The Moultrie game trail cameras have undergone an impressive redesign for 2017. As part of the new series, the Moultrie M-40i is top of the line and does not disappoint. From fast detection, to outstanding image quality, and up to 9 months of battery life, the M-40i is a top trail camera option. Its video battery life is below average, but performs admirably in other aspects.

The slimmed down M-40i has an attractive pine camo case. It bears forth a solid 16MP image sensor, very fast trigger speed of 0.3 seconds, and delivers 1080p HD video with audio. This game cam has the specs that hunters are asking for, and our M-40i review has all the details.

Tech Specs

Camera Design – New Case for 2017

The Moultrie M40i is a well-designed and engineered game camera. The new case design is much smaller than its Gen2 predecessors. It offers a great option for hunters looking for smaller yet powerful trail cameras. A palm-sized game camera with good camouflaging is easier to carry, easier to mount on trees, harder to spot by a trespasser.

The latch to open and close the camera has an unusual mechanism, but it’s still easy to operate. The battery tray ejects at the bottom of the camera and it is easy to load and unload the batteries.

For setup, users who are familiar with the programming functions on older models will have to re-learn the M-40i’s new menu with the help of the owner’s manual. The menus on these new Moultrie cams are not their strong suit.

Detection & Trigger

Picture detection and recovery with the M-40i appears to be exceptional. It captures the first picture at a snappy 0.3 seconds and recovers at a relatively fast 2.7 seconds to capture the next shot. This high trigger and recovery speed ensures you never miss a picture of any game before it scrambles out of sight.

The M-40i features a detection range of 80ft; and with its top-of-the-range Invisible Infrared Flash technology, the camera can comfortably illuminate and photograph animals within this range in total darkness. The M-40i’s detection width also closely matches its field of view, which is indeed an excellent detection range.

Picture & Video Quality

Daytime Photos– The daytime images captured with the M-40i trail camera are quite impressive. The pictures have great clarity and display realistic colors as well as a great depth of field. The camera stops motion well during the day too.

With the camera’s 16MP image sensor and a 16:9 wide image format, you get a very nice wide field of view. This is truly apparent when you have two cameras pointed at the same spot.

Nighttime Photos– Equally, night photos captured with the M-40i appear to be great. It has an excellent flash range and does very well in terms of contrast.  Whether taken in dense woods or open fields, the night photos look very satisfying.

There are cases where blurring occurs, particularly on running animals, but that can be controlled using the “Motion Freeze” setting to quicken the shutter speed and hence freeze fast-moving objects for clear shots. You may also get some whiteout on near objects at night probably because the camera has such a good close range focus and an Infrared Flash.

Video – Video quality with the M-40i is very good. It mimics the picture quality, both during the day and night. The camera is capable of high-resolution videos of up to 1920×080 pixels. The night videos also have great looking contrast, which is a big win for night operation.

Battery Life

The M-40i trail camera runs on 8 AA batteries with the capability of capturing close to 19,000 images on a 32GB card. The battery efficiency of this camera highly depends on whether you use it for capturing pictures or video. In picture mode, the camera uses relatively low power compared to the video mode, which uses large amounts of power per video clip.

According to TrailCamPro, if the camera took 70 pictures over each 24-hour period, it would last 9 months in the field on a set of 8 AA Lithium batteries. This puts it among the most efficient cameras in picture mode. However, if it were to take 30 10-second videos every 24 hours, it would struggle to operate beyond a month and a half on similar batteries, making it one of the more inefficient video trail cameras.

Conclusion