I'll have to agree the Coverts are "the best bang for the money". But no one should expect Reconyx reliability and functionality from anything Chinese and costing a fraction as much as a Reconyx.
This past year I added two 2013 model Covert Black 60's to my dwindling (dying) assortment of trail cams. While I've had better "luck" with these Coverts than Bushnells and Uways, one of these two Coverts periodically just fails to record pics. I've ruled out any card issues. I suspect (based on what I've heard) that Covert would exchange it for another, but I've twice "thought" it might not happen again, then it did. Will go days without recording (while it "seems" to be working properly). I've found out I can "fix" it by re-setting everything to the factory defaults. In the meantime, I'm wondering if I wasted my time with the last time I placed that one. Time will tell.
I also have a 2012 model Covert Black 60 which has not given any problems, so by no means, am I trying to steer anyone away from giving Covert a chance. Over the past year, there was a surplus of 2012 models being sold at a considerable discount. However, those 2012 models will not take an SD card larger than 8gb, and, they are an 8.0 mp cam, while the 2013 Black 60 is a 12.0 mp cam capable of handling up to a 32gb card. (In retrospect, I wish I had just paid a little more and gotten another 2013 model instead of that single 2012 unit.)
Bottom line remains that 2 of my 3 Coverts seem to have made it about 6 months now without failing (which is a better success rate than I've experienced with most other brands).
And, Covert's daytime images are maybe the best I've seen coming from commercially offered cams (they're even better than Reconyx). But the Covert nighttime images are very comparable to most others, and you can simply ignore megapixel ratings for nighttime images. The Reconyx 3.1 mp cam typically produces superior nighttime images to any of the Coverts or Bushnells, the latter of which are often so blurry they have no value.
Just keep in mind what we're really "paying" for is the end product of pics, clear enough to be of value. A significant percentage of the nightime pics will be of little or no value with almost all brands of either "red" or "black" flash cams. And no matter how little money we spend on a particular cam, we have wasted all our money if it fails to deliver those pics, such as by either not working, having a slow trigger, or producing blurry images of no value.
