General Information
How to catch a package thief - and the FedEx- and the UPS-driver…
Since we moved to our new home in Charleston WV, we experienced packages that showed up as »delivered« in the tracking, but actually never arrived. We were long suspecting that the FedEx- and UPS-drivers were dropping off our deliveries at the entrance of our driveway, instead of driving up the hill to our house and deliver them correctly. When we lost the package with the food for our spring-duckings and five other deliveries in February 2019 we had enough.
I spent several hours on the internet and found the Victony HC800A trail-camera on amazon.com for about fourty Benjamin's and ordered it. Just two days later it arrived in a cardboard box:
The box contained the camera itself, the user's manual, a fixture that can be screwed to a wall and a belt to tie the camera to a tree or pole:
I also ordered three 32GiB Micro-SD cards, as the camera has just 16MiB internal memory, which is barely enough for 4 pictures:
The camera needs eight (8!) double A (AA) batteries to operate and as a test, i just left it outside with my ducks to shoot some pictures, which i then compiled into the video »The secret life of my ducks«:
The quality of pictures, taken during the day is very satisfying! The camera was mounted to a tree-stump, overseeing the entrance of the driveway and our mailbox:
This is the camera's integrated display which shows the battery status, current temperature, number of pictures taken and other things:
And here is another example picture, taken during the day:
And here is an example picture, taken during the night: Me, picking up a package from the driveway, that fortunately wasn't stolen:
During one night some curious deer checked it out, so here are two examples of pictures taken while it was pitch black outside:
In the end we did not caught the package thief, but could prove to FedEx as well as UPS that their drivers did not deliver packages correctly to our house and corrective measures were performed by both companies. We now get our stuff delivered to our house; Problem solved!
Summary
We are very happy with that camera, it solved pour problem without us investing a fortune. Configuration and operating the camera is pretty straight-forward even for dummies…
Technical stuff:
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More pictures and videos are available in my »TrailCam Album«, whenever the camera records something interesting i will upload it there.
Since we moved to our new home in Charleston WV, we experienced packages that showed up as »delivered« in the tracking, but actually never arrived. We were long suspecting that the FedEx- and UPS-drivers were dropping off our deliveries at the entrance of our driveway, instead of driving up the hill to our house and deliver them correctly. When we lost the package with the food for our spring-duckings and five other deliveries in February 2019 we had enough.
I spent several hours on the internet and found the Victony HC800A trail-camera on amazon.com for about fourty Benjamin's and ordered it. Just two days later it arrived in a cardboard box:
The box contained the camera itself, the user's manual, a fixture that can be screwed to a wall and a belt to tie the camera to a tree or pole:
I also ordered three 32GiB Micro-SD cards, as the camera has just 16MiB internal memory, which is barely enough for 4 pictures:
The camera needs eight (8!) double A (AA) batteries to operate and as a test, i just left it outside with my ducks to shoot some pictures, which i then compiled into the video »The secret life of my ducks«:
The quality of pictures, taken during the day is very satisfying! The camera was mounted to a tree-stump, overseeing the entrance of the driveway and our mailbox:
This is the camera's integrated display which shows the battery status, current temperature, number of pictures taken and other things:
And here is another example picture, taken during the day:
And here is an example picture, taken during the night: Me, picking up a package from the driveway, that fortunately wasn't stolen:
During one night some curious deer checked it out, so here are two examples of pictures taken while it was pitch black outside:
In the end we did not caught the package thief, but could prove to FedEx as well as UPS that their drivers did not deliver packages correctly to our house and corrective measures were performed by both companies. We now get our stuff delivered to our house; Problem solved!
Summary
We are very happy with that camera, it solved pour problem without us investing a fortune. Configuration and operating the camera is pretty straight-forward even for dummies…
Technical stuff:
- Wide lens - 120° fixed objective
- Three PIR sensors covering 120°
- 3 Modes: Photo, Video and Video and Photo
- 42 infrared LEDs for night vision
- Water resistant IP65
- Maximum 32 GiB memory card supported, cycle recording is supported
- Trigger time 0.3s
- 2" TFT display and 8 keys to configure the camera through a menu
- Date, time temperature, battery status and moon-phase stamped into pictures and videos
- 4 digit password functionality
- Micro USB 2.0 port to connect the camera to a computer
- Power supply: 8 AA batteries or external power supply (6V)
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Pro | Con |
|---|---|
| Easy to operate | The LEDs are visible to the naked eye, so if a thief would steal a package during darkness the camera could be detected and very likely stolen too. |
| Good picture quality during daylight | Nighttime pictures are very dark and blurry |
| Water resistance very good, even during periods of frost | We found the only useful operation mode is Photo: Video drains the batteries and fills up the memory card quickly, the combination is just BS: First the camera shoots pictures and then records a video. Most of the time the video shows nothing. |
| The price is unbeatable! | Currently the camera is unavailable… |
| Battery life sufficient in Photo mode (5 days with 8 AA alkaline batteries) | Batteries won't last long when recording videos |
More pictures and videos are available in my »TrailCam Album«, whenever the camera records something interesting i will upload it there.
