When you place a cheap Chinese camera in the outdoors elements I don't expect any to last three years. The only company I know that repairs their cams is Reconyx and even those have some Chinese parts.
Cameras that sell for $150 and up should last more than 3 years. I run close to 15 trail cams and if I can only get 3 years out of them, that means I'm replacing 5 cameras a year. Costing me $750-$1000 a year. That's money I'd prefer to spend on things other than replacing cameras.
Moultrie M-80's were the first cameras I ever got and I love them. I have 2011 and 2012 models right now and someone else figured they needed one more then I did and stole one in 2014. They all still work. One is starting to burn batteries a little faster then it should (the 2011) but heck that's 5 years in the woods for at least 7 months a year in temps down to -30. I picked up a 2014 M-880 and it has very poor picture quality vs the M-80's. Battery life is great on the M-880 but picture quality is not good. I have talked with the CS at Moultrie a few times and they are a giant pain to work with. I also have an L-50, D-55ir, A5, and A5 Gen2 and to be honest I haven't seen pictures from a Moultrie camera in a couple years now that would make me buy another one and they make up over 50% of the cameras I use right now. I am also the kind of guy that isn't going to buy something new and fancy when it comes to trail cameras. I wait a year on all cameras and pick them up at deep discounts after I have seen a years worth of reviews and sample pictures to make sure I get what I want out of the camera. This year I am thinking about adding my first browning (strike force) and possibly first Covert (MPE6). I did pick up two Stealth Cam G30's last year and loved them so there is a chance I just add two more of those this year as well.
I'll echo what others have said about Covert. Had a camera on a stic n pic get mowed over by a runnning deer and although it would turn on, it wouldn't go into picture taking mode, only set up mode. It ran out of warranty 2 years ago, but I contacted Covert anyway to see if there was a potential remedy I could do or if they'd repair it. I was told they couldn't do anything for that particular camera, but was offered 40% off any of their current cameras. I ended up with a HD40 and a nice discount and had it 3 days later. The one time I dealt with Reconyx, the camera was out of warranty but they repaired it for free and had it back to me within a week of me sending it in. Moultrie has always been decent to deal with for me. But that was back in the i40 days. Makes me wonder if they got sick of fixing all those cams that came back with faulty display screens and just said we're not repairing cameras anymore. I wasn't overly impressed with StealthCam when I dealt with them this past summer. I'd bought a G42ng in Sept 2014. Pics were very grainy, and far from clear but you could still tell what was going on in the pic. Fast forward to summer of 2015. This camera is again taking bad pics, and adding to it, taking thousands of pics of nothing and eating batteries as fast as I can put them in. Camera is under warranty, so I call them. They refuse to give me a return authorization number and have me a do a "hard reset" and try it again. 2 weeks go by and its the same deal- tons of grainy pics and eating batteries. Call again and the rep tells me to do the "reset" thing. After explaining that it'd been done and didn't work, I reluctantly get a return authorization number. Send my camera in and a couple weeks later, I get a replacement. But not just any replacement. A refurbished camera, complete with cobwebs and spider eggs / nests in the hinges and door latches. Add to it, the mode selector switch is so worn out that I couldnt even tell which mode / setting I was in. If the switch was in the top most position, it would practically fall to the bottom via gravity as soon as I took my finger off of it. Finally got it into "set up" position and was adjusting settings, or so I thought. Several of the settings wouldn not change- I could change the delay to say 30 seconds and move onto the next setting. When I came back through to confirm all the settings were how I wanted, several had reverted to default or whatever they were prior to me changing them. On top of this, the warranty on this camera was only good until 1 year after the purchase date of the original camera. By this time its Labor Day weekend, and I've got exactly 10 days left on my warranty. Awesome. Called StealthCam and told them of the issues with their lovely refurbished camera they sent me and was told to send it in and I'd get another refurb. By the time I would have received another camera it would have been outside of the warranty. I didn't even bother sending it back. It got used for muzzleloader target practice and is now in a landfill somewhere.
If I had to guess I would say its a 2013 model I know there was a firmware update to correct this issue but you can also default the camera and it should start saving pics to the card again. Just a guess tho.
Seeing how my Moultrie was nothing more than a paper weight now, I decided to mess around with it to see if I could get it working. I had suspected it was a battery issue, so I found a AC to DC converter that had a plug that would fit into the 12V port on the camera and low and behold she fired right up. Knowing that the camera still functioned, that pretty much isolated the issue to the batteries. Come to find out there was enough corrosion on the contacts that power wasn't getting to the camera. I tore the camera apart, cleaned all the contacts with vinegar and a little sand paper. The design of the M80 makes this process fairly difficult. I put it all back together and have a working camera again. Still give the Moultrie customer service a thumbs down, but I'm glad to have this camera back in the fleet.
I have both Moultrie and Covert cams - Love them both. I have also worked in customer service for almost 10 years... You can't expect the company to hand out freebies or discounts to every customer that buys their products, especially a product that is 3 years old and 2 years out of its warranty. It's silly to give them a thumbs down in customer service for something like that in my opinion. Just my 2 cents.
Agreed. A company going above and beyond is wonderful, but bashing a company for not doing anything for something 2 years out of warranty is kind of silly. And for the record, I would never buy anything from Moultrie or WGI
I would be surprised if someone that actually works for Moultrie runs their facebook page or even saw your post. I would guess at least 75% of business pages have someone that doesn't work there run them for them.
I am running into this now. I had to call Stealth Cam due to the night pictures on my camera going black on one and another would section pictures. I got the whole run around about doing a reset on the camera and erasing the card with a full format. He wasn't interested in my argument that the one camera which wasn't more that 200 yards away didn't have issues taking pictures at night. He states that its a battery problem and that i should be using lithium batteries. Though i agree these batteries have better options over alkaline i have never had a problem with any other trail came using regular batteries. I will update after my second attempt with their customer service in a couple of weeks.
