The big brown truck just delivered a new game cam. Academy has them for $149, got it new through Amazon.com for $117 with free shipping. The Stealth Cam UNIT. First thing I liked about it was how small it is, but that's where it stopped.

I farted around with it for 20 minutes before finally admitting I was going to have to do the most embarrassing thing known to man.... Read the instructions.

After that, everything clicked. I like the 8 AA battery feature, hope it runs as long as the review says it's supposed to on a set. Couple of cons already, it doesn't have a way to secure it with a cable lock, the other is that the camera and controls are mounted in the front door that swings open to turn it on or put your SD card in. You have to be quick to get the door closed and the two tiny little locks secured, then reposition the aim before it arms itself.

Other than that, I just got it placed out in the pasture behind my house to run it through some trials over the next few days to see if I like it.

I have 6 Stealth cams and luv "almost" everything about them. The only thing I don't like about them is the battery life with the 8-c batteries that it takes for mine. I switched to the 12volt accessery battery and they do a lot better now. I hope yours does better on the batteries than mine but I think you will like them all the same. Good Luck

I was looking at these at Academy and knew Amazon sold them a lot cheaper, but while looking at them, they had a Primos truth cam 35 on clearance from $99 to $49, so I bought one of them to play with until this one came in.

For the most part, it's a pretty good camera. Day shots are nice, color is good, but the night B&W shots are a bit hazy. The advertised 40' IR range is closer to 20'-25' though. Just for kicks last night, I put 4 new D cells in it and set it to take it's max of 5 pics per trigger. Threw a bunch of chicken scraps and deer corn on the ground and let it go just before dark.

Pulled the card this morning and I had 1746 pics on it. Several fox, coons, skunks and deer all night on the camera and the new batteries were down to 60% this morning. Have not shot any video with it yet, but with the IR range being so poor, I'm not expecting great things from that.

We have 2 units on our property, and loved them from the get go. Pictures were good quality and battery life was great until we installed solar panels, and then we never had problems with the batteries.

Only had 2 problems so far. One of the camera's IR was dead out of the box, would not take night pictures. Academy took it back no questions asked. The big thing, though, just sprang up in the last few weeks. The camera will occasionally say 50 pictures, but when you go to DL them from the card, there are no files on it and a warning pops up saying the card is corrupted. This is on both cameras and four different cards. And its bee happening randomly. The cameras and cards are only about 4-5 months old so not to sure whats going on.

Other than that, I would highly recommend these camera's.

My first day's review is not good. I unpacked it yesterday afternoon, read the manual to program it, installed new batteries and played with it in the house for 30 minutes, all worked great. Took it out in the pasture, baited with deer corn and food scraps.

Attached it to a tree, turned it on and couldn't wait till this morning to see the results. Ground is vacuumed clean and digital panel says 0000 photos. (??????)

Unlatched the cover, it was turned to "on" but graveyard dead. Couldn't get it to power up by turning off/on...... Took it to work with me, took the batteries out, re-installed them and working great. Had to reprogram everything, then set it up in the coffee room and caught everyone's picture coming into the coffee room.

Get home this afternoon, play with it some more in the house and all is good. Go back to the pasture, re-bait the area, hang it in the tree, turn it on and then wait about 10 minutes to walk in front of it to capture myself....... NOTHING !!!!!

Froze up and dead again. Take batteries out, re-install plus reprogram everything again, turn it on, wait 10 minutes and it catches me this time..... Will see what it does overnight and report back then.

Test your batteries, some times you get a bad one out of the box.

I've had nothing but problems with Stealth Cams. Good luck, but I have a feeling you're going to be returning it at one point or another.

Sounds like a battery holder issue to me. Batteries are not fitting tight in the holder and coming loose when you carry it to the pasture. You might try Duracells if you are not using them already as they are just a little larger is size than off brand batteries.

OK, 2nd nights test was a bust also. Sat the camera out just before dark, baited the area and left. Went out this morning and the unit is dead once again, frozen up and will not restart. Pulled the SD card and there were 12 photos recorded over a 26 minute period. I had it set to take one photo every 60 seconds. It died at that point and went all night from there dead in the water.

It's now boxed up and enroute back to Amazon.com for a refund. As for the batteries, I tried new sets of both Duracell and Energizer....something electronic apparently is haywire inside it.

Now is when you can call me not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I just got home from Academy where I bought a new Stealth Cam Unit from them. I love the size of the these cams + the 12 pics the old one took were exceptional.

Told the store manager what was going on and inquired if there was a problem with this one, could it be returned. He was all for a further review of these as he had just had a shipment come in and a shelf full of these. He told me if I wasn't satisfied with this one, to return it for either a full refund or exchange toward something else, so figured I win all the way around here.

Just got this new one programmed and it's currently outside where it's watching the dogs and taking photos of them as it should..... Back to the test grounds tonight with this one, but so far ~ so good.... Will report back tomorrow on what it does tonight.

2nd that, I have heard some issues with faulty batteries.

I'm convinced it was some ind of internal snafu it was suffering from. Here awhile back, harbor freight was kind enough to give me a little cheap-o volt meter when I checked out. Just got it out of the box for the first time. Both sets of Duracell and Energizer batteries had been in the unit one day apiece. It apparently never ran long enough to discharge either brand one iota...

Both packs came with 10 AA's in pkg, the two batteries out of each brand that were never used read 1.63 for Duracell and 1.61 for Energizer. The 8 each that had been in the unit were tested and all were +/- 1 over the brand spanking new ones......

Ok, I'm like a little kid that can't wait on Christmas. I saw some deer activity around where I put the camera behind the house. Waited 30 minutes or so, then couldn't take it any longer and had to go check the picture count.

Found it had taken 17 pics in the short time I had it out. Here's a sampling of the first pics off this new camera bought today.... I'll hope to have some night pics from the bait pile to post tomorrow on the performance of this little unit.....

You can see in the 3rd pic of just a few I picked out that they had busted me sneaking in on their party....

That's awesome, Thanks for sharing.

my buddy bought a stealth cam and had the same issues you describe. after doing some research he found out what was causing the problem and it worked like a champ after that. now i assume its working like a champ for father of 4's hunting with soldiers program, we lost are place to hunt so he donated it to him.

Well folks, for those following this review of my testing the Stealth Cam UNIT, I'm going to conclude this review with a thumbs down, one word remark for these cameras...... J-U-N-K !!!

As noted with my last post, I was excited that this second UNIT was going to perform satisfactorily. I pulled that first batch of pics off prior to dark, then went back out, re-installed the SD card and was prepared to find several images captured during the night.

Got to it this morning and digital counter on the front registered 0004 ..... ???????????

Opened the cover and you guessed it, the UNIT was dead. The last photo recorded was time stamped 20:42. Every kernel of corn and scrap foods were cleaned from the ground which told me varmints and deer had been there for a long time during the night with a dead camera standing guard over them.

Took this one to work, again we played with it all during the day and the most it would run before freezing was 2hrs 14mins. When they quit, they quit. Cannot be turned back on until the batteries removed and re-installed.

On a surprising note, Academy had no problem taking this one back this afternoon. In fact, I was able to speak with the regional manager who was in the store and he told me of the 6 stores in this region that he supervises, he's seen a tremendous quantity of these cameras returned for one of two reasons, this exact problem OR the IR flash does not work.

If you are contemplating this camera, save your money and invest in another camera of your choice.

I'll start a new thread tomorrow on my next test. I was going to just have a refund made to my credit card, but the Academy regional manager was very apologetic and informed me if there was any other camera in the store that I wanted to try, he would give me 25% discount off the difference if the camera cost more than these UNIT camera's retailed for.

The post I will start tomorrow will be for the new camera that that followed me home, the Moultrie Game Spy I-65s ......