Review on 📷 WingHome Trail Camera 630 - Wildlife & Game Camera for Deer Monitoring, Hunting Gear Accessory with Leica M6 Technology, 0.4s Trigger Time, Farm Scouting, Motion-Activated, Night Vision, Waterproof IP66 by Victor Kakaruk

My experience with cameras is as limited as it gets as this is my second camera. The siren song for me was the fact that it comes with a Leica M6 Solution and a Sony sensor as the imaging hardware and software system. As hard as I tried, and I struggled to do both pre- and post-purchase research, I couldn't find enough information on what their ad campaign was about. Sony sensors seem to be the industry standard that most security cameras are made in. That makes sense to me. Sony is the modern equivalent of Kodak in America. I have a SONY bridge camera, actually the second one. I like and trust Sony optics, but lenses are part of the equation here. The Leica M6 solution somehow sounded great. The Leica M6 is a camera that was released in 2009 and its technology is far superior to anything I have ever owned and currently a used M6 would cost anywhere from $1,000 to $1,800 or more. However, I had high hopes for this combination in terms of optics and image processing. I was initially impressed with the color depth, which is not surprising that my Sony Bridge camera has very good color depth or color brightness due to the way the camera processes the image to increase the number of pixels. This is called interpolation, and it's a common way cameras of all types use to increase the number of MPs from the sensor's baseline to something obviously large. The Sony sensor is a 5-megapixel sensor, which is about average for a gaming camera from what I've read. At least for the price I'm looking at. Anything over 5MP is interpolated, which means the software in the camera takes individual pixels and duplicates the pixels around the original, increasing the image size from 5MP to 8 or 16MP. The camera software can shade additional pixels in the final product and increase the color depth to make the photo look brighter. Because of this, the manufacturer usually gives options above the native 5MP and may or may not advertise that the sensor size is so small. It seems like in an ideal world a 16MP sensor would be 16MP. In this case it is not. Impressive if not overly intense greens and bright blues. Colors, while vibrant, were a little more vibrant than they really are. When it comes to photo clarity, however, this gaming camera shines to the limit. There's a sweet spot where the subject is in focus, the ambient light is just right, and the shaking speed is spot on. Compared to my previous gaming camera, there is no competition here and this camera is the winner among them in this department. I used this camera day and night in three locations at a feeding station. Night shots while using the lowest IR settings and various other settings to optimize image quality. There is an easy menu for navigating and changing settings. However, for my applications where mostly game, birds or anything else came into view, this camera worked well but was easily triggered by a sensor that had nothing in frame most of the time. It's ok, good luck. Finally, the last question was about battery life and ignition failure in combination with light pulses during the IR video. At just over half power, the pulsing IR light was so distracting that I felt like the camera would stop working. I contacted support during this trip and they were helpful but there were no clear solutions to the lighting issue other than maybe the game camera was placed too close to the wall. The bottom line for me was that the colors were too bright and unrealistic for the application I was using them for and the battery life was half what I expected. I see batteries draining like they're going out of style. I suspect if the Winghome 630M game camera was mounted at a feeding station, next to a waterhole or standing pond I would do an impressive job with reasonably sharp images and the best optics I've seen in a game camera. However, because the sensor is so sensitive to movement even on medium settings and where I placed it, it never gets triggered by movement around my house, vegetation and wind.