BSK
Well-Known Member
In a private conversation, Andy S. asked me about the earliest trail-cameras. I responded giving a brief history of trail-cameras that I remember (as I was somewhat involved). Andy S. thought the conversation should be shared with everyone. I've added a few new details as well:
My mentor, Dr. Grant Woods, worked with an engineer and made one of the first trail-cameras for his Masters work in the late 1980s. It used a hacked Kodak disc camera, the one that had the negatives on a cardboard disk, like the old child's toy, the ViewMaster. With that system, he was one of the first researchers to study scrape behavior with a motion-sensitive camera. After that, Grant worked with the developer of what became the first commercially available trail-camera system, Trail Master. The first available unit an "active" unit that required a sending unit, which produced a beam of light, and a receiving unit with a photo-electric eye that monitored the incoming beam of light. If the light stream was interrupted for a predetermined length of time, the receiving unit recorded an event. The receiving unit could be equipped with a camera that would trigger whenever an event was recorded. I believe these units hit the market in the early 1990s. But wow were they expensive! The basic sending and receiving units (TM1500) were around $600, and if equipped with a camera, $1,200. At today's prices, that's $1,200 and $2,400 respectively! But I actually had one of the basic units. Still have it. Next, Trail Master came out with the "passive" unit that became the blueprint for all future trail-cameras (TM500). It had a camera hooked to an infra-red sensor. The problem was, it was only a single sensor, so the camera would trigger whenever there was a sudden increase in infra-red radiation, which means it would trigger whenever the sun came out from behind the clouds! Those units were so frustrating. An entire roll of 36 exposures that were nothing but the sun coming out on a partly cloudy day.
The big change came with the development by two famous wildlife biologists (Jacobsen and Kroll) and their engineers of the NonTypical TrophyCam camera systems around 1998. Those are the ones that took the hunting world by storm. They had figured out that the units needed two infra-red sensors side by side, and the unit would only trigger if the sensors trigger at slightly different times, meaning the source of the warmth was moving right to left or left to right. Those units still used the film cameras, and are the ones most people started with. Eventually, NonTypical was sold and became Cuddeback. Although I'm not a fan of Cuddeback, they did do the hunting world a huge favor by being the first company to produce a trail-camera with an integral digital camera, not an attached hacked camera.
The second huge jump in camera technology came about once the Chinese companies and engineers got involved. Many, MANY of today's camera systems are rebranded versions of these early units, with Covert being one of the originals. To keep from getting sued, I won't go into detail about the industrial espionage that took place in China in those early days, but suffice to say intellectual property theft is such an accepted practice in China that engineers working for one camera company often just walked away with the camera plans and overnight started new companies selling the camera under a different name. However, this system did produce quite a bit of innovation, as each engineer starting his own company added new or upgraded features to the original stolen technology. This bizarre form of competition did produce some truly great cameras. To this day, I'm still using cameras from an upstart company called Uway. Their black-flash cameras truly lead the technology curve.
However, trail-cameras really hit their peak in innovation and quality once big name companies with a lot of money to invest got involved, such as Bushnell and Browning.
My mentor, Dr. Grant Woods, worked with an engineer and made one of the first trail-cameras for his Masters work in the late 1980s. It used a hacked Kodak disc camera, the one that had the negatives on a cardboard disk, like the old child's toy, the ViewMaster. With that system, he was one of the first researchers to study scrape behavior with a motion-sensitive camera. After that, Grant worked with the developer of what became the first commercially available trail-camera system, Trail Master. The first available unit an "active" unit that required a sending unit, which produced a beam of light, and a receiving unit with a photo-electric eye that monitored the incoming beam of light. If the light stream was interrupted for a predetermined length of time, the receiving unit recorded an event. The receiving unit could be equipped with a camera that would trigger whenever an event was recorded. I believe these units hit the market in the early 1990s. But wow were they expensive! The basic sending and receiving units (TM1500) were around $600, and if equipped with a camera, $1,200. At today's prices, that's $1,200 and $2,400 respectively! But I actually had one of the basic units. Still have it. Next, Trail Master came out with the "passive" unit that became the blueprint for all future trail-cameras (TM500). It had a camera hooked to an infra-red sensor. The problem was, it was only a single sensor, so the camera would trigger whenever there was a sudden increase in infra-red radiation, which means it would trigger whenever the sun came out from behind the clouds! Those units were so frustrating. An entire roll of 36 exposures that were nothing but the sun coming out on a partly cloudy day.
The big change came with the development by two famous wildlife biologists (Jacobsen and Kroll) and their engineers of the NonTypical TrophyCam camera systems around 1998. Those are the ones that took the hunting world by storm. They had figured out that the units needed two infra-red sensors side by side, and the unit would only trigger if the sensors trigger at slightly different times, meaning the source of the warmth was moving right to left or left to right. Those units still used the film cameras, and are the ones most people started with. Eventually, NonTypical was sold and became Cuddeback. Although I'm not a fan of Cuddeback, they did do the hunting world a huge favor by being the first company to produce a trail-camera with an integral digital camera, not an attached hacked camera.
The second huge jump in camera technology came about once the Chinese companies and engineers got involved. Many, MANY of today's camera systems are rebranded versions of these early units, with Covert being one of the originals. To keep from getting sued, I won't go into detail about the industrial espionage that took place in China in those early days, but suffice to say intellectual property theft is such an accepted practice in China that engineers working for one camera company often just walked away with the camera plans and overnight started new companies selling the camera under a different name. However, this system did produce quite a bit of innovation, as each engineer starting his own company added new or upgraded features to the original stolen technology. This bizarre form of competition did produce some truly great cameras. To this day, I'm still using cameras from an upstart company called Uway. Their black-flash cameras truly lead the technology curve.
However, trail-cameras really hit their peak in innovation and quality once big name companies with a lot of money to invest got involved, such as Bushnell and Browning.