What’s important in a wildlife camera triggering device?
Summary of an online survey
A survey was made by Ruchik Shastri and PrithviRaj Narendra to understand the current market status and user requirements of camera triggering units. The survey was posted in the last week of January 2014 in the Camera Traps group in Yahoo, Wildlife Camera Trap Photography group in Facebook and sent to contacts by email.
The survey was created and posted through Google Docs and is still available here. The survey consisted of eleven questions in three pages. The first page has one question asking if the respondent has used motion detection based camera triggering unit, the basis on which the second page having questions related to these units is shown. This survey is both quantitative (number actively used, purchases per year, cost, models used) and qualitative in nature (pros, cons, wish list).
Results
The survey was answered by 15 people and here’s information extracted from their responses.
Features
Price
All the camera trigger units bought by the respondents were priced above 200 USD with an average price of between 250 and 300 USD.
Camera trigger models used
The TrailMaster 500 and 1550 were the only motion detection based camera trigger units used by the respondents.
Active usage and purchases in a year
Among the 9 respondents who have used camera triggering units before, here is the maximum, median and minimum of camera triggering devices’ active using and purchases per year.
| | Max | Median | Min |
|-----------------|-----|--------|-----|
| Active usage | 20 | 10 | 2 |
| Bought per year | 15 | 2 | 0 |Respondents’ location
Conclusion
This survey shows that the most important aspect of a camera triggering unit is that it does its basic task reliably. The respondents mentioned that the sensor’s viewing angle and detecting distance be consistent and animals be detected reliably. Other characteristics of a camera trigger system that many of the survey participants wanted were low cost and low latency between detection of motion and image acquisition. Many of the secondary characteristics such as small, sturdy, environment-proof construction, intuitive user interface, good battery life and wireless triggering were mentioned by few participants. Only if a triggering unit does the job of reliably detecting and triggering these secondary characteristics are important.
There was some unexpected information that the respondents provided such as prevention of curious animals (Quati) opening and tampering the camera systems, the hooks to fix to the trees shouldn’t break easily, easy to clean and having a female tripod screw thread.
Only two models of TrailMaster, namely 500 and 1500 were mentioned in the survey. Although there are other camera triggering systems in the market, for the wildlife community there is little choice (at the time of the survey). The prices of these camera trigger systems are in the range of 200 to 300 US $. This amount can get a full-fledged mobile phone nowadays, so there is certainly an opportunity to optimize both the camera trigger system and the business model of the company producing them so that customers can access them at a lower price.
Finally, one needs to keep in mind that in surveys such as this, the respondents usually respond by thinking of the drawbacks of the current system that they are using. This can lead to ‘evolutionary’ improvements in the products, which are definitely required. Any ‘revolutionary’ changes, maybe from some of the characteristics mentioned by one or two respondents needs to get feedback from potential customers at every stage of development.
