Best value cell cam?
Equipment
Contributors to this thread:
Looking into cell cam's- when it's all said & done what's the best value taking into account I'd get 2-3 camera's & have to pay the cell phone plans?
From what I can tell that BlackGate cam looks like the best deal going & is a solid camera to boot
My only experience is with TacTacam(at least cell cameras);they have been excellent.Recently added solar chargers(3) they also work well.Own Browning regular cameras, they are good,but the cell plan is more expensive.Bushnell regular cams have been good,again don't know about their cell cameras. Owned cameras since they were 35mm film.
I have a tactacam and a spy point. The spypoint has a cheaper plan and was very easy to set up. Tge quality of pictures is not that good.
The tactacam was a pain to set up and the plan is considerably more than the spy point. However it takes very good pictures.
The working class bow hunter podcast guys run black gate and they like them. I believe they are sponsored by them and if so I would take that with a grain of salt.
Has anyone tried WiseEye? lot of people on facebook talk them up
My tactacams miss pictures. Not sure if it is the trigger speed or the motion sensor, but they are not perfect. And i have adjusted the sensitivity.
I’m new to black gate….but down here in NC since I moved a lot of people use them and love them! The pics are good too from what I’ve seen. I left all my cell cams at my place in NY and with my dad at home so I’ll be replacing down here soon and am thinking trying the black gates myself
I’m a Moultrie mobile fan. I kept hearing how good the Tactacam Reveal is so I bought it and subscribed to the plan. It’s reliable, but the app sucks compared to Moultrie. And I saw zero improvement in image quality compared to my Edge cams and there’s no upsell with Moultrie if I want to use video. But it was very reliable, but so is Moultrie and their Edge cams.
Never heard of black gates so I can’t comment. Never tried Spypoint or cuddy and I never will. Enough of my friends having shared their experiences with me.
Just understand there’s lots of variables to consider like signal strength, plan flexibility, battery life. I have places where no cell cams will connect, or they work so hard to connect that the battery life is short.
Post your experience with whatever you go with. I’m all
Candor, I found I was missing pics with the tactacam when I had it set to send pics immediately. I think it wouldn't take a pic while it was in the process of sending one. I reset the cam to send the pics twice a day and I quit missing pics.
For what is worth, based on year round experience with Tactacam, I Agree with all above about them and adding that I have them on solar panels year round purchased from 360 with zero issues until the leaf canopy takes over and blocks the sun light, then the back up batteries drain depending on the settings.
Reconyx Hyperfire was used in Iowa and was stellar, but so is the price.
I’m running 5 Moultrie cell cams 3 Edge, and two older Base models. I’ve had good success with them all, but especially like the Edge models which will connect to the strongest cellular signal, and have rechargeable battery packs. They have recently had special offers of $99 for the camera and rechargeable battery. I like the app.
I had a miserable experience with Spypoint. Terrible! Glad that is behind me. 2 years of issues. My 2 Spartans work well but I dont know how they compare in value to the others.
Little bucks at my protein feeder
Little bucks at my protein feeder
Bucks in my Green Cover plot
Bucks in my Green Cover plot
I bought two Moultrie cams based on Pat’s review. So far I’ve been pretty satisfied with them, but only had them less than two months. I really like the fact that even a dinosaur like me can set them up, and all functions can be controlled from my iphone or iPad, even what plan I want. I have one that needs the unlimited plan for about six months out of the year, the other can get by with the cheaper plan, and I can toggle up or down as I please. Pics are not great but I can request a high res pic if I need to. I don’t know what battery life is gonna eventually be, but I’m thinking that the one that takes the most pics needs a solar panel. It wouldn’t take long to recap the price in batteries used.
I didn’t realize that I hadn’t saved any daytime pics.
I had a handful of tactacams for a few years and after countless attempts at working with customer support to get them working correctly for almost 2 years I finally got rid of them all. The tactacams would; completely miss taking pictures, or take pictures but not send half of them, get moisture in the cameras behind the lenses, need the SD cards replaced regularly because they'd "get corrupted" per customer service (sometimes monthly), the app would not work correctly sometimes, and the cameras can chew through batteries like crazy if they're tasked with taking more than a small amount of pictures per day. I agree with the guy above that switched his tactacam settings to send pics only twice a day and that stopped or cut down on the failures to send, I noticed that also but I wanted cams that would reliably send pics immediately (within a few minutes at least) and the tactacams could not be trusted. I think there are likely quite a few tactacam owners who think they're tactacams work fine but that's because they put them out in remote areas so when things walk by the cams and the cams don't send the pictures these people don't even know it's happening. When they pull the cams or replace the batteries and check the SD card and see craploads of pictures that the cameras didn't send they figure it out. Or after people got wind that this was happening to others they temporarily moved the cams to their personal driveways or their yards and figured it out that way. Facebook has a tactacam reveal page that people TRY to post this kind of thing to get help and to let others know about these issues but the page is owned/moderated/administered all by tactacam employees so most if not all posts that are not completely positive about the cams either get locked or deleted so the page is very misleading. Before that page became so misleading it was often you'd read a post from someone who had owned tactacams for quite a while and thought they were great until they sat in a stand where they could see the cameras from and watched deer walk by and not get a single pic sent to them. A lot of people had not hunted certain areas based on a lack of deer pics only to realize later that the spot actually was active it was just that the cameras weren't working right. I tell everyone that decides to purchase tactacams to 1st set them up in their yard/driveway to make sure they work correctly and even if they do leave them there for at least a month to see if they continue working as most of the time with mine swapping the sd card would get them to work correctly but only temporarily and that could be anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks before they'd act up again.
Tacacams suck, horrible detection circuits. If you don’t mind missing one out of five pictures they are a great camera. The Gen x2 are reliable at least. The Pros are junk and will end up with water damage. Tacacams CS Is terrible. The saving grace is they are cheap and that’s about all they have going for them. Night pictures decent … day pictures overly plixial out big time. Dawn and dusk…washed out. Sample size about 20 cams. Expensive plans for what you get. The app is decent.
Various browings, good battery life. Good night pictures, fair to poor day light pictures. Data plans suck. Been fairly reliable. 6 cams or so sample size. Their app sucks
Muddy and Spy point cams, not even worth time to type how big a piece of crap they are. Sample size about 3 each
Spartan Go cams, decent in all respects. worth considering if you can add them to an att or Verizon plan. If you’re using their plans with credits ect …forget it overly complicated and expensive. The app is decent. Had three. Picture and video quality is good to very good across the board.
Reconx, most reliable and trouble free cams made at this point. The data plans are fair and so is the app. Picture quality is on par with Spartan and Wise eye. They shine in detection and reliability. A negative is 12 batteries like the Tacacams. If your not on a tight budget they are no brainer. We have 10
Wise eye been a sleeper for me, I have 4 data cams and mini. And I just ordered 4 more data cams. Pictures are excellent across the board. Settings are responsive. Video fantastic. Easy to set up. Best App of all I ever used. Best tag system. The data plans are phenomenal. I can’t speak for battery life and reliability yet but if it’s good I can seen them replacing everything except the reconx
I run 8 Black Gate cameras and really like them. I've used them for 2 seasons so far, video and picture quality is great. The best part is the data plans, I share just shy of 10,000 pictures worth of data for my 8 cameras and I only pay $36 a month!! My pick is the R4G over the R4G Lites. When you have it set on video mode it actually sends a 10 picture GIF first, if it's a video you want to download then you can. Once the camera triggers again then you get the HD video, this way your nor wasting data on videos that you don't need. It takes less data to send the 10 picture GIF than a HD video, great idea by them. I'm able to get cell service with these Black Gates in places my other cameras couldn't and even places where my cell phone has zero cell service, very impressive! I've ran Tactacam, Moultrie, Stealth and Exodus in the past and these Black Gates are a no brainer in my opinion.
I have and use tactacam, Moultrie, Black Gate, and Exodus. Tactacam has been reliable has the best priced data plans. If you do have issues their CS is hit and miss. Moultrie is just ok. Black Gate is good. Pics are great you hardly ever need HD. They don't do pic on demand which I really don't like. Exodus is the worst for me. I really wanted to like their cams as I love the content the Exodus crew puts out. I have had multiple issues with mine, expensive data plans and they only keep your pics for 60 days. Their CS is good as far as being available and helpful. But they seem to want to put a lot of the issues on anything but their cameras. I run my cameras year round so they never get a break. For a durability for the price of the camera, it's hard to beat Tactacam.