Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Trail Camera Review

You might remember Eric commenting back in June that he had purchased a Wildgame Innovations IR2 game camera on sale for $49.95.  In August we purchased a second cam and pulled our first batch of pictures last weekend.  We wanted to post a short review of our initial impressions of this camera.

Set-up
The set up on this camera is super easy.  Basically install four C batteries, a memory card and strap it to a tree.   That sounds too easy and really it is, as we all know there are some things we want to know about our pictures, like the date and time.

Settings
The settings are pretty basic compared to more expensive cameras.  You can set the date and time and that is it.   There are no options for taking more or less pictures and video.  It just does what it does.  

Day Pictures
The daytime pictures are exceptional quality.  They are clear and it seems to have a good but not great shutter speed.  We do not get a lot of pictures of butts fleeing the area, but at the same time we don't get a lot of the deer as it comes into view.  

Night Pictures
Night pictures are decent quality most of the time but can get poor when the batteries start to die.  The IR seems to reach pretty far without being impressive.

Batteries
Speaking of batteries, the life of the camera increases and decreases drastically depending on how many pictures it is taking.  We had the two cameras up for 2 months, one took 560 pics and the other 110.  The 560 pic camera died 8 days before the other and started taking poor night pictures a full 13 days sooner than the other camera.  Based on just this one trial, you can get about 530 pics on one full battery charge over almost 2 months.  

Summary
Overall, these cams are a great value for the price.  If you are in a spot where you get under 500 pics in between camera checks, you should be able to keep the batteries fresh.  Based on the current price of $10 for 12 C-cell batteries, if we figure we are going to go through 4 every two months, we will use $20 worth of batteries in a year.  The pictures are great quality during the day and serviceable at night.  Durability is still a question mark at this point, but if I get two years out of this camera I will be happy.  

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