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WhitetailCam S40 Digital Trail CameraI’m not going to do a full blown review on this camera, I just wanted to tell you a little about it if any pictures from it show up on our Whitetail Deer Photographs pages. This may also show a little more about the homebrew game camera possibilities. The Sony camera in the Whitetailcam S40 is the same camera that is in the Trail Watcher 2040 and the Woodland SpyCam so we already knew that it was a good camera. Our previous homebrew trail camera, the Whitetailcam P41, used a Pelican 1060 case and we scaled down to a 1040 for this camera. The Trail Watcher 2040 uses the even smaller 1020 case but I wouldn’t advise trying a case this small until you get good at building them. If you’re new to game camera building you don’t need the added hassle of trying to fit everything into tight spaces. One feature this camera has that our other cams do not is the Trail Mode feature. When set in Trail Mode the camera stays on and will trigger as soon as three seconds after the first trigger. The camera will stay on for 30 seconds waiting for the trailing deer before shutting off. Of course, as the name implies, this is to catch trailing deer as they travel along a trail. We haven’t tried this yet but we will once our food plots green up again. One thing we have noticed about this camera is that it is slow and I'm not sure why. The trail cams made with the Sony S40 are not known for blazing speed but this one is slower than both the Trail Watcher 2040 and the Woodland SpyCam which both use the same Sony S40 camera. I may try some other settings to see if I can speed it up so I'll let you know if it works. This camera was very hard on 9 volt batteries and I could not find out why this was happening. Eventually I started using a rechargeable 9 volt battery which would last about a week. This was poor performance and not acceptable. I had another controller board that was also made my Pixcontroller that was what they called a Universal board. We bought another case and put this trail cam together using the same camera. Unfortunately this set-up has used one 9 volt battery in a short time as well. I can't figure out why this is happening. I've used two different boards, two different battery holders and I know the camera is not the culprit since I've used this camera in the Trail Watcher 2040 with no problems. I can get about one month with an alkaline 9 volt battery but I'd like to get much better life than this. I've used a rechargeable battery and it only lasted 3 to 4 days. This is not acceptable. I am now using the cheaper Rayovac batteries and getting about one month out of them. The power up time with the new board is faster than the previous board. It has a power up time similar to the Woodland SpyCam and the Trail Watcher 2040, which both use the Sony S40 digital camera. I'm pleased with this performance. So far I've not been happy with either of these homemade trail cameras.
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