|
2011 Moultrie Plot Stalker MFH-DGS-PS
8MP Time lapse Camera Review
After last year and our review of this cameras predecessor the “plant
cam” I was pleasantly surprised that Moultrie has openly
jumped into the time lapse exclusive and selectable
function camera market with both feet. My preliminary
list of vendors to purchase from this year included Wing
Supply for several cameras. Well I will have to say that
the term “several” has now dwindled to a single camera
after the purchase of this camera.
I will probably have this camera a full two months or so before the
actual review gets into progress due to our failure to
complete the 2010 schedule which still has cameras
waiting to be completed. So for the time being I will
only get the initial findings out and posted on this
camera at this time.
Arriving in the same case as last years plant camera, this camera is now
a flat black instead of the green case. It appears that
this camera has a 5 MP sensor that is interpolated to 8
MP’s for the top resolution. Advertized as having HD
video and can be uploaded to Eyes In The Woods and You
Tube easily. It has a simple setup with time date on
every picture displayed. Delay interval is down to 10
seconds and up to 1 day. These delay cycles can be
arranged in a selectable up to a 4 window option. This
means that the duty cycles can be selected to operate
during the highest activity times (up to 4) of the area
that it is viewing. This unit is very easy to program
and operate. Operating on 4 AA cells or can be used with
the external battery system from Moultrie or your own
home brew setup.
Out of the box there is a strap, USB cable and software CD. The CD has
an 8X speed and a motion selection frame feature plus
zoom. This camera can take up to a 32 gig card so as
long as power is applied it should last a good long time
in the field.
The
question is ...
“Did
Moultrie pay attention and tune this camera to where it
takes good clear pictures?”
Let’s hope that is the case because they sure had
somewhat of a problem in that area last year. The time
lapse feature is a hot item this year and competition is
very high. The price on this camera makes it fit very
well in the market place because it is 1/3rd
the cost of the competition.
02-01-2011 update: Now that I have had some
time to play and evaluate the basic idea of this camera,
here is my first impression. This is a well designed and
well thought out camera. The 4 windows of operation is a
very nice touch and should fill just about any need that
you could put at it for a pure TL operation. The
external power option and up to 32 gig card size could
allow the camera to be afield for some good extended
periods. If you are looking to be able to read any
degree of detail even on the higher (8 MP) settings on
distant subjects, forget it. The picture quality is just
not there. Animals out past 150 feet with horns would be
very hard to evaluate other than travel routes and
times. I cannot tell if the reason for this is a focus
issue or just a plain old cheap image sensor. My
feelings it is the later because of the reasonable price
on this little camera. Should
Moultrie
clean up the picture quality, this camera would be very
hard to beat by units costing three times more. We are
now on hold until we clean up our back log and have time
to get back on schedule looking at the 2011 offerings.
02-14-2011 update: Some very strange things
appear to be happening and I cannot figure the reason
for what I am finding. First off was the amount of
attention that was paid to time lapse cameras during the
recent past. Since this camera hit the shelves and I
bought one, there has not been a single mention of it or
anyone saying that they had the slightest interest. It
is as if it does not exist. Because of this total lack
of interest I just pulled the batteries and shelved it.
I had even sent Anthony the disk to evaluate the
software and he showed some interest and has had no
comment as to its functionality. This will just open up
space to maybe get me going on another camera that maybe
will be something that we can report on that is of
interest. We will leave it there until we start to
see maybe the interest re generated later on when the
catalogs start to appear.
02-19-2011 update: I took the time to do
another search to see if this camera had gained any
interest and created a following and the answer is no. I
did see where there were questions asked on other forums
but after a quick look it appears that it was the same
individual that frequents other forums. As mentioned at
the first of this review, it may take some time before
we really get into doing more work on this because of
what is still ahead of it but we will get to it as soon
as we can develop a hole.
02-27-2011 update: This camera with its
partner the 12v SLA
and cable hit the woods and died a death 26 pictures
later??? Everything checked fine when checked today one
week later and we do not know the reason.
03-01-2010 update: The fact that this
camera quit and we did not realize it until we returned
that long distance and checked the card, it was a kick
in the shins to go ahead and head back south using some
more of that $3 plus gasoline. Anyway I did go ahead and
retrieve the camera and brought it back. The camera was
locked up again and had not taken any more pictures
after the card change. I returned the camera to default
and re entered the program and did a two hour test
outside the lab. It took a couple hundred pictures and
seemed to be fine. I reprogrammed it for a two window
capture with one period in the morning and one in the
afternoon and we have it now deployed on our local
testing area where we can watch it a little closer
without any travel time or gasoline. We will pull this
camera again this evening after the second capture
window has expired and see if it entered the second
window or locked up as it did before.
My search showed that the availability of this camera is
now in several places and all of which I have dealt with
before. So I recommend that you seek out somewhere else
to purchase other than where we acquired this one. They
will follow shipping instructions and will not be so
hard to call back.
03-02-2010 update: We did an early morning
setup and set for two capture windows and went ahead and
waited until the 2nd window expired and
checked the card. The camera seemed to now advance
through the capture windows as normal. Returning to
default and reprogramming the capture windows seemed to
correct the problem. We are now in the process of
evaluating picture quality from other units to see if
maybe all cameras have our same issue or if it is just
our camera with the problem. We stuck a new card in the
cam to get a few more pictures until we hear from those
that also have this same camera.
03-17-2011 update: This camera has caused
us one problem after another. We have never had the
camera operate a full 48 hours yet. It has locked up
normally within the first 24 hours. Clearing all data
and reprogramming now with only a single window capture
at 30 seconds has proved to work a full day without
incident. A half dozen bags of corn and a couple hundred
dollars worth of different SD cards have been put into
this test and maybe we will get a three day period of
time with some sample pictures with animals in them. The
picture quality on this particular camera is just not
very good. I made a special trip back to the camera with
the thought that maybe somehow the lens had got fogged
up but it was bright and clear. The goal has been to at
least to get some publishable samples with animals in
them so I can just pull this creature of funk and return
it to its little garage for a total rework and
evaluation by its source. The function on the external
battery has worked like a charm and it still registers
99%. On a positive note, the programming function has
been done very well and setup is a breeze. If it would
just take that effort and run with it I would be
happy.
03-20-2011
update: We gave it three days again in the
field with the hopes of getting our load of sample
pictures and run their software and give you our write
up. This did not go as planned, because the camera
locked up again at the end of the first day and would
not advance to the next program. We did how ever get
that days pictures with some deer in them so we are
going to use them to give a few samples and go through
the supplied time lapse evaluation software from the
disk. Please view the pictures and check out the screen
shots of the software function.
This camera is
on its way back to
Moultrie
and the review is closed until we determine if they are
able to do anything about this concoction.
Plot Stalker
Software
After capturing
our day+ time lapse photos in the 1920x1080 resolution
we loaded the provided software from the CD. The
install was smooth and simple from under Windows 7.
It is the
owner's responsibility to load the files from the SD
card to a folder on the computer. I would strongly
recommend against running the software on the files on
the SD card as this makes for much slower access.
There is no photo import facility. After getting
the software installed and running I selected my folder
of photos and the software appears as follows:
There are 12 buttons the control a
photo slideshow: Start/End, Picture step
back/forward, REwind/Pause/Play and a search
forward/backwards.
The Settings menu provides a dialog
to establish a search sensitivity, search region (a
single rectangle) and a search step. Using this
search feature seemed to select just about every photo
on high as the light created shadows on the forest
floor. The search feature left a lot to be desired
but when you are in a forested environment with constant
light changes the software will have a hard time finding
critters in the all the "noise".
The Plot Stalker logo and huge buttons take up a huge
amount of screen real estate keeping you from viewing
each photo in a very large size. there are however
zoom in/out buttons which slows you down a bit.
Yes, I wear glass and have some vision challenges but
these buttons are too large and take up too much screen
space. I would rather have a larger photo on
screen and smaller buttons and no logo getting in the
way.
Clicking the File menu with photos
loaded brings up a dialog which allows for start/end
frame selection and the export of a video from a range
of frames. The user can choose the the output size
and frame rate. The output file has the extension
.mp4 which normally means mpeg-4 compression for video.
I used the software to export a 100
frame video that I knew contained deer. This is
the original video:
click here to play samples video
The video production took around 20
seconds and was an easy process.
03-31-2011 update: I received a replacement
camera back from
Moultrie but still have not
received any feed back as I assumed I would get by
sending it in for that purpose. That fact did not go
well with us because we spent a sizable amount of money
and time trying to get this camera to operate as
advertized. Since starting this project we have had our
hands on other
Moultrie
products that also do time lapse in a much more
desirable manner and with much better results. The
Picture quality on this replacement camera is better but
is not as good as what we have seen on the medium
setting on the other
Moultrie
cameras in our system currently. The cost of these multi
purpose other cameras is not that much more than this
camera and they give much better results plus additional
features like PIR function. Anyway we will go ahead and
work this camera back into the system and finish the
review as time allows. We do really like the setup but
function is somewhat lacking.
04-06-2011 update: This little camera has just
about earned an official trip to the 100 yard target
mound for its final official function on this earth. We
are still experiencing the lock up issue as we did with
the original camera. I have studied just about every
word that any user has put on the internet and I still
have a ton of questions. I understand now that the 32
gig printing in the user manual is some bunk. This
camera will only take up to a 16 gig card according to
Moultrie and the printing is wrong
plus the description just gives the gig size and not the
class size. It is now thought that this camera will only
take class 2 cards and function as normal.
I made several special purchases of higher capacity
cards which are the SDHC type but you must look at the
little indicator that looks like a C with a number
inside to determine the class. Anyway the recent tests
we performed this week were with a 16 gig class “4” card
and the camera will run and capture just over 2 gigs of
memory and then the camera will shut down and lock up.
We again ordered some more cards today in the class 2
category. All of our standard cards to date are in the
class 2 category and are only in the 2 gig and smaller.
In order to operate a week or more and gather quality
resolution pictures on a two window setting using the 15
or 30 second setting you will need a high capacity card
and a high capacity external battery. The 2 gig cards we
have in that class will fill in just a short time so
they cannot be used for extended periods. Should all of
these problems be related to the lack of proper
information in the instruction manual, it will be very
up setting. We have spent well over $500 and more time
than the law allows getting this camera to work as
advertized. I could just set the program on the bottom
rez setting and do a short test and pull the plug after
a couple days and then move on to the next camera. We
want this camera to work but it will be up to
Moultrie
to publish the proper data after we finally figure it
out and prove that it will actually capture more than 2
gigs of data prior to locking up. If this whole issue is
due to the “class of card” it will still blow our mind
because it will work as normal all the way up to just
over two gigs of storage prior to the lockup. We will
also say that the picture quality on the replacement
camera is somewhat better but no where close to what we
see in the M-100 even in the low settings.
04-16-2011 update: We again went out and
managed to find some 16 gig class 2 cards and ran the
tests again. This time the camera did work as designed.
My suggestion for anyone who is thinking about this
camera that you first research a source for good High
cap class 2 SD cards and then also put some type of
external battery on your list. The
Moultrie
panel is about the same cost as the camera so you would
have less than $200 invested. I will say again I place a
lot of the problems on the lack of pre release testing
by Moultrie
and very poor documentation. The documentation any more
should be written and corrected after all the findings
of the pre release tests. Closing this review is going
to be a pleasure because of all the difficulty it caused
and our need to figure it out and get to the bottom of
things. If all our reviews went like this one, we would
have to go out of business. To date invested on this
review is more than the cost of all the other nine
reviews that we are either doing presently or have
finished so far this year. It is a good thing that we
are avid time lapse fans.
|
