New Browning

The wind was howling in Montana the past few days. When I brought the 1DII/PIR in Monday night, it was crusted in ice. Whoops, I didn't think that was going to happen, but weatherproofing has been a major selling point of the Canon 1 line since the first EOS-1 film camera was introduced in 1989. I dried it off and it seems fine.

Melted Browning #6 had been pointed at the bird house during the storm, but there was excitement yesterday when a shipment from B&H arrived. The new Browning BTC Patriot FHD superficially resembles the 5-year-old Browning #5, but is wider and the camo is perhaps a bit darker. (It would also resemble #6 if #6 wasn't fire-damaged and wrapped in tape.) It also has two camera lenses, one for day and one for night. The most interesting thing is the listed "effective pixels" of the daytime sensor is 4208x2368. If true, that's about 10Mp, so I set the image size to medium. With all my previous trailcams except the Reconyx, I always set image size to low, about 4Mp, because the manufacturers lie about camera resolution. Even this new camera claims 24Mp resolution, which it achieves through upsizing the 10Mp image. That's not resolution. (Reconyx does not lie about camera resolution, but the image size of the two cameras I have is only 3Mp. They have a newer camera that is 8Mp, but it costs more than 3x as much as the new Browning.)

The new Browning has been designated as #11 (although it says #13 on these images; I forgot how to count) and is now in service watching the bird house. My first impression is the image quality is a lot better than the previous Brownings, but the images are still a bit oversharpened. I wish they would just leave it alone and let the user do sharpening in post processing, but I suppose that's not their target audience.

I see the info strip now has barometric pressure. Something I didn't know I needed.