Best Trail Cameras For The Money (5 Trail Cameras Reviewed)

Trail camera set up

The Strike Force Pro is switched on by sliding the power switch up. The 1.5” viewing screen displays the Browning logo on startup, followed by a live feed from the camera lens. The camera will count down from 10 – 0 to go live.

Pressing the mode button on startup gives  access the setup menu. The colour screen is very easy to read. I don’t have the best eyesight and I had no trouble reading all the settings.

The navigation buttons are a good size, I had no problems pressing them with my fat fingers. They also glow a fairly bright luminous green so will show up well in low light.

From the setup menu below are all the options available. I will discuss the main settings that are most used as some of them are self explanatory.

• Date
• Time
• Mode
• Capture Delay
• Picture Size
• Multishot
• Video Quality
• Video Length
• Smart IR
• Night Exp
• Adjustable IR Flash
• Timelapse Settings
• Temperature Units
• Info Strip
• SD Card Management
• Motion Test
• Camera Name
• Default Settings
• Delete All
• Software Upgrade

Ok, so that seems quite a lot of settings, but most are typical to all trail cameras and are obvious, hopefully. The most important setting is “Mode”. This has 3 settings, still pictures, timelapse and video. When certain modes are selected, some of the other settings that are not relevant to that particular mode are “greyed out” so you can’t choose them. Which makes sense.

Still picture mode and capture delay

This setting will take pictures of game animals during the daytime and at night. The night time pictures will be black and white. This setting is most used for covering trails and feeding areas.

You will need to set the capture delay to suit your location. The options are from 1 second upto 60 minutes. For example if your covering a food plot you don’t want the camera triggering every second, so you would choose every 10 minutes instead.

The picture size options are 4MP, 8MP, 12MP and 18MP. Remember the larger the size picture the more space it will take up on the SD card. 4MP pictures are fine for scouting an area for white tails.

Multi shot mode

This mode is used in conjunction with still picture mode. There are 2 types to choose from: Multi Shot and Rapid Fire. You can set the camera to take between 2 – 8 pictures when triggered with a 2 second delay between shots or 2 – 8 pictures in quick succession. A useful feature and welcome addition to this trail cam.

Video mode and smart IR

The Strike Force Pro records video at 720p. There are 2 settings, High and Ultra. This dictates how much compression the video has. I would tend to use the Ultra setting as I found the High setting to be quite pixelated for my liking.

The video length may be set from 5 seconds up to 2 minutes. The video also has sound, which I found to be of reasonable quality, usually of just bird song in the background during the day, which it picked up clearly without distortion.

The Smart IR option is very useful if your setting the camera up where you expect a game animal to graze in front of the sensor. Choosing Smart IR mode, the camera will carry on recording if it picks up movement. If a deer stands still in front of the camera, it will stop recording video.

Adjustable flash

You can adjust the IR LED power for night photos. There are 3 settings:

• Power Save, ideal for wooded areas within 70 feet of the camera
• Long Range,  Perfect for open areas such as food plots in a field
• Fast Motion, Ideal for trails where, game is moving quickly

Timelapse settings

Timelapse is a great way to record all the activity in an area. The timelapse frequency can be set from 5 seconds upto 60 minutes.

The timelapse period is a clever setting that is very useful for scouting. The camera can be set to all day or 2,3 or 4 hours before and after sunset. The camera learns and adjusts the length of the day automatically. I’m not sure how it does this but it seems to work well from my experience as long as the camera is not facing South.

Other functions and modes

The motion test function is worth mentioning, all it does is set the camera to detect motion which is then displayed via a small red led in the top right of the camera housing. I used this on several set ups, waving my arms about to make sure of the range and detection angle was covering my chosen target area. A useful addition to this trail cam.

There’s also a handy SD card management option which will re-record over the first image when the card is full. I didn’t use this feature, but with the ability to hold a 512Gb SD card I’m not sure I’d ever use it. Although some people may find a use for it.

Video and picture quality

As mentioned earlier the video is recorded in high definition at 720p which is a slight disappointment that it’s not the full 1080p. However this trail camera does have an excellent video to battery life ratio which may be the reason why Browning chose the lesser resolution.

The video quality at Ultra setting was excellent overall. I did notice some pixelation at the very beginning of some clips during the day, but once the sensor started to run it smoothed out.

The video is slightly too colour saturated, the green hues are too green for my taste. This is something you could address using a software video editing program such as Adobe Premier or similar if you wish to share your clips. Of course for scouting it doesn’t matter as the detail is there in the recorded video pictures.

The video clips are in the Windows AVI format so you will have to use the convert function in your Quicktime Player on a Mac which is what I did and had no issue doing so.

The still pictures were great quality. Similar to the video, I found them over saturated in colour but not quite as pronounced as the video. Again you can reduce the colour saturation in the many photo editing software programmes available today.

Detection range and IR flash

Trail camera manufacturers always give figures for ranges that are difficult to achieve in many settings. Browning specify that the camera has a 120 feet flash range and an 80 feet detection range. In my experience in reviewing this trail cam, they’re not far off.

The field of view for the camera lens is around 45 degrees, maybe slightly more. The detection angle is less at 30 degrees. The plus side to this is that you won’t get so many false triggers. The downside is that if your covering a trail you’ll get less captures when a game animal moves through the camera lens FOV.

Overall I found both the detection range and flash range to be excellent for a trail camera priced at this level.

Trigger Speed

The trigger speed is impressive for both pictures and especially video. The picture trigger speed is very low at 0.3 seconds. I found the camera missed very little, I only had a few tail end shots of grey squirrels 2 feet away from the camera. The video trigger speed is even more impressive, 0.4 seconds is outstanding for a trail camera for this money.