Some years ago I purchased a wildlife trail camera. That was at a time when I used to have regular evening visits from bats. I was fairly sure they used to skim the pond to drink and hoped a trail camera would capture any action. It was a complete failure. What little it did capture was of poor quality so I ended up adding it to my pile of unused equipment.
I still like the idea of being able to capture photos of any night time visitors to the garden. I know there are foxes around from time to time and keep hoping hedgehogs will start visiting again. Anyway, I suddenly decided to try a more modern one and ordered a Floureon Trail camera from a seller on eBay. That arrived yesterday so after perusing the instructions - yes I do sometimes read them - I set it up temporarily on the side of the shed aimed at the wilder end of the garden:
The camera runs on 6V so can have 4 or 8 1.5V batteries depending how long it is going to be left running. Four are said to last for up to three months so it is quite economical to use. Unlike my old trail camera this one has a built in colour display so a quick check can be made on what it has captured on the SD card which is an extra purchase. The display is automatically turned off when the camera is switched to automatic operation.
This camera has three passive IR sensors. The two angled ones detect an approaching creature and prime the camera ready to take a photo when the forward facing detector notices any action. It can be set to take a single shot or 2 or 3 in succession. It takes colour during daylight (the background picture on the collage), b/w with IR LEDs at night. If wanted it will record the temperature along with the date and time on the photo.
It can also take movie clips and time lapse so I will have to experiment to see how those work out. Results are not up to my DSLR standards as the camera has a 5 mega pixel sensor which can be interpolated to 8 or 12 Mpix when saved. Still they seem reasonable as record shots of any nocturnal activity and pretty good value for £56. Probably less than half what I paid for my first one.
No problems getting the photos on to a computer. When the provided USB cable is plugged in it installs itself as a removable device on PC or Mac.
