I run all Cuddebacks right now, I love them but just want to try something else. G30 is on amazon right now for $81.. seems like a good deal to me? What do you guys think?
I have one, you will be hard pressed to find a better camera at that price. My experience is the flash is a little over powering but I fixed that by taping off the top 3-4 LEDs on each side. Will also have a little blur with movement but acceptable depending on how good an image you are expecting.
I've got about a dozen of them. One had an issue, but since it was bought from Cabela's they took it back with no questions. The others have taken 10's of thousands of pics each with no issues. The beauty of the G30 is that they take good pics (not 10mp quality but good), have fast triggers, get awesome battery life, and they just work. If you want to win some picture quality contests the G42 or GX45 will take better pics but that comes at the cost of battery life. If you put cams out in say June, you can literally run the G30's until end of the following winter on a single set of cheapo Rayovac batteries.
At that price, I tempted to buy more. So far, I've been very happy with my G30. I opted for it over the upper models for the same reasons Matt mentioned. If I'm going for pure quality, I have homebrews for that.
is the black flash for $30 more worth it? I've got a couple of bucks that definitely "see" the camera.
The G42NG? If so then I'd say yes, it's more than just a black flash...it's also 10mp instead of 8 and has better blur reduction. But for the cheaper purchase it's hard to pass up the deal on the G30's. The G42 are what I run though so I'm biased, lol.
The thing is that the G42's suck the life out of the batteries with all the extra LED's and any pics from closer than about 10 yards get blurred pretty badly at night. My G30's last easily 30% longer on batteries than my G42's. Both great cams, but for me battery life is more important than black flash. I wish they would come out with a black flash 30 LED camera that was as good on batteries........
My two G30's have worked great and I plan to add at least one more this year. My only issue is the file size that they save when you have them on the 8mp setting. It will fill up an SD card pretty fast if your getting a lot of pictures.
I just picked up a G42 on ebay for $104, Covert MPE6 for $60. Looking forward to comparing the 30 to the 42.