The Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera is a combination Stealth Cam’s technology with Ralph and Vicki’s in-field experience resulting in one of the best products available for hunters. The Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera is a compact camera that is easy to conceal in the woods and features a 640x480 digital video with audio (10-180 seconds). It has an 8.0 mega-pixel still image that offers clean, crisp pictures. The fast, one second trigger speed is sure to capture game on the move. The 38 IR (infrared) emitters, with a range of 50+ feet, provide excellent quality pictures of your game at night or during low light times of the day. For extended time in the field, the Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera is capable of taking up to 10,000 photos on a single set of batteries. The time/date/moon stamp on video files gives the hunter access to important facts that they need to know when preparing for a hunt. The Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera has a Time Lapse Mode incorporated that allows the user to view a day’s activity (or time period of activity) in a condensed time frame. The burst mode on the Archer’s Choice offers one to nine images per triggering for the most full, accurate view of the game as possible. “For years we have trusted our Stealth Cams to help us bag everything from Midwest whitetails to Canadian bruins,” states Ralph Cianciarulo, “we are now excited to introduce our first ever Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera. Loaded with features, this baby’s gonna change the way we play the game!” Other great features of the Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera include a compact housing 6”x4”x3”, icon based programming and one to 60 second / one to 60 minute time out setting. The “Posse” mode-quick preset offers two picture burst / one minute time out setting. The Archer’s Choice Scouting Camera comes with a 12v auxiliary power jack, mounting strap, and a bonus Severe Whitetail Disorder 3 DVD (a $15.99 value). The Archer’s Choice operates on eight “AA” cell batteries.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
Note: see updates at the end.
Note 2: be sure to read last update.I specifically bought this camera because of the time lapse feature. Since that is really the only mode I use, I will limit my review to that.The IR picture quality even at the lowest resolution is outstanding. No complaints at all about that.Now on to the time lapse. If you pan to use this mode and take a lot of pictures, you really need to use an external battery. It will take about 6000 pictures before the AAs die. I wanted to take a picture every 5 seconds. There is even an example in the manual for this. However I found that if you set it for 5 seconds, the actual time between pictures is 10 seconds. So I then tried reducing the timeout. So a 4 second timeout would result in pictures every 9 seconds. However the lowest I could go was 2 seconds which resulted in a picture every 7 seconds. Any setting lower than 2 seconds still resulted in 7 seconds between pictures. I thought it might have something to do with the time it takes to write the picture to the SD card (more on that later), but I found that even if I did a 2 shot burst, I had the same results. So for example with a 2 second burst, the first picture gets taken at time 0, then the second (the burst) 3 seconds later, and then the next one is 7 seconds after that. So it obviously can write the pictures fast enough since it writes the burst after 3 seconds fine.So I set the camera for 2 shot bursts with a 2 second delay. This ended up getting me close to the every 5 seconds I wanted. It would do a picture at 1, 3, 10, 13, 20 etc. seconds. This resulted in about 7,000 pictures each night. Using a fast slide show or other software will let you scan through the whole thing pretty quickly. I would then delete all of the pictures for the next night. This all worked perfect for about 5 days. Then one morning I saw there were only about 800 pictures on the camera. the camera was also locked up. I could not turn it off or on without removing the batteries. When I put the batteries back in, it came back to life, but the clock time was at the time it had locked up.I figured it was just a fluke and reset everything and tried again the next night. I had the same problem. After about 2 hours the camera locked up. I took it back to Academy where I bought it and they promptly exchanged it. I tested the 5 second timeout again with the same results above. So I called tech support to ask about that and to mention the lockups.Tech support was very friendly. However, they immediately wanted to blame the SD card, saying they don't support 'high speed' cards. The manual does state this and they even list some brands that are supported. In my case I was using a SanDisk card that was listed as being supported. However, tech support said that ANY card that has a number in a circle (i.e. class 2 or 4 etc) will NOT work (which mine did). I asked why it worked fine for 5 days, but they insisted that the camera WILL lock up if you don't use the right card. Well that is all well and good, but have you ever tried to find a 'slow' high capacity SD card? As a side note, a class 2 card is the slowest you can get over 2GB. Everything is high speed these days. They had no explanation for the 5 second timeout not working properly, but said they made a note of it.So I am going to try the same card that was working fine again, and if the lockups start again, I will try and find one of those other cards and see what happens.So other than these two issues (and it may indeed be card related), I highly recommend this camera, especially because it has the time lapse feature. It's amazing what you can catch that the PIR is either too slow for, or the critter is too small to detect.<edit 9/23/11
