Wingscapes WSCA04 Timelapse PlantCam

Comment: PROS
I bought the Plantcam to get time lapse video of fields I hunt for deer. It works great! I set it up 10-15 feet up a tree watching wide open areas. You can easily spot deer & turkey out to 150 yards, further if you had low grass or snow. This is a very well made device with a solid feel & intuitive operation. I can watch a couple of 2 minute videos & have the same information that I could have gotten only by sitting a tree stand sunup till sundown for a week! I will leave one of these running in my tree stands during the season to see what goes on when I am not there. I advise that you buy a pair of 2GB SD cards & use rechargeable AA batteries. Each time I check the camera I swap out batteries & SD card to take home & view on the computer leaving the plantcam in the field.

CONS
1-The camera has software to convert the photos into a video, but will only do 360 photos at a time. If you have 800 photos you will have to tell it to make videos using photos 1-360, 361-721 & again from 722-800. The conversion process is annoyingly slow, like bring a sandwich slow. Probably around 12 minutes per 360. I start it converting & then do other tasks or hike to the next spot I will set it up in while it works. Instead of the on-board software I have used MS Moviemaker but I find the on-board software videos run quicker & let me see more than Moviemaker does . The video conversion process preserves the individual images also so I can select images of game to save in a folder with the video for easy review.
2-While it comes with a great mounting bracket & other mounting options there is no way to secure it against theft, which make sense since it was intended to watch garden flowers & not food plots. With some inventiveness you can figure out ways to keep it safe.

Overall the pros outweigh the cons such that I am ordering another one of these cameras.

Comment: I found this camera easy to use and well worth the money. Along with being a "plant cam" for taking time lapse pics of developing plants and such, it can also be used to perform time/use studies. For example, I set it up to photograph my humming bird feeder at a 5 minute interval. The camera operated for a total of 1400 minutes. I also knew, by timing 20 hummingbird visits to the feeder, that the average time for a hummingbird at the feeder was 8 seconds. Thus the probability of the bird being at the feeder when a picture is taken is simply 8/300=0.0267. Of the 281 photos taken, 20 of them captured a hummingbird. Thus, I could estimate the number of visits to the feeder during the 1400 minutes to be 20/0.0267=749. That's roughly 32 visits per hour. During this 1400 minute interval, 121 ml of sugar solution was consumed. I can then further estimate that the average feed consumed per visit to be 121/749=0.16 ml. By knowing the caloric content of each ml of feed solution, total daily consumption of feed, and daily caloric needs of the hummingbird (about 10 calories/day) one could even go further to estimate the local population if one could account for all food sources. This same technique can be used to estimate traffic on roads and the like. Have fun!

Comment: I have been using the Plant Cam to photograph a construction project for the last few weeks. The camera is placed in a tree about 50 yards from the building and has performed very well, including several rainstorms. Shooting every 15mins. from 8am - 8pm first seven days the camera at highest resolution onto a 2 gig card the camera had only used 23% of the power from the 4 AA batteries installed. The photo quality is not all that great however for what I'm attempting, my guess is that even though there is an option to set the lens for far distance (3'- infinity)shooting, it is designed more for closeup work. Overall it is a nice product for the price and I would recommend it for closer work, although I would be very happy to see a version suited for distance shooting.

Comment: Well built camera with a lot of nice features - more than I would have expected, for example it can be run off a 12 volt battery. Setup for automated sequences for time lapse is very straightforward. Although it can be set to turn on with daylight, I find it works best to simply give it a schedule to shoot. Photos are not nearly as good as I would have expected, I run them through a batch process in Photoshop to improve sharpness and contrast. I would gladly pay twice the price for one with a better lens and imager. For the price, I give the WSCA04 four and one half stars.

Comment: I have had so much fun with this little guy! The pix are good quality and the stitching makes an instant movie. Highly recommend!