2011 Primos Truth Cam 46 review (revisit)

Please view the 2010 Primos TruthCam 46 Review Page for the original review. This review will discuss all the new features and upgrades that have been thoughtfully collected and introduced. This company says “Speak The Language” but while the language thing is going on they are also busy listening to the chatter about their products and doing something about anything that comes out as being a problem. From the early days where the local rock band could use a 5 camera clunk to maintain their beat to their latest tune to just pure silence except for a gentle nudge as the filter shifted only twice a day at the transition time. 

What this re visit is going to be looking at is the basic trigger testing, picture quality, Sensing, filter clunk, and battery life. We are only going to do all the basic lab tests and then capture the day/night/sensing range pictures and then just set up for a long term battery life test.  

We are yet another two weeks behind because of some shipping problems. The coordination went hay wire so I just picked out a couple of their models and went to the store and bought them. 

The 46 camera and the 35 camera from this company will be the only cameras tested by us this year. These are now in house and we will proceed immediately on them. We will get all the in house stuff done and head for the hill to get the samples. The main data will still be in the base review so just those new upgrades will be looked at this time.

07-30-2011 update: Having the lab nice and cool made doing these tests much easier. The trigger time came in at 1.55 seconds for both day and night with flash. Delay period testing came out fairly accurate to programmed setting. The day range and eight plate came in nice and clear but somewhat weak in color and natural looking. The night testing for flash range and sensing (89 degrees) came in at 50+ with the flash reaching out to 60+ feet using all 46 leds.  The night shots were well lit but somewhat grainy. Now off to get the sample pictures and videos.

08-02-2011 update:  Check out the sample pictures and you will see this camera takes a respectable picture. The light colored IR pictures and dark color pictures at transition are very normal for IR cameras. This is the alternative to pure whiteout pictures which de did not get any. This light sensing could probably be tweaked a little but our test area is a very tough area that has been chosen to see if we can achieve a failure which this camera avoided. One thought though is the camera that is trying to make up its mind to use flash and is busy changing the filter back and forth. This operation can be heard but not anywhere as bad as last year’s cameras. We have three resolutions to go through and then grab a few videos.

08-06-2011 update:  This camera has some problems in the video department. It wants to switch back and forth at transition and there are very light and nearly black videos. The file sizes are huge. The better videos are very jerky and not smooth and the quality is very lacking.

08-07-2011 update:  We made it through all the sample pictures and video resolutions and have posted samples for your evaluation. This camera appears to do much better in the picture department and has some issues with vide as you can see in the samples. We enjoyed using this camera and we still seemed to like the 35 series with the switches even though it does not have near the capabilities of this camera. We only performed the testing on the high flash setting because the two main areas we were looking at were the upgraded clunk and battery life. The clunk passed very well and we will report the battery life results later. This revisit is closed.

10-02-2011 update:  Battery life data as follows, 3508 pictures and 47 videos, Operation 07-30 through 09-19-11.