anyone else running these yet? I bought three for the season, been running them about a week and a half now, and here's my thoughts; Good Tech: out of the box setup and activation is a breeze- you can do it all from the field I really like the StealthCam Command online/app interface. It's not perfect, but it's pretty user friendly. Even a tech knuckledragger like me figured it out w/o reading the instructions I really like how with the Command account you can add/subtract units at any time, and that it has interoperability with other StealthCam cell cam unit models You can set up/change each unit's settings individually from the app and on the fly. Got a camera that's only seeing activity at a certain time of day but gets a lot of false alarms from branches in the wind? You can narrow the active window down to only operate for that one magic hour to minimize battery and memory use The cam has 6 60* field of view apertures. I like how the interface shows you which of the 6 apertures caught the initial triggering event I like how you using a mouse (on laptop) or your finger (app) you can slide the images to kind of overlap 2 separate captures on the screen at the same time- creating a 120* image. On the laptop, you can even slide 3 pics together on the same screen. The left and right images aren't full (you only see the edges) but that can be useful/kind of cool if you have several deer kind of all around your cam at the same time 'on demand' pic feature is pretty cool and useful Performance: trigger time is decent, but not great. However unless the animal is right on top of the unit, the 6 60* apertures are usually quick enough to catch a quick moving animal in the next aperture FOV So far, I am happy with battery consumption. 16 DuraCell PowerBoosts are still showing 100% on all 3 of my units after appx 10 days, and one of them has taken close to 600 image series...appx 3600 total pics (all 6 camera apertures firing at once.) Not too many false alarms with nothing in the pics Range is impressive. I routinely get images of deer 50+ yards out (although resolution at that range is not good) Bad Tech: Memory usage- you have the option to set your cam to take 8/16/32mp images. Depending on your placement and volume of activity, 32mp fills a 16gb card in less than a week. It's not drag and drop to move your pics from your Command account to your laptop. It doesn't have immediate cloud storage. You can direct the device to 'download HD image' which you can later access and download direct to your laptop/mobile device storage, but that's a process in unto itself and it takes at minimum an hour to download, so it's much easier to screenshot each desired pic and just save it direct to your device. Long story short - if you've got a unit that's getting a lot of action (giggity!) , expect to spend 30 mins or so every few days to manually convert/move all your pics from SD storage to your long term storage It appears you have to re-format your cards to actually free up memory. Deleting a pic will delete it from your queue but doesn't free up the memory. Or at least it appears that way on the Command account. So I just copy everything I want to save into a folder on my laptop, then format the card every few days. You can re-format the card remotely using the Command account, which is nice It has a 'species identify' feature powered by AI that sucks at its job and routinely mistakes bucks for does, does for hogs or canines, and stumps as coons or turkeys. Its nearly useless and as far as I can tell you can't permanently disable it. It's annoying AF because it blocks off headgear and you have to manually disable it on every series of pics. I can't tell you how much I hate this feature. It's not a feature on the phone app, only laptop. Performance: Image quality- there's not much difference between 8mp and 16, then not much better from 16 to 32. After a week of fiddling with them, I settled on 16 as a comprimise. 32 eats way too much memory, and 8mp quality is kind of abysmal. I've got some older non-cell 6mp cams that have nearly as good image clarity than the 16mp setting on the Revolver caveat to this- this issue may only exist when accessing the images remotely- they may be crystal clear on the physical SD card, but I don't intend to physically pull cards until the season starts and/or I need to swap batteries Never had a trail cam with image quality that was this affected by moisture. These are crap in morning dew conditions. Until the sun burns the dew off the camera, it looks like dense fog most mornings, which is usually prime time, right? Mostly due to dew, image quality at dusk and especially dawn is marginal at best. It does well in full light and full dark To get the full unobstructed 360* FOV, you have to mount these on top of some sort of post rather than strapped to a tree. This is more of an annoyance than anything, but these cams are best set up/mounted using the screw in base rather than a T-post (and unless you mod them, you have to use the big T-posts, not the lighter and cheaper v-chaped posts). There is not enough distance between the anchor post and the camera FOV. So every time I get an image series, there is always one with a flare or even completely blurred out b/c it tries to focus on the tip of the mounting post which is less than a half inch away while I appreciate the fact mounting is a tool-less operation, there's multiple little washers and threaded posts that are in play...super easy to drop into the ground and disappear ****************************** Overall thoughts: For $150 per unit, there's a lot of value here. The image quality is not the best, but the intel gathered with that 360* view more than makes up for any image clarity issues. You may have a tough time telling if a buck is carrying 8 or 10 measurable points, but you now know if he's traveling with other bucks or exact route approaches that you would have missed with a traditional FOV camera. I love the Command account. You can interface with all your Stealth Cams (Revolver or other models) instantly. You are not limited to running a network of cams on the same property like some of the other manufacturers. I can have/access cams in multiple areas or even different states all on the same account. I could even run one on the house or camper as a security cam by activating the 'instant' notification feature. They have unique IMEI/ESN, and are GPS enabled so if some a-hole steals one, if they ever power it on again you will be able to find it because *you* control it's connectivity. I haven't tried yet, but I think as long as it has live batteries in it you can still cycle it on remotely and then bang, you know where your stolen camera is at (assuming it's in an area with signal coverage.) Another cool value feature (not unique to the Revolver) is that for every StealthCam you add to your monthly Command account, the price is lower. So it's $20 per month to run one cam (unlmited data), but it's only another $15 to add a second, and only $12 to add a third (not sure how much more it goes down per unit after that.) So whereas it used to cost me $50/mo per each unit to run my Spartan cams, I can run 3 StealthCams in the Command app for the same $50/mo. It's pay as you go, so I'll be ending the plan by December. So for a total of $700 (3 units+service,) I have 5 months of 24/7 intel at 3 separate locations on the 40 acres in WI that I hunt. Given I live 4 hours from the property and I'm a pretty busy guy, that's money well spent to me. Also, the Command account does all the cell phone provider work for you- you don't have to create/manage a separate Verizon or ATT account. You pick which provider you want at the outset, and that's it from there. Everything after that point is through the Command account. There's a lot of other little features that I won't get into here that you can mess with to make every single cam you are running very customizable. As I stated, I am a tech troglodyte, so I may be mistaken/mistating some of the features. Please feel free to add comments and ask questions in this thread. Hopefully as a community can optimize our experiences running these great tools. I feel vastly more informed on our area deer population and overall activity this year than in the past, and I have only been running 3 cams for 10 days!
'post flare' issue (it's worse when there is a deer in same image, tries and fails to focus on both and everything is fuzzy) Stupid AI doesn't do the dew same unit, same time, same series, but facing E so the dew had burned off the lens shield:
here is an example of 3 separate pics taken at the same time blended into one: (the deer in circles is actually the same deer in 2 separate simultaneous FOV image captures, you can tell by the same stump being at the edges of both frames)
circle showing the 'target' symbol indicting the triggering event underlined doe in center was appx 40-45 yards away, eyes in the back are appx 60 (that trail is running on an agle away from the cam)
...The compass directions on that cam need adjusting. "N" is actually NE, "NW" is actually true N. I think I can do that remotely from the Command account but I am too lazy and I know what's where so it doesn't really matter to me.
Great review! I will be interested to see if all 6 cameras will hold up and the longevity of it. Wonder what happens if one goes out, the others continue to work as normal? Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
I only have 3 Revolvers. I have other SC models as well. Each Revolver unit has 6 60° wide camera apertures for a total 360° FOV. Since they're not networked, they would be fine. All have their own independent connection.
I meant the 6 apertures, not 6 individual cameras. I just didn't word that correct. Was wondering if just 1 of the apertures go out, then will the unit keep working and just not get pics from that angle. Hope I explained that better. Im interested to see how your season goes with them this year. Sent from my SM-S901U using Tapatalk
heres another example of the stupid AI feature: once you remove the stupid tag, you can clearly see that it's a buck...and I forgot to mention it's a 2 step process with AI tag removed it's a really, really stupid feature and StealthCam needs to do a software update and add a permanent off switch to it. @Justin can you bend their ear???
also, I may have been inaccurate in how I described the cams, I think there is only one actual lens/aperture in each unit, that rotates (revolves) stopping and snapping at all 6 pre-set vectors. I think this is how it works based on what I have read/seen on the webs and also sometimes the deer on one frame edge will be slightly different position/posture on the edge of the next frame.
@dnoodles I am running command pro on my pc and have found a way to view pictures in the gallery by turning AI off at the gallery level. Open camera gallery and scroll down along right side to remove all AI tags. This should allow you to view pictures in the gallery with out the blue square of death called AI!
hmmm. when I try that I get this: when I unclick it, I get this: only difference is the checking the box.
Sorry my bad... just had a new picture come in and it DOES NOT remove tags that i have not previously deleted. It only show the ones in that I manually removed. Oh well... thought i had the answer....
See! told you it's the devil. And stupid. StealthCam just needs to do a software update and add a switch to it.
yeah, I am 90% sure it's just one lens aperture. These are all the same doe in the same series of 6, 1/2/3 vectors (180*)
