Moultrie Mobile's 2024 release: The Edge Pro2-–review in progress

[robby denning]

This is my 3rd season running the Edge series, starting with their first Edge: https://rokslide.com/forums/threads/moultrie-mobile-edge-trail-camera-review.283316/

Their Edge Pro:

Moultrie Mobile releases Edge Pro for 2023–review in progress

I ran the Edges for 2022 into 2023 (thread here ) Very happy with those. Two have been in operation in the field 12 months next week with no battery change. To be fair, they were in check-in mode (camera checks in daily to network but doesn’t send photos) from mid November to Early July but...

rokslide.com

And now the Edge 2 Pro...which I'll cover on this thread

Each Gen adds features/upgrades that have improved these:

1) Image Quality/Trigger speeed

2) Filtering

3) Smart Tags

4) Battery Life

I'll jump into each one.

Image Quality

the original Edge was a 33MP/720p

the Edge Pro jumped to 36MP/1080p

and now the Edge 2 Pro is 40MP/1440p

I put my Edge 2 Pro in the field mid July, it's in a heavy feeding area. Based on previous years, I get at least does and fawns every few days and seems like a bach herd of bucks comes throught about twice per summer.

The images first come through at a standard quality which is good enough to see what you're looking at and saves some battery. This image is standard:



Then if you wanna take a better look, you can request an HD (full 40MP) image. It'll come through on the cams next scheduled upload (in my case, every 12-24 hours). This is an HD Image:



This also is an HD image:



a nice feature to really study a buck, but not game changing.

I have not shot a lot of video because these cameras are very hard to access and might end up staying in the field overwinter, so I'm always conserving battery. The videos I've received have been of good quality, and include sound. I'd load some but they just give too much away. Sorry. But I can say you can trust the video quality. What I do is wait until I start getting pics of bucks in the area, set my cam to upload every 3 hours and switch to video. Seems like the bucks are there a day or two (not always) and I usually end up with a video. Like the HD photos, the videos are not uploaded automatically (that burns battery) but rather you see a thumbnail and can request a video on next upload. That's why I set it to 3 hours so I don't have to wait. Once activity drops, I go back to 12-24 hours. I'll cover more on that when I get to battery life post. But the image quality checks the box

Trigger Speed:

Each Gen has decreased trigger speed starting at 0.65 sec, to 0.40 sec, to now 0.3 sec.

While you really never know what you're missing, I see lots of noses and birds at edge of images, so I can say I'm happy with (really) all of them. But peace of mind knowing that the 0.3 sec in the Edge 2 Pro is less than half the original Edge.

More on the other upgrades later.

 

[robby denning]

Ok, on the Filtering, this is really the leap forward in Tcams to me in the last few years.


With Moultrie, the Filtering saves you so much time trying to find and organize images. Let's say I had a buck on a Tcam last year and another shows up the next year. I can filter by camera folder/date to compare the bucks easily. Is it the same one, or not? Either way, I'm not digging through hundreds (thousands) of images to compare.

You can also filter for a myriad of other data points like Time of Day, Day/Night, High Res/Low Res/Video/thumbnails, Moon Phase/ Temperature, Barometric Pressure/ and Self Ratings (scale of 1 to 5 stars)





Using the Moon Phase filter, I see one Tcam in a saddle that the vast majority of buck pics are under a dark moon! I'd never have known that without Filtering. You can go so far down the rabbit hole on this stuff, someone's gonna have to throw you a rope.

The next level of Filtering is Smart Tags. Smart Tags is the tech that automatically tags an image based on what the AI sees. For example, in the original Pro, and now Pro2, the camera is tagging the image according to what you've told it to send you, like "bucks, does, person…".






This saves battery because the camera will only send you those images, rather than everything it captures (in the pre-pro 1 & 2 Tcams--the original Edge--they send all the pics but the app does the Smart Tags, thats why the Pro 1 & 2 have better battery life).

This is another big advancement to me. Besides saving battery life, it's saving me time not having to look at all the images the cameras send. It's not a perfect technology and I do receive some images that I had not approved to send, but it does work. And because it's AI, you can help it learn by opening the image details and see if/what it applied a Smart Tag. Let's say a pic of a small buck is tagged as a doe, I can help the AI by selecting "no". Or if it's tagged correctly, I can even say "yes" improving it's accuracy.



My fav Smart Tag is "Mature Buck". It's pretty dang accurate on muleys with say an 18" spread and up.



Next post, I'll touch on Battery Life a bit more, although I've covered it pretty well. I'll look at some Tcam launch dates and the remaining battery life over some various Tcams. This will be for Alkaline only, because the Lithium reports 100% until the day they die. Moultrie is aware of this glitch. I'm testing a "work-around" and will report on it later.