RLC-523WA seems unsuitable for night surveillance

Juergen Lemke

I received my RLC-523WA camera 11 days ago and am quite disappointed with the performance.
RLC-523WA seems unsuitable for night surveillance.

Here my observations:
1) Intruders are detected in daylight, but faces are difficult to see even in the high resolution stream.
Remarks:
- the 5 MP resolution makes for a very sharp background, but the intruder's face has low quantization.
- with a maximum bitrate of 8.192 Mbps, I would expect significantly better results, if the bitrate is used for the moving object instead wasting it for the background
2) Person auto-tracking works in daylight, but often the camera pans in a wrong direction, losing track of the intruder and returning to the guard point earlier than configured.
3) The most disappointing, after spending several days for testing many different configurations:
For nighttime surveillance, I haven't found a configuration that detects intruders walking about 2 m below the camera from left to right or from right to left through the watch point.
Person detection at night only works if the intruder is walking very slowly and preferably waving his arms to signal "Hello camera, this is me". But even then, the face of the intruder is very difficult to see (in the high resolution stream).
I tried recording after motion detection but this resulted in more than 500 recordings per day and recorded intruders appear as white bubbles due to the spotlight not turning on.
4) Miscellaneous:
I did not test the siren and audio as these functions are useless in semi-public areas.
When changing the configuration at night, the connection to the camera is often lost (firmware crashes?)
Used Firmware Version: v3.1.0.804_22011510_v1.0.0.30 (Details IPC_523128M5MPS10E1W31100000001)

I contacted the Germany support team but received no reply after more than 5 business days.
Is there a firmware update for RLC-523WA in progress?
Or, are there better performing REOLINK products?