I received this product in exchange for my fair and unbiased review. TL-DR – The Rexing H1 Blackhawk Train Camera is a decent device overall but is held back by the device’s firmware and the overall value of the package.
Compared to other non-cellular trail cameras in this price range, you don’t get included batteries or an included SD card. The unit itself is at least well-made and I found it to be very water resistant (it withstood being sprayed by a garden hose).
Pictures and video shot by the camera – both in daylight and at night – is mostly clear with some artifacting from the camera itself, a good tradeoff for the high sensitivity of the sensor. The mounting hardware it comes with is also well-made and easy to use – the belt easily wraps around medium-sized trees and the hard mount goes together easily and securely.
Besides the value proposition, the firmware is the other problem with this camera – it doesn’t allow for higher compression of images and video, it causes the IR sensor to be too sensitive at even its lowest setting, and the menu system is just very dated in how it looks and works.
It’s worth considering if you’re looking for a trail camera, but you can do better based on value. —————————————————— Unboxing and first impressions: The H1 Blackhawk Trail Camera is packaged in a relatively plain cardboard box.
Items inside of the box are packaged in plastic – this is one case where I’d prefer to see the packaging be all paper, as there’s just as much chance someone would be setting this up out in the field as they would be at home, meaning you have to deal with packaging waste properly.
Inside the box is the trail camera itself, a mounting belt (meant to go around trees or posts), a hard mount (meant to be screwed into a board, pole, or bolted to a t-post with a nut and bolt you can get at any hardware store), a typical Mini USB cable (which I’m surprised is still a thing in 2021, but I’m not knocking it because it’s easier to plug in correctly the first time than Micro USB ever was), and instructions for usage.
What I didn’t find in the box were a SD card and AA batteries, both necessary for use. Considering that other trail cameras this competes with come with those items at lower prices, I was disappointed about this.
The camera itself is built well. The plastic exterior is tough enough where it survived a fall onto a cement floor without a scratch. It has a 3 lens motion sensor, 40 IR LEDs in all, LEDs to indicate power and recording, belt and cable loops on the back side of the unit, and both a hard mount and a passthrough to the DC in port on the bottom.
the unit latches together with two snaps and the rubber gasket protecting the electronics inside. There’s a small hole so you can lock or zip tie the unit closed. The electronics package has the battery storage on one side of the unit and a small screen and controls on the other.
At the bottom of the controls are a full-sized SD card slot, a Mini USB port (for those of you who don’t have a SD card reader), and the DC in port. The controls are clicky but somewhat mushy and the screen is clear but too small to be useful outside of device setup.
—————————————————— Setup and usage: The belt is nylon with a plastic clip buckle and holds securely. The hard mount is simple to assemble and use – you’ll just need a socket and a wrench to initially pit it together.
For my testing, I chose to go with the belt clip because of placing the camera on a tree. Inserting batteries is easy enough. You only need 4 batteries to power it on, but you can add 8 batteries so the camera has double the available power and battery life.
Note that NiMH and NiCD rechargeable batteries won’t work properly in this device; I tried a set (because science) and got 30 seconds of run time out of the H1 Blackhawk in setup mode. In addition to Alkaline and Lithium disposable batteries, you can also obtain alternative ways to power the camera – either a 6 volt transformer or a third party battery pack with 6 volt output.
Configuring the camera is easy enough, once you get used to a somewhat archaic menu system on the camera. You get options for video and/or photo mode, what resolution the pictures and video will be shot in, time lapse recording, sensitivity of the motion sensor, whether it uses the side motion sensors or not, sound recording, and a few other system settings.
Photo and video quality are not options in the setup, however, so you can’t set the camera to tie up around 4MB per picture file and around 100MB per 15 seconds of video recording when set to full resolution; because of this, you’ll find that a 32GB SD card will fill up very quickly.
The reason I say photo and video quality should be adjustable is I did compress several pictures to between 1/5 and 1/6th of their original size using macOS’s Preview app and saw no discernible difference in picture quality (photos went from around 4MB each to 650-800KB each).
I also found the motion sensors to be very sensitive, even at the low setting. My 32GB SD card I tested with filled in a matter of hours and the 8 AA batteries are already about 50% depleted over two days of being deployed at different spots because of this (set to record video at 1080p while taking pictures at 16mp).
The picture quality was good overall, though while zoomed in, even the 16mb images tended to look “softened” around the edges; zoomed out, everything looked sharp while being viewed on a 1440p 27″ monitor.
While images do have some artifacting from the camera sensor being set to high sensitivity, the tradeoff is better low-light photos. The artifacting improved with lower resolutions. IR photos and videos were crisp, clear monochrome and only had artifacts in the darkest portions of the images and video.
Inserting and removing the SD card can be a little difficult; I found that I needed a pencil to engage and disengage the locking mechanism. Note that it also uses standard SD cards so you can feel free to push a little harder to engage and disengage the locking mechanism without fear of destroying your memory card.
My 32GB SDXC card worked perfectly, and the device claims compatibility with up to 128GB SD cards. You’ll want to set it up to test your chosen settings before you deploy it for “field research”. Once you have it configured and working the way you want it working, you can deploy it to the hunting grounds and check it every few days for new content.
Keep in mind the small screen viewer isn’t particularly great, so you may want to invest in an OTG SD card reader (Android) or the Camera Connection Kit (Apple) so you can view photos on your phone. —————————————————— Issues: So I think I’ve covered them all, but to reiterate: 1 – file sizes of pictures and video are huge so you should get a large capacity SD card to go with this camera 2 – the camera does not come with a SD card or batteries in the box, a big omission since competing products include these things and cost less 3 – the archaic menu feels cumbersome until you get used to it 4 – overly sensitive motion sensor 5 – soft edges while zoomed in on photos, including high megapixel images.
6 – just a bad value proposition compared to competition The sensitivity and image compression issues might be fixable with a firmware update, as would be the menu system. If the camera were less expensive, the omission of batteries and the SD card would be more acceptable; personally, I’d rather see batteries and a 32GB SD card included, but either a price drop or inclusion of those two things would fix the value proposition for me as the camera is a little better with image quality than similarly-priced competing products.
—————————————————— Conclusion: The Rexing H1 Blackhawk, by all measures, is a pretty decent trail camera. It’s dragged down, however, by poor design decisions in the firmware (menu system and image compression) and being a bad value proposition compared to competing products.
For many people, image and video quality won’t outweigh a lack of storage and batteries as pack-in extras, but even with the bad value proposition versus competing products in that regard, it’s still worth considering as it does the job well, but you can do better based on value.
Because it does what it needs to do well, however, I can recommend this.