I wanted camera that did not produce visible flash and I have read lots of debates online whether visible flash spooks deer & I have talked to lots of buddies who have used flash cameras. Lots of them feel that visible flash spook deer. I selected Moultrie Game Spy I 40 Infrared unit mainly because it is reasonable (around $230 to $240) as well as has nice 4 mega pixel camera. Also it takes normal photos during day & IR flash pictures at night. The moultrie advertised few other neat characteristics that I wanted, like long-battery life, fast trigger time & laser aim, which makes aligning camera a snap.
I ran 6 I 40s on land for 3 months last fall & got lots of images of good bucks and this review can detail what I have learned.
Camera has lots of useful aspects. First, it has infrared flash and camera needs to produce flash, but flash is infrared, and not visible white light. It has infrared sensor, which detects changes in the temperature to trigger shot. It is not been supposed to trigger on the branch or else grass movement. I have got lots of photos of grass, however it is possible that way I had cameras set up there was temperature gradient between shadow and sun, that was causing extraneous shots. It was a little annoying but not major issue.
Moultrie markets 150 day battery life on all of these cameras & I cannot dispute that figure. I had them for 90-days and all cameras still show about 75% battery-charge.
I-40 has 50 foot flash rating and again, I will need to say that their number is very conservative. I have few shots of deer, which are 50 feet away. Camera did not appear to trigger on all these long range deer, however they certainly appeared in shot when camera triggered on the closer deer. I'm not sure looking at my pictures what maximum sensor space is for camera to trigger, however I do not see that were beyond about 15 - 20 feet.
Camera accepts SD-cards and is definitely a route to go.
It has video mode I didn't test.
Software is upgradeable & that fact also proved to be very beneficial later.
Camera is weather resistant & airtight and I had got no problems.
Operates on 6-D cell batteries
NOTICEABLE GAME SPOOKING
I can tell from the photos that I got that sound of shutter opening & closing was sufficient to alarm the deer. I also got lots of pictures of deer staring at camera, thus they should have heard something.
In some cases, they also looked tense, back on the heals, whereas in others they seem curious. Generally, tense ones seemed to be older deer & even then, it was just a few. Overall, I will say that deer weren't excessively alarmed by camera. Majority got used to sound of shutter quickly. Actually, I generally got many pictures of every buck on a corn pile although I had camera set for one minute delay.
