Trail Cams

[Antique Shooter]

What would anyone suggest for a good quality trail cam for $100 or less. I am having trouble seeing the differences in all of them. Right now, I was thinking of a Moultrie. How would that be? I have seen good reviews, but there are also plenty bad reviews.

Thanks for the help, Antique Shooter

[Hog Buster]

I’ve had a Moultrie D50 for several years now. I’ve gotten many pictures of deer, hogs, coyotes, rabbits, bobcats owls, etc. with it. If I remember it cost me about $70.00. Very easy to program. It takes good pictures and I am well satisfied with it.

It doesn’t have a rapid trigger time so in order to get good pictures you have to put bait, or something, to get the animals attention and slow it down for a moment in order to give the camera time to fire. Animals that just run past don’t give it enough time to work in most cases or you just get blurry images.

I also have had 2 other expensive infrared cameras that were a PIA to program and didn’t take decent pictures.

Here’s a couple of shots, you can judge for yourself.

[Hog Buster]

Plus occasionally I get pictures of things that I’m not exactly sure what they are....

[PawPaw]

I am having trouble seeing the differences in all of them.

Yeah, me too. There's not a lot of differentiation at that price point. As a matter of fact, they all look like the same camera with different logos stamped on them.

I've got a Wildview and it's served me well for the past three years. It's easy to program and I've gotten some good pictures, except that it tends to "white-out" during the early morning and late evening. This is mainly in the grey dawn times when the camera can't decide if it is trying to take a darkness shot or a daytime shot. The white-out will also happen when the sunlight is coming directly onto the face of the camera and putting a flare on the lens.

One method of dealing with white-out is to position your camera where it is pointing as closely to true north as possible. The winter sun on this continent rises just below true east and sets below true west, so if the camera is pointed north, the face of the camera is never in the sun.

I like my camera and enjoy checking the pictures. It's added another level of interest to the hunting. One buddy of mine is using something he calls a plot watcher camera. He likes it a lot as it provides daytime views of his food plot on a time-lapse basis. He says that he can watch an entire day in just a few minutes. I've been thinking about putting one on my Christmas wish list.

[bswiv]

Have a couple of the very inexpensive Wildgame models......3 or 4 years old.

They trigger SLOW so you miss some stuff but the pictures are good enough and they have held up in the rain and the heat. In fact we retrieved one today from a spot where I had not thought out the sun situation to well on.

It spent over a week with the worst part of the Florida sun beating down on it......and it has a BLACK cover. Only problem with the pictures on it was the &^%$#!! coyotes.

[603Country]

I've got several Moultries and one Leaf River. They are all easy on batteries. The Leaf River has been on the same tree for at least 3 years and maybe 4 years, and it just keeps on working. The Moultries work real well, but the LED readouts seem to quit working eventually, though I don't really use them anyway, so it's no big loss. Moultrie customer service is quite good. Trigger time on the Moultries and the Leaf River are a bit too slow for my taste. As for other types, I had a Bushnell, but I hung it on a tree without giving thought to what the high water mark might be in the creek. The high water was a foot more than where I put the camera. Till then it worked just fine. I had one Sniper Cam that I just could not get to work. I was so mad that I'd have run over it with my tractor but thought maybe I could just return it, which I did.

[rickyrick]

Hogbuster,

The best that I can tell, that is an armadillo fixing to drink a can of Bush Beer.

[Hog Buster]

rickyrick

Can’t be an armadillo, too small. The brown lump behind it is a mineral block. Besides the armadillos around here prefer Bud.

[rickyrick]

Ok when I looked back st the other pics I see what you mean.

What the heck is that? Now I won't be able to sleep.

[Hog Buster]

rickyrick

Plan to lose more sleep. Here it is peering out from behind the stump from an earlier date.
Must be one of those things that go bump in the night.

[Hog Buster]

Antique Shooter

When my cheap Moultrie D 50 gets pictures of small things like those above you can see why I highly rate it. I’ve had some other trail cameras that had to have something as large as a coyote to set them off.

[C0untZer0]

It's a a baby chupacabra

[rickyrick]

Yes that camera does seem to do its job for the money.

[tynimiller]

We've had terrible problem with battery life in our $80 Bushnell...however our Primos 60 and Primos 46 have ran great (granted these are a little more pricey than the Moultrie).

Trail cams are great but you have to be careful about them. We've only had good luck with sustaining action around them if you put them on foodplots, mineral licks or feeding spots...the one time we positioned it on a trail and also a heavy creek crossing the camera seemed to deplete the action over time. (obviously could just be coincedence) But we've decided to just put them where we actually frequent a decent amount of times (foodplots, mineral licks or feeders) as to not have to spread our scent more than needed simply to pull chip and replace batteries.

I've attached acouple recent shots from the Bushnell and then the Primos, both with light though. The Bushnell's night performance is where the price difference is seen:

[tynimiller]

Here's a night time comparison:

[Mudinyeri]

I have a Moultrie M80 that does a pretty good job. I bought it on eBay brand new. I think there's a seller on eBay that has them fro ~$108 with free shipping right now. Like most of these cameras, it doesn't have a particularly fast shutter speed. So, if the animal just walks by, you'll get a bit of movement blur. Aim it then drop a mineral lick or something that will get the animal to pause for a bit in that spot.

I recently came across a Stealth Cam deal at Sam's Club for $99. It comes with batteries and a 2GB SD card. I'm very tempted.

Link (you have to be a Sam's Club member to purchase): http://www.samsclub.com/sams/shop/pr...241&navAction=

Take into account that you'll need to buy an SD card for most of these cameras. Some of them have internal memory but you won't be able to save very many high-def pictures and you'll have to use a USB cable to download the pics to your PC or laptop. That can make field d/l's a bit of a PITA.

I have a small Netbook that I take with me to the field. Pop the SD card out of the camera and into the Netbook. Download the pics and pop the card back into the camera. Quick and easy. I guess you could do the same with a USB cable.

IMO, the Infrared cameras perform a little better after dark.

[tynimiller]

mud...infared is far better for night...but honestly I don't feel it's worth it. However if I had the extra cash just setting there you bet your sweat biffy I'd buy the top of the line one!

[Brian Pfleuger]

You NEED infrared at night if you want to keep game animals around. The normal camera flash DOES spook them, especially deer-type animals.

I would not consider a non-infrared camera for monitoring deer. No way, no how.

Even the "after glow" from traditional infrared flashes can cause deer to stop frequenting an area. They make "low glow" infrared flashes for a reason.

I'm not convinced "low glow" is a necessity but I absolutely would not use a visible flash camera anywhere I cared to shoot deer.

[tynimiller]

You're right and I kinda mis-spoke.

I know we've taped over the flashes on a couple cheap cameras we used to use to hide the flash...yeah lessoned quality of dusk and dawn pics but we felt it was worth it. Honestly anywhere you can get pics of huge bucks at night...daytime pics is what you need to see more than anything That's when you know you got a chance!

[Hog Buster]

The only animals that the flash has spooked around here are coyotes. Deer, hogs, foxes, bobcats and others don’t deem to pay it any attention. I have had many, many sequences of flash pictures, 30 seconds to a minute apart, day after day, showing the same animals feeding with no concern whatsoever.

Plus on several occasions I’ve witnessed the camera taking flash pictures of deer and hogs without the slightest disturbance to them. On the other hand coyotes are good for one picture. When the flash goes off they hit the road, at a rapid rate.

[tynimiller]

Hog,

True I mean it seems to be from deer to deer as to their reaction...we have about a 40 picture sequence of a little 4-pointer nosing around the camera as it took picture after picture after picture of him. Obviously he heard the subtle click and possibly the flash (can't remember if it was one we'd taped over or not). We've also had deer in the picture once and bam gone, some seemingly running during the photo because of it. Again I feel you put it by a food source or mineral lick you're already lessoning the chances of it scaring them to the next county.

[Brian Pfleuger]

There are many documented instances of deer, particularly large/trophy bucks, that are seen unsuspecting in one picture, looking at the camera in the next and never seen by that camera again.

As I said, they make the "low glow" infrared for a reason. Even "regular" infrared can bother wise, old deer. Regular, bright camera flashes will definitely scare many of them.

Does it scare all deer? Nope. Most? Probably not. Which ones? I don't know. What I do know, is that I don't want to guess which deer I'll see again and which ones I won't. After all, the whole point is learning what deer are around, not which ones used to be until my camera scared them away.

[603Country]

After years of game camera use, I think peetzakiller is probably right. Old bucks with big racks didn't get old by being stupid. Does and young bucks keep showing up in my pictures, but the big ones only show up a couple of times. The biggest one, and he was truly a whopper, only was in one picture. There has to be a connection. Hogs, coons, does, and young bucks will eat corn all night in front of the camera. The big bucks just will not do that (not on my place anyway). My next generation of game cameras will be the low glow or black flash cameras. Probably they'll be Moultries, but that isn't a sure thing.

If it wasn't for the rut, I might never have killed any real big bucks over all these years. I guess that chasing women is a weak spot in the males of all species.

[Hog Buster]

After a lifetime of deer hunting I’ve learned one thing. Big bucks are like tomcats, they service one hell of a lot of does over a wide area. Like tomcats they run lesser bucks as far away as possible from their ladies. The distances they travel plays a large part in how often they are seen or photographed in one certain area. Does and young bucks, who are not a threat to big boys harem, generally prowl a much smaller territory and are seen more often.

In one instance we had a rather large buck that had a bad foot. A large knot above his left rear hoof. Everyone within a 15 mile radius got a picture or two of him for years, but no one ever got a shot at him. Then he just disappeared.

Of course it goes without saying that they’re pretty wise too. They didn’t reach old age by being careless.

[Win73]

You NEED infrared at night if you want to keep game animals around. The normal camera flash DOES spook them, especially deer-type animals.

Check the buck in the following four pictures. I set the camera to take three shots each time it trips. So those four pictures represent 12 flashes of the camera. Also I didn't include two other shots of the buck because he had his head down and you couldn't see his antlers. So six pictures, three shots for each picture, means that deer was flashed at 18 times in seven minutes. Definitely not spooked. And I have repeat flash pictures of even bigger bucks.