliom which recorded less than half of the event.

I also measured how quickly each camera started recording, and the Tapo, eufy, and IHOXTX were the first to start at around 2 seconds, followed by the ieGeek and Reolink Altas Bullet camera, then the Reolink PTZ at around 4 seconds, the Wyze and Baseus at 7 seconds, the Aosu finally started around 17 seconds, and the Soliom stayed in sleep mode for the first 33 seconds of the event.

I repeated that same test again, but this time on the Reolink Altas bullet camera I activated its most unique feature which is the ability to continuously record during scheduled hours. As expected, that resulted in it recording the entire 75 seconds, but the Wyze, TP-Link Tapo, and Reolink Altas PTZ also did a great job, all recording over 85% of the event, while the ieGeek and eufy struggled, but not as much as the Soliom, which only recorded 6 seconds out of a possible 75.

In this test the Reolink Altas in continuous mode obviously started first, followed by the eufy, Tapo, and IHOXTX at around 4 seconds, the Baseus and ieGeek at 5 seconds, the Reolink Altas PTZ at 7 seconds, and this time the Aosu didn’t turn on until 27 seconds in while the Soliom took a full one minute and 8 seconds before it started recording.

I repeated those same tests at night, setting each camera to infrared night mode if it was available. Most of the cameras performed very well, capturing 80% of the event or more, but the Baseus, IHOXTX, and Soliom all struggled, capturing less than 40%. While most of the cameras started recording within one second, the Baseus took 13 seconds, and the Soliom took 38 seconds.

I repeated the test one last time, this time setting the cameras to color night mode if available. Again, there were a lot of very good performances, but the IHOXTX and Soliom continued to struggle, the TP-Link Tapo also missed the majority of the event, and the Baseus didn’t record at all. Just like the night IR test, most of the cameras started recording within one second, the Wyze, Aosu, and IHOXTX were around 5 seconds, and the Soliom didn’t start recording until 53 seconds into the motion event.

And that means that as far as event capturing, the top performer should have been the Reolink Altas Bullet when set to record continuously to its internal SD card, but the Reolink Altas PTZ recording to the Reolink Home Hub actually recorded 3 seconds more when considering all four trials, and the Wyze cam was also close behind recording 255 seconds total.

When looking at the time required to start recording an event, again, the Reolink Altas Bullet in continuous recording mode was by far the fastest, with 0 seconds of delay if you remove the first trial, but the TP-Link Tapo and eufy S3 Pro were also very good, with just 8 seconds of delay when starting recording over four separate trials.

Daytime Image Quality

Next, assuming the camera has captured footage of an event, the next important thing is whether the footage is high enough quality for you to see what’s happening. So, for this test I held up a sign at 10 feet and 25 feet, zoomed in, and evaluated each camera’s image quality.

During the day, the Reolink Altas PTZ’s 4K resolution resulted in the clearest image at 10 feet with crystal clear text on both the sign and my Z-Wave shirt. The 2K Altas Bullet came in second with similar detail but less overall sharpness. The eufy S3 Pro was very close behind in 3^rd place, again with excellent detail on both the sign and my shirt, and good facial detail, but with a bit more digital noise. The Aosu also performed well but had some soft focus on my face. The Baseus has an interesting trick where it simultaneously records both a more wide-angle view and a zoomed in view and while the wide-angle was just okay, the zoomed in view gave a crystal-clear image of the sign and my shirt but was aimed too low to capture my face. The ieGeek was also surprisingly decent, but the IHOXTX, Wyze, and Tapo were a significant step down, even at 10 feet.

At 25 feet each camera was predictably worse, but the top three were still the Reolink Altas PTZ, Altas Bullet, and eufy S3 Pro.

Night Image Quality

At night in very low light with each camera set to infrared mode if available, the eufy S3 Pro was the best, and it wasn’t even close with the ieGeek, Tapo, Wyze and Aosu in 2^nd through 5^th place, and the Reolink cameras coming in 7^th and 8^th in night color mode since they lack an infrared filter.

At 25 feet the eufy was still in a league of its own, but I put the Aosu, Tapo, and ieGeek in 2^nd through 4^th place.

In color night mode, the eufy also came out on top at 10 feet with the Altas PTZ close behind, and then the rest of the cameras were significantly worse than that. At 25 feet the rankings were nearly identical with the eufy and two Reolinks in 1^st through 3^rd place and everything else distantly behind with much worse overall image quality.

That means that as far as picture quality, the eufy S3 Pro finished in first with an average rank of 2, followed by the 4K Reolink Altas PTZ with an average rank of 2.7 and the 2K Altas Bullet camera came in 3rd with an average rank of 4.

Field of View

Picture quality is often inversely related to field of view where a more zoomed camera will look more clear than a wide angle, but that wasn’t the case with these cameras and the IHOXTX and Soliom cameras had the narrowest field of view and the eufy, Wyze, and Tapo had the widest, which is impressive considering the eufy also came in first for overall image quality.

The Soliom and Reolink Altas PT Ultra also have person tracking, but in my testing, it was less than impressive and not something I’d seriously consider turning on since it could easily result in the camera pointing in the wrong direction during an important motion event.

Notifications

Next, assuming that the camera detects motion and captures an event with good image quality, the next question is how quickly it can notify you and how useful the notifications are.

To test this, I put my phone in LTE mode and walked in front of the cameras and then recorded the amount of time that it took for each app to notify me of a motion event. A few of the apps have options to send rich notifications that include a thumbnail image but can take a little longer or to just send a text-based notification which arrives faster.

For this first test I set each app to use the fastest notification speed and the Reolink Altas Bullet and Soliom were the fastest, which was surprising since the Soliom had been extremely slow to start recording in my previous tests. The eufy came in at 9 seconds and the Tapo and Aosu were next at 12 seconds. The IHOXTX, ieGeek and Wyze were between 20 and 30 seconds, and the Reolink Altas PTZ using the Reolink Home Hub and Baseus S1 Pro were the slowest around 50 seconds.

In the second test, I turned on rich notifications and the Reolink Altas Bullet still came in first at 5 seconds, but this time the Reolink Altas PTZ using the Reolink Home Hub came in at 13 seconds. The Soliom was a bit slower at 13 seconds this time but was the first rich notification to come through. The Tapo and rich notification from eufy were right after that at 14 seconds. A rich notification came through from Wyze at 27 seconds, the Baseus rich notification came in at 46 seconds, and the Aosu came through with its ChatGPT style description of the motion event after 68 seconds.

Which means that the fastest overall notifications were consistently from the Reolink Altas running in standalone mode, but the fastest rich notifications were from the Soliom and eufy. I should note that the Reolink app has an option to turn on rich notifications for the Altas which used to only be an option if you paid for Reolink’s cloud service, but it always just says that it failed to enable the service, so it might just be appearing there by mistake.

I also measured the amount of time that it takes to access the footage of an event. The eufy and Soliom were by far the fastest at just 3 seconds from clicking on the rich notification until the video started playing. The Aosu and Wyze were also very fast at 4 seconds, the TP-Link Tapo took 7 seconds, the Altas PT Ultra with the Home Hub took 8 seconds, the IHOXTX and standalone Altas Bullet were at 10 and 12 seconds, which is usable but a bit annoying, the Baseus was almost double that at 23 seconds, and the ieGeek took a ridiculous 76 seconds to access footage.

Battery Life

Next, it seems pretty late in the review to start talking about battery life, but that’s because I don’t have anything interesting to report. I first tested the cameras in my side yard that receives about eight hours of full sun per day and even set to the more battery intensive optimal surveillance mode they all gained battery percentage every day until they were full.

Then I moved the cameras into my garage for a few days to let the batteries deplete and then installed them on the front of my house, which catches a lot of shade from my large oak tree and sees a lot of motion activity from the sidewalk and street. Surprisingly, the battery percentages still continued on an upward trend, and even the Reolink Altas Bullet set on continuous recording mode from 6 AM to 10 PM every day stayed at 100% with just a few hours of full sunlight.

I will say that aesthetically I prefer cameras with built in solar panels like the Baseus, Aosu, ieGeek, and eufy, but cameras with detached panels are easier to make sure that you get both optimal camera placement, and optimal solar panel placement. It’s worth noting that the reason the Reolink cameras are able to stay at 100% while continuously recording is that their panels have about four times the area of the other cameras, so they aren’t exactly inconspicuous.

Reliability

Next, let’s talk about reliability, security, and privacy.

Out of these ten cameras, four of them, the IHOXTX, ieGeek, Wyze, and Tapo are standalone cameras that connect directly to your WiFi and record to their internal SD card. While all four of them are directly connected to my WiFi, I haven’t had any issues accessing the Wyze or Tapo cameras, but the IHOXTX and ieGeek have been a nightmare, constantly disconnecting, being unable to download footage, and missing notifications.

Four of the camera systems, the eufy, Baseus, Soliom, and Aosu come with a base station that plugs in to your network via ethernet, and then the cameras connect wirelessly to the base station. The advantages of that are that you can usually install much more storage using a 2.5” laptop hard drive, all your recordings are stored off the camera so you still have them if your camera is broken or stolen, and if you need to access your recordings you don’t need to wake your camera up from sleep mode to see them which not only increases performance, but will further improve battery life. Overall, all of the hub-based cameras were faster and more responsive to use than the standalone options.

And the last two cameras, the Reolink Altas PT Ultra and Reolink Altas 2K can work in either mode, and for this video I had the Altas PT Ultra connected to the Reolink Home Hub, and I had the Reolink Altas 2K in standalone mode. The advantage of using a Home Hub is the same as the other hub-based cameras: it’s faster, has a more reliable connection, and doesn’t drain the camera’s battery when viewing recorded footage. But specifically for the Altas series, running in standalone mode is the only way to enable the Altas’s advanced recording features like pre-trigger footage and continuous recording since those have to be recorded to the device itself. But as great as those features are, I would personally choose to use the Altas with the Home Hub since the Standalone Altas 2K did occasionally disconnect from my 5GHz network and refused to reconnect until I forced it to using my router.

Privacy

If you’re a more privacy conscious person, you may want to be able to use your cameras on your local network without an internet connection. To test each camera’s ability to function without the internet, I isolated them with my network firewall and then turned off cellular data on my phone to make sure that they showed up offline. Then I reconnected my phone to WiFi and found that the eufy S3 Pro, TP-Link Tapo, and Reolink Home Hub all functioned normally, allowing me to not only see a live view of my cameras, but also view and download recorded footage.

The Aosu camera would connect to the live view on the same local network, but the hub seemed to require internet access to view recorded footage.

And all of the other cameras, including the Reolink Altas that wasn’t connected to the Home Hub, showed up completely offline when they didn’t have access to the internet, which is pretty disappointing especially for the Soliom and Baseus cameras that have wired hubs.

Conclusions and Recommendations

So, all things considered, which camera should you buy?

If you’re looking for a budget camera, the IHOXTX and ieGeek might look tempting, but you should absolutely avoid them. Not only are they unreliable in terms of picture quality and motion detection, but they are also just a huge pain to use and are the kind of devices that you’ll probably get fed up with and just throw in the trash.

Conversely the $40 TP-Link TAPO is genuinely decent. It had the 2^nd fastest motion detection time, the 4^th most footage recorded, the 4^th fastest notifications, the 4^th fastest view time, it has person detection with no monthly fee, and if you want you can even block it from the internet and view both the live view and your recorded footage completely locally. It’s also one of the smallest overall camera and solar packages and you have the option of using the solar panel on the built in mount or moving it away from the camera for more optimal placement. The TAPO’s only real weakness is its 1080p video quality which Is definitely usable but ranked at the bottom for daytime quality, still this is an excellent deal for $40, especially if you just need a single camera.

If you’re looking for a higher end system, the Reolink Altas and eufy S3 Pro Kits are both excellent options.

The eufy had the highest picture quality, and the fastest recording time other than the continuously recording Reolink Altas. It also has the option for rich notifications that are delivered relatively quickly, and the most user-friendly app that makes it simple to scrub through your footage. It supports person, vehicle, pet, and even familiar face detection without any monthly subscription and it records locally to the home base. This is the first eufy home base that I’ve ever tested that continues to work when blocked from the internet, which is a big step forward for the most privacy conscious people.

The eufy’s main weakness was daytime footage where it would stop recording after 30 seconds even on optimal surveillance mode. Eufy does have a custom recording mode where you can set the clip length up to 120 seconds with a 5 second retrigger time, but the longer you set the clip length the lower resolution the file will be, so at 60 seconds you’re limited to 1440p and at 120 seconds you can only record 1080p. But if you’re having issues with recording entire events, at least there are options. The eufy was by far the most expensive coming in at $220 per camera if you buy the two-camera kit, but in this case the performance does justify the increased price.

The Reolink Altas cameras are also extremely impressive and continuous recording from a battery powered camera seemed impossible just a few years ago, but Reolink has pulled it off. Other than continuous recording, some other reasons you might choose the Reolink Altas series over the eufy S3 Pro is if you wanted to have a mix of wired and battery powered Reolink cameras that can all use the same app, if you want pan and tilt on your camera, if you’re planning on using your cameras with Home Assistant, or if you specifically want to use the desktop based Reolink app, which works great with both the standalone mode and the Home Hub. 

In addition to the continuous recording of the Altas in standalone mode it had excellent notification speed and good video quality, but I’m disappointed that it wasn’t able to work without the internet without being connected to the Home Hub. Overall, the performance and reliability in terms of live view and downloading footage was also much better when using the wired hub, not to mention the awesome Home Assistant integration that’s only available for battery cameras when connecting through the hub.

Right now the Altas 4K PT Ultra is the same price as the 2K bullet, which makes it a no brainer, and the good news is that if you want to start with standalone mode and see what the performance is like on your network it’s easy to switch a camera over to the Home Hub after setting it up, so you can always get the Home Hub later.

The Aosu cameras had some interesting features like AI notifications that describe the entire motion event and a daily security report within the app, and I also like the overall form factor of the cameras with the built in solar panel, but the overall performance of the cameras needs work, especially the choppy video recordings that makes people look like they are teleporting from one place to another.  If these were more budget friendly, they might still be worth it, but definitely not for $170 per camera.

Last, when I first started this test I was pretty confident that the Baseus S1 Pro was going to get my top recommendation because it has so much in common with the eufy S3 Pro at a much lower price point, but this is Baseus’s first try at security cameras and they need to work on their motion detection speed and notification delay before they will be able to compete. I’d also really like to see them add the ability to aim the zoom lens, because the way it is now, it’s way too low compared to the overall field of view of the camera, and as I said before, I’m definitely disappointed that the base station didn’t function locally without an internet connection like the Reolink and eufy.

As always there are no sponsored reviews on this channel, but I do have links below to all of the cameras that I tested in this video, and as always, I appreciate when you use those links since as an Amazon Affiliate, I do earn a small commission on the sale at no cost to you.

I’d also like to thank all of my patrons over at Patreon for their continued support of my channel, and if you’re interested in supporting my channel please check out the links below. If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and as always, thanks for watching The Hook Up.