I have 6 of them. I have no experience with other wireless cameras, but after doing a ton of research and reading about different cameras, I think the Spartans are pretty tough to beat in their price class.
They are pricey (like all wireless cameras that arent junk), around $450. Once you get the camera added to your verizon account as a connected device ($5/mo), and get the camera activated and linked to the web portal and phone app, they are a breeze to operate IMO. I will say that you should probably plan on an hour or more per camera to get through all the setup processes. It is a pain, but to me its well worth it, as I am several hours from my hunting land. One tip i would give would be to follow the instructions EXACTLY and you will not have problems. Us dudes always seem to think we can jump ahead and make assumptions......with these, I quickly found myself asking why I couldn't just follow the damn directions the first time.
As stated, the Premium version of the phone app will be another $3-4 per month, depending on how many credits you buy at a time. Frankly I see this as chicken feed when you have a $450 camera sitting out there, but everyone sees things differently.
Photo quality....day time is quite good IMO, night time is not as good as a plain Moultrie or other camera. they are OK, but the night pics are not as nice.
I had a camera lock up last year, I called support and they sent me the firmware file to manually reload onto the camera with the hopes that it would fix the problem, but it didn't. No problem they said....send in the camera. I got a new camera back in about a week. Cant complain about that. They have always been very helpful for me.
If you buy these, I would urge you to leave the Realtime setting to off. This setting, when on, allows you to have more instantaneous control over the camera. However the tradeoff with battery usage is nowhere near worthwhile for my situation, at least.
My cameras are in a remote part of the state, and I also invested in $25 antenna updgrades, as well as 6v 12ah external battery packs for all of my cameras. The antennas are worthwhile for me, and the external batteries seem to be working well but I have only had them out for a month or so....time will tell. Typical picture send times are 60-80 seconds for me. The camera will not take another pic until the first one is sent.
In my location, AA batteries last around 3 weeks typically and that equates to 600-1000 pictures. Honestly considering the extra cost, I have a hard time justifying lithium AA batteries vs. plain old Duracell. There are gains, but for me they weren't that impressive considering the price difference. I do have a friend who has one in MN where signal is pretty good...and he gets much longer life.
If you have any questions I'd be happy to help. I am certainly not an expert but I have done a quite a bit of messing around with them so I might know a few answers that a new guy wouldn't. Good luck.
UR