Ok so I had bought and put a StealthCam WD2 in the field a week ago and I'll be honest, I was quite excited for the week to pass and get the results back. Overall I think the camera is a pretty good deal for the money, it was rated best in its class by
www.chasingame.com (they are still testing the bushnell 11-9200 atm and it might be the new in class winner).
First impressions: I set it up in the backyard and played with it for a few min... the menu system seemed kindof confusing but I thought I had it figured out after noodling with it for a while. It seemed to sense a fairly good distance but the first 10 or so pictures it took of my boy walking back and forth at different speeds resulted in zero pictures of him (he had already exited the field of view when the camera went off.
With the camera configured ok, I took it down and placed it over a watering hole where there seems to be alot of elk activity. When I returned a week later I was surprised to see 168 pictures on it! Wow! I knew I had at least a few pictures on it as the camera was covered in MUD... I dont understand why elk are so curious but they seem obsessed with licking, nudging, smelling, rubbing game cameras .... on a regular basis! I'd say at least 35 of my 168 pictures are of different elk all having a turn at playing with the camera.
Problem #1. I had brought along a portable DVD player and I figured I would just pipe the signal out of the camera into the DVD player to view them... then I could decided if I wanted to return it in exchange for the Bushnell 11-9200 that seems to have faster trigger times and better picture quality. The video output would not work... I fiddled and fiddled with it but I couldnt even get the camera into TV mode. That feature seemed broken on my camera.
I brought the camera home with plans to exchange it. When I got home with it I finally viewed the trailcam pictures on my Computer. Quality as I had seen in others sample pictures is ok but not as good as some of the other cameras.
Problem #2. Every once in a while, the WD2 would take some "white out" pictures... completely washed out with little to no detail. These would be even in the middle of the day pictures.
Problem #3. The clock is completely screwed up. It uses 24 hour time (ie: military) ... the clock was off by 17 hours when I picked it up... and looking at the time stamp of alot of the pictures, its completely wrong. I have pictures timestamped at 3am and you can clearly see by shadows its more along the lines of 9am.
Due to the video out problem, Clock timer problem and the rare whiteframe problem I decided to return it for a Bushnell 11-9200. The bushnell takes much better pictures according to people I've talked to and it has a .25 to .5 trigger time where the WD2 was in the 2-3 second range.
If the stealthcam hadnt had the above problems I would have kept it. If the bushnell has problems as well I'll maybe try another WD2.
Sample Picts (all resized from 1024x2048 to 640x480):
Stupid elk smelling the camera.
Ditto... note the time, 14 hours later
Holy crap, did the camera really just sense those elk
50 yards away??
An example of a bad pict, this is during the day as I got a couple picts 1 min earlier and 1 min later. The camera was set to take 3 picts at a time and all 3 during this sequence were white like this.
Lots of elk visit this watering hole. I have a blind set up just behind where the camera now sits for the upcoming archery elk hunt in 2 weeks. Its an either sex hunt in a "spike only" area so with no chance to shoot a big bull (gotta draw that tag), I'm just looking for a cow... according to this pict I think I'll get a chance
Bulls! Nothing great, just some raghorns.
Looks like this wateringhole is infested with elk.
Spike! I think... is he splitting on his tops? Its too fuzzy to see.
Nice eyelashes
A interesting picture, but I'd rate the coloring of the picture as "poor" & contrast is too high... maybe I'm too picky though.
Bushnell 11-9200 picts comming next week... assuming that camera works anyway
-DallanC