Gents I just went through this a while back, and there is a great solution. Better yet, prices are falling. I thought about all the options, and the single best I determined is an Android tablet. Mine has a 7 inch screen. I can download pics from my camera, read books, surf the web, check email, even watch movies all from this same device. I haven't done it yet, but I could post here if I wanted. All while in the field or on the stand. Its light, and easy to hold with one hand. There are a few keys to these devices. First, don't think you have to buy an iPad or get one from your wireless carrier. Really decent tablets can be had for $100 to $200. Some are even less than that, but you do lose some features. If you have an Android phone, getting the tablet to use your phone's internet connection is fairly easy, especially if you have bluetooth on both the phone and tablet. You will also want to make sure that whatever tablet you buy has "USB Host" listed as a feature. I ran the gambit before my tablet and carted around netbooks, laptops and even used an old camera. I tried a card reader once. This tablet by far is the best solution I found. If you don't want to mess with USB cords in the field, its easy enough to carry some extra SD cards, and still a ton easier than messing with a laptop. Compared to the card readers, or a camera, I find better pic quality (mine renders in HD), and better ability to minipulate the pics like zoom, adjusting brightness, contrast, etc. If you go this way, note that there are basically two types of screens. Capacitive and Resistive. Capacitive is probably more like what most folks have on their smart phones or iphones. It relies on a certain level of actual conductiveness on the screen to make things happen. So, you have to use a capacitive stylus, your bare fingers -or- they do make gloves now with capacitive tips. Resistive relies on simple pressure, so you can use those with gloves on. Resistive screens tend to be cheaper, and arent as sensitive as capacative.
I just use my Canon A130IS camera. The screen is plenty big and I can zoom in with it while viewing pics if needed.
I use my iPad. I have the card reader for it. I wish it would work with the iPhone. Maybe next phone. With the iPad I can download and clean off card. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
For those without a trail camera to start with, buy the right one from the start and there is no problems. The Leupold Camera has no buttons or programming on the camera. It's all done on the hand held unit. You can name each camera, and then plug in the USB cable to the camera from the handheld, select down load, and walk away. The camera resets in a minute and you don't spend an extra second there. We have about 30, (wow can you believe that we have this big an investment in this stuff?) for our business. Almost all were Moultrie until last year. We bought the Leupolds for the exact reason you are talking about. No complaints using them, they work wonderful and have this download feature that is brilliant! It's also nice to have such small cameras in the field without any programming. We have both the RX1 and RX2 the RX2 have the nice feature of sound with the video. It's an interesting feature to have bears fighting on the camera and be able to hear the sound as well as see the short clip. We also had a woodpecker pounding the heck out of the case on video hearing it pecking away on the case! Then after you down load all the images you can climb up to the stand and spend the next hour looking over all the photo's. You can zoom, delete and save all the pictures you want.
