Wildview Game Scouting Camera Review

The Wildview Game Scouting Camera looks like it was introduced to try to capture the lower end of the digital scouting camera market. Initially I didn’t have any interest in testing the Wildview but after receiving an e-mail question about them and seeing a little interest in the forums I decided to purchase one and review it.

The Wildview is a 0.3 MP camera and has the capability of taking only VGA and QVGA images. The VGA setting is the high quality setting on this camera. I do not leave my cameras on the VGA setting if they have a higher setting. When using the VGA setting you cannot blow the picture up to get better detail. All of the digital scouting cameras I have previously tested have had higher quality settings than VGA available.

As expected the picture quality is poor. The VGA size pictures lack clarity and the flash is also poor. Animals need to be real close at night. You can take a look at some Wildview pictures and our picture quality grade explanation here.

Recently we had been getting black pictures so it looked like the flash was not going off. I brought the unit home to test it in the house and see exactly what was going on. After two days and 55 pictures I took a look at them and found that 3 of the 55 pictures were black. Apparently the flash fails to go off on some pictures. We'll have to wait and see if it gets worse.

The Wildview game scouting camera operates on four C size alkaline batteries. This isn’t an excessive number of batteries and won’t be a big problem if battery life is long, but I still like using re-chargeable AA’s. The first set of batteries lasted about three weeks. The last set of new batteries were dead in two weeks and there weren't any pictures on the memory card. The battery life hasn't been very promising.

I purchased four C size NiMH rechargeable batteries and have used them one time. The camera took 51 pictures before the batteries went dead and I do not know how long they lasted. I recharged them and am currently testing the Wildview game scouting camera in the house. We'll see how long the charge lasts this time, so far it has taken 111 pictures of us in five days and they are still working.

Set-up and operation is simple, similar to the Bushnell Trail Scout. Three switches are used to set the unit up. Similar to the Bushnell, this simplicity limits some of the options that are common to most of the other cameras. One possible problem is that if the unit is left in test mode it will not automatically switch to a picture-taking mode after some time. I can easily see myself leaving it in test mode so I do not use the test mode at all. Most other digital scouting cameras will revert to picture taking mode when left in the test mode after a certain period of time.

The Wildview game scouting camera comes with a strap to attach it to a tree but there is no way of locking it to the tree. The directions state that a locking plate is available. This strap system is identical to the Stealth Cam.

There is a built in 8 MB of internal memory and a port for an SD memory card. One important note is that the internal memory is erased when the batteries are removed or when they completely lose their charge. This would be difficult for hunters such as me whom often leave their digital scouting cameras in the woods for long periods. You could go to retrieve you camera and find that there are no images left and the batteries are dead. This is not a problem when using the SD memory card.

The Wildview game scouting camera does not have an LCD screen to view the pictures but it does come with a USB cable to download your pictures.

One thing that I noticed real fast when I downloaded the first pictures was that there is no date or time stamp. This is a problem for me, I really like knowing the date and time that each picture is taken.

The time delay between pictures can be set for four delay times; 1, 5, 10 and 20 minutes. This is another feature limited by the simplicity. These delays are OK but the addition of a couple more would have been nice. When setting a scouting camera along a trail I like to use short delays even as low as 10 and 30 seconds.

This camera cannot be used as a personal digital camera.

The Wildview game scouting camera, like each of the other scouting cameras we have tested, has the capability to record short video clips.

Wildview has introduced a 2.0 MP scouting camera.


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