Stealth Cam Prowler STC-DVIRHD IR red flash 8 MP digital camera with HD video

Announced late summer and in house tested to iron out the wrinkles this latest version of the Prowler series of the Stealth cam is being released after a long wait after the announcement time. Keeping the same 81/2 X 7 X 3/13 inch case as before, but without the camouflage finish of the Pro Series it takes on a plain Jane look when set beside  the Pro series from the same company. Our next observation is the missing extra camera that separated the previous Prowler from other manufactures offering. This means we will be looking for that dreaded filter clunk that sometimes is a troubled feature of single camera IR units. Shipped with the instruction book and strap this camera has the basics to get it to the field. The offering of sound with video has been offered by this company and other manufactures this year and seems to be a growing trend that is emerging throughout the industry. The pro series we tested also had this sound feature but the microphone did not seem to be as sensitive as it should have been. Leaf River has the sound feature also and though they needed a lot of help in the video department their sound was great. It has not been easy for these companies to come up with effective sound features and still maintain the weather tight characteristics needed to last in the field. New this year is the HD (H.264 video compression 1280X720) video offering in trail cameras. Early factory samples sent to us were very impressive and left us wanting to get our hands on one to test. The rest of the features are like the over kill in high MP ratings up to 8 MP on the top side and sliding down to the more sensible 5, 3, and 1.3 settings. Besides the high card filling HD settings in the video mode there is also the standard VGA and OVGA settings that are also selectable. There is plenty of fire up front with 54 IR emitters pumping out the needed flash that is rated to 40 feet. Time, date, moon phase and date are printed on each picture. The bigger memory requirements because of the HD offering will bring the max card size to 16 Gig and the same 64mb internal memory will not change. Our hope of a less than 1 minute delay time setting went down the tube once we started pushing buttons. The minimum delay is one minute and goes up to 59 minutes. Burst mode has been kept from previous models and is still 1 to 9 pictures per trigger. Other frontal indicators are the low battery indicator and the walk test mode indicators. Sensitivity is fixed and is not adjustable. TV out and USB (cable supplied) are also again a standard feature that was kept for this camera. We cannot say that out of the box we have a step up in this camera to something better than the two camera Prowler. Only the in depth testing that we will get into will determine that but other than the neat HD offering and video sound will not save this camera from getting high marks if it performs like the Pro series tested earlier this year. We need to see some action from Stealth like was shown by the WD series a year ago that everyone loved. 

The documentation for this camera is good.  The programming is very familiar and easy as it programs just like all the cameras in this series.

12/05/2009 update:  The trigger times were performed today and are a bit longer than what we had hoped for.  They come in at around 3 seconds for both with and with out flash.  We will move on to the Flash Range tests tonight.  You might as well say that the filter clunk is inaudible.  I could not hear it and I can hear most of them.  The flash range is respectable.  Its time to move the camera up on the hill for some sample pictures.  we will start with high res so be prepared to wait a bit as these download as they are fairly large.

12/14/2009 update:  We pulled photo samples from the camera and were hard pressed to find any that were usable because of all the rain we are having.  The pictures are nice but the night shots are somewhat grainy and the illumination is average.  We will place the camera in video mode next.

12/17/2009 update: We have had nothing but rain lately making it hard to get any usable photo and video samples.  On top of it all, my computer crashed and burned literally.  It has taken 3+ days to get it back up and running, meanwhile this camera has been faithfully doing its job.  For 3 days I have had it in movie mode.  We finally got some clear days and I was able to get both day and night video samples.  Because these are large, I have placed only two samples below.  These are high definition which means they are 1280 pixels wide and 720 pixels tall and each is around 10MB in size.  They are compressed using MPEG-4 compression and include sound.  First of all, the sound is nice and clear not muffled like we saw on the DVIR4 however at night the illumination in video mode is good to about 25 feet and the videos are a bit grainy.  I am a bit disappointed in the night time illumination.  The batteries are new and only two weeks old but you would think they are low.  There is a difference in illumination on night photos and night videos.  I noticed one strange issue and this is that the camera gets mixed up on its AM/PM in the date time stamp on the videos.  The videos have the date and time stamped in the bottom which is nice but much of the time it will say PM when it should say AM while at other times it is correct.  After performing a walk test and getting a video with the correct time I feel this is a firmware or programming issue.

01/10/2010 update:  After getting a few photos and videos on this camera over our corn feeder test ground we decided to move it to a wilder area on our remote hunting property.  This area is deep woods and we located our setup next to a swamp where we normally have plenty of critter noise ranging from the wood ducks to coon fights.  Our hopes were to get a good variety of animals and both day/night video to really demonstrate this camera's video feature.  We've had poor luck and timing as either the critters would not cooperate or the camera ran out of juice before getting footage of deer tearing up the mock scrape we created in front of it.  This was disappointing as it is an hour drive to retrieve the camera.

I pulled the camera and retested the batteries at home and they are definitely low.  I managed to get the low battery light to come on even though the lcd indicator on the display reads full.  This is a common issue with this series of cameras as we have experienced this in the past.  On new Energizers we got 91 photos and 143 videos over a period of 4 weeks.  This is not acceptable battery life. The day time video is excellent as is the recorded audio and in our opinion the best we have ever seen on a scouting camera.  The day time photos are good but both photo and video at night is poor because of limited illumination. 

Having very good pictures and a relative slow trigger time this camera managed to still gather good field data. The flash seems very weak for the large emitter count IR array. The sensing also has been questionable. The HD video with sound (daytime) has been great. If the night flash was a little stronger we would have liked the performance much better. Things seemed to have moved in the right direction with this offering from Stealth even with the trigger time where it is at. We keep harping and hope we will see some changes coming in that area being we are now weeks away from the shows the hype will again start to hit the net. I am sure that the ice has been broken and more manufactures will get into the HD world but one thing for sure Stealth cam will have a whole years jump in experience with that.

We are concluding this review.

01/14/2010 update:  Hold the presses folks.  We just got a firmware update in from StealthCam for this camera.  Our preliminary testing on our flash range shows some improvement in photo flash range and big improvements in video flash range.  We plan to continue testing with this camera to explore these improvements contained in this firmware update. So stay tuned for more action here.

01/18/2010 update:  After testing the firmware we we see little in improvements.  This review is finally closed.