Review on Enhanced Brinno TLC200 Pro Time Lapse Camera with Extended 42-Day Battery Life - Creates High-Quality HDR 720P Timelapse Videos - Ideal for Indoor Projects of Limited Duration by Kyle Omaha

This is a well-integrated system that consumes very little battery power, but the image quality is on par with a relatively cheap webcam. It doesn't help that the only supported mode is to encode each frame into a video file instead of being able to save a JPG or even some kind of RAW. One or the other will certainly be happy if the camera automatically creates video files. I myself would have preferred discrete frames. Update: After using it for a while and then sitting down to analyze the videos it made, I have more criticisms and comments. The video codec is an MJPEG stream, so there's no benefit to temporal compression, it's literally just a few jpeg images stitched together. At "best" quality, the space used per frame (400kb/frame on a complex, well-lit image for 720p images) is about 95% equivalent to JPEG quality, but somehow they might still seem to have a lot of artifacts . because not all JPEG encoders are the same. Simply put, the camera only produces ugly videos. I don't know if it's the optics, the sensor, the coding, or both. Despite the tiny sensor, it has a surprisingly shallow depth of field. The LCD has such a low resolution that it's difficult to get proper focus even with focus assist. You can approach, but you might get frustrated later when you watch your videos. This seems to work best for distant subjects, where everything in the frame is near-infinitely sharp. When used with fresh and expensive branded lithium batteries, it lasted about 105 days with 10-minute recordings. They could probably design it to improve battery life if they wanted, but that's acceptable for a cheap consumer device. In 105 days it only used 3.6GB from my 16GB card. Don't worry about SD cards larger than 4 or 8GB unless you plan to leave the card and just change the batteries, e.g. B. on the go, or if you have not set a very short photo delay. It seems to work better with some brands of SD cards than others. I think I'm using a cheap 16GB Transcend card I have laying around and it works fine. So far she has survived the whole spring without dying, but I have her in the official outdoor enclosure and then again a lot of rain/sun. a sign I built from a plastic container. It still gets rain and fog because the body doesn't really do anything other than make it waterproof, and the lens is so wide you can't have a rain cover to keep it out of the frame. I also placed small moisture-wicking tabs inside the case to prevent internal condensation from becoming an issue. The camera comes in a chic box that seems to be very popular with overpriced consumer electronics. It reminds me a lot of a Fitbit or Handybox. The device is quite slim and looks like a piece of modern technology. The actual functionality of the device could probably be mimicked with something not much more powerful than a cheap stm32 chip, so I'm surprised the battery life isn't better. than there is. Modern embedded chips can be *extremely* power efficient for such applications. I wouldn't be surprised if it accesses the SD card via SPI, which could explain the uneven card support. Some SD cards do not support SPI well. This does not mean that more speed is needed (maximum 500 kb/s when recording at 1 fps). The only people I would recommend this to are those who want to do long periods of time (up to 3 months unsupervised), who don't care too much about image quality, and who need the camera outdoors without anyone around Source. To be honest, a quality security camera can work better in many cases. Most of them have a time-lapse function. For around $200 for this camera + body + mount, you can get a decent trail/gaming camera from a reputable brand, some of which have the best reputation for customer service. However, they mostly have fixed focal length lenses. I have a security camera for $70. Maybe I'll do a few interval shots with it and compare the image quality later.