This is a really neat little unit and can provide information that a conventional motion triggered camera just cannot do.
I was running a Bushnell Trail camera there and decided to move the DPS unit there as well for a test run. I discovered that the birds are coming from a different direction to enter the pasture and are not using that roost right now. Since this camera is set to take a photo every 5 seconds, I get a clear sense of where the game came from, when, how long they were in the area and which direction they left in. The beauty of the camera is you collect data even when the game is too far away to trigger a standard motion sensing camera.
One negative is that this is a daylight camera only and does not take photo's at night.
I found the photo's to be pretty clear depending on the lighting. I would say the photo quality is average to slightly above.
You can set this camera to take a picture every 5 or 10 seconds. I prefer the 5 second setting myself. A lot can happen in 10 seconds and an animal could walk past the camera without getting his picture made. You can always delete pictures but a missed opportunity is lost for ever!
The camera was easy to program and set-up. It requires (8) AA batteries for power.
One of the best aspects of this camera is the PRICE! You can buy (4) of these for what you'd pay for a plot watcher!
You will need a pretty large card to store all of these pictures. The unit will handle up to a 32gb card and you definitely want to go with the 32gb. Otherwise, you will be servicing the camera every couple days if you use something like an 8gb. I am using the "Sandisk ULTRA" but the "Extreme" or "Standard" will do a good job also. The Kingston "Ultimare X" or "Standard" cards work well with the DPS camera also. As far as class of card....class 10 is great but I have used class 4 also and cannot tell any difference. For individual photo's, the class is probably not a factor.
The camera comes with software to watch each days time lapse. You can watch a whole days activities in 3 minutes or less! The software is fairly intuitive and you'll get the hang of it without to much trouble. Set up was the only place I had any issues with the software. There was not much instruction on installation.
As far as using the photo's you collect.....That's a whole other issue. The photo's use an extension that is not supported by many photo editing software's. I was able to use a free photo editor called "Irfanview" to edit the photo's but you should make a duplicate copy of them before you open them with Irfanview as it will change the file extension. Once that happens, the DPS program software can't read it anymore.
I was able to make the videos below from the time lapse collection by doing a simple screen capture with "Corel VideoStudio Pro x5", a video editing package you can get for about $49. The DPS software has a share button but I could not get that to really do anything and there were no instructions that I found on how it works.
Here is a hot link to the technical data on the Primos DPS Camera. This is a link to Amazon. In the interest of transparency I do receive a minuscule commission if you decided to make a purchase. However, if you can find a better price somewhere else, by all means, save some money! You may even want to consider a used unit on eBay, just be sure it is the latest version as earlier units had problems using certain cards.
Here are a few videos made from the DPS time lapse photo's....
Best of Hunts,
Larry Stephens
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