![]() Try to set the height and angle to capture the game in the center of the camera’s view.” Sometimes you may not have the right angle it may be too high or too low. “Have it snap a few pictures with you walking by and then review them. Shrum of C&K Archery recommends testing your trail cam before you walk away. Hiding a trail camera in a dense thicket means you’ll get pictures only when something passes right in front of the camera. Not only do you want to choose a location where you expect your desired subjects to pass through, you also want to position the camera so it has a clear line of sight on a fairly broad area. Since trail cameras are often left alone for days, weeks, and sometimes months, you want to be sure that your camera is set up properly. A good standard to shoot for is 0.5-second trigger or faster. If the camera takes nearly a second to actuate, that deer may not even appear in the camera’s frame. Imagine a deer running full-tilt past your trail camera. You want the camera to snap a photo as quickly as possible when the motion trigger is activated in order to best capture the subject. Since trail cams are motion-activated, the importance of a fast trigger should be fairly obvious. While trail cameras rarely take print-worthy shots, I’ve definitely come to appreciate the better-quality images produced by my newer trail cameras, including 4K videos, compared to the relatively crude and fuzzy images generated by my first trail cams. Online reviews on sites such as Amazon often include photos taken by real users and can be a great shortcut to evaluating image quality. The best way to gauge the quality of a trail camera’s actual camera is to look at real images from that camera. While they can be a decent clue to the quality of an image you can expect from a camera, lots of other factors, such as sensor size, trigger speed, shutter speed, pixel size, and more, contribute to the final image quality coming out of your trail cam. The goal is to get pictures of animals without them knowing they are being watched, and when something is out of place, game animals have a tendency to figure it out.” Megapixels and Picture QualityĪs a professional photographer and videographer, I can tell you megapixels aren’t everything. If not, snap some photos of the trunks of the trees where you intend to mount the camera and compare them to the patterns on the cameras you’re considering.Ĭameron Shrum, avid bowhunter and co-owner of C&K Archery in Frisco, Colorado, says, “People will get a good deal on a camera and not realize how important it is to have match habitat. If you’re a hunter, you probably already have a good sense of what patterns are most appropriate for your area. Since most trail cameras are marketed to hunters and are intended to be used outdoors, they generally come in solid earth tones or camouflage patterns. This might seem like a minor detail, but given that most people want their trail camera to capture subjects without alerting them to the camera’s presence, the camera’s exterior color can be an important factor. Networked cameras are great because they provide nearly real-time information from your camera(s), but there’s increased cost and setup complexity, so you’ll want to be sure you really need the connectivity. While these don’t rely on cellular signal strength, they won’t work as far afield as cellular trail cams. There are also more localized networked cameras that use a wireless mesh network to send images to a home base without the need for a cellular plan. Connected models are so common that AT&T and Verizon offer monthly service plans that often come bundled with the camera. One of the main divisions in the trail camera market is whether or not the trail camera connects to a cellular network so it can wirelessly send images over greater distances. To help you choose the right trail cam for your needs, we highlighted the most important features to look for and narrowed down our list to the best models for each type of user and budget. The increased popularity of these cameras means new features and models debut each year and more companies enter the market. The right trail camera for you will depend on several factors including where, when, and why you use it, your budget, how important image quality is to you, and how high tech you want to go. ![]() Because of the ease of use, they’re also used by plenty of non-hunters and folks just interested in what might be eating their tomato plants or passing through the backyard at night. Trail cameras have evolved over the past few decades from expensive, niche products for only the most hard-core hunters into easy-to-use consumer products used by thousands of hunters all over the country.
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