Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Optics Spotter with phone skope vs super zoom camera?

I just sold my spotting scope kinda on a whim. I need to replace it before the summer shooting season and the fall hunting. I do a fair amount of long range hunting and have started filming my hunts, or at least shots. I have been using a Nikon fieldscope ED with my iPhone on a tripod. The videos are pretty cool to watch later. Also I find that looking at the screen on my phone is easier on my eyes than looking with one eye closed in the spotter.

Transition here to my thoughts on what to replace this with.

A couple years ago a buddy, who does some guided hunts, told me about a client who brought a camera on the hunt that could zoom in and spot bullet holes on paper at 1,000yds. They were testing the guns and verifying drops the day before the season. He said that they would shoot and he had no idea where the bullets hit with his Swarovski spotter but the client could zoom in with this camera and see the holes in paper. The guy said it was a Nikon and after looking into it I believe it was the P900 with a zoom range from 24-2000mm that’s huge!

I’m no Optics expert but that seems very useful in the kind of shooting and hunting I do. I usually set up on top a hill and glass the valleys and hills below until I spot a shooter. I’m thinking about replacing my spotter-phone skope set up with one of these super zoom cameras.

The downside I can think of is battery life. Spotting scopes still work without the camera and if my phone dies I can still spot with the scope. I’m also guessing the camera would not be as rugged or have the same image quality. But that might be incorrect?

What do you guys think? I can get a Nikon p900 for about 450 used on eBay or a new Nikon p1000 for about $800. Is a $450 spotter even worth owning? The options are pretty limited at that price range. I’m really learning towards the camera but I’ve never been a photographer so I don’t have a lot of experience with cameras.

I’ve used the P900 and P1000 quite a bit for work and they are exceptional point and shoot cameras. I don’t know if they’d replace my spotting scope but if you didn’t mind the weight of carrying extra batteries it could be a decent replacement. I’d also be leery of hauling it around in the back country since the lens is a bit fragile to bumps and such. It isn’t a weakling but students have broken Enough of them during training that I know it’d be hard to be soft on them while hunting.

It’s funny but I’ve never thought of using one the way you mentioned but I could see it working decent. Great cameras and they take very good pictures without a lot of user input.

Thanks for the input! I just found myself always fumbling with the phone skope mount and spent more time with it on the spotter than off so I figured why not just use a camera since they make them that can reach way out there.

I think it’s worth trying. I like the cameras. Never thought of trying them like that.

Please report back with how it works.

Having a camera like that is fun to take pictures and videos, including videos of your shots, which is really cool.

But a camera will not do the work of looking for game like a spotting scope does. If for your style of hunting your binos are enough for finding game then you can use your camera to look at them and it will give you more detail than the spotting scope. But if you use the spotting scope to actually find the game then the camera cannot substitue it.

Otherwise yes, the camera is (much) cheaper and a great toy to play with.

If you’re going to digiscope, you need to look at https://novagrade.com/


Phone Skope sucks.

Nova Grade

It looks like the chargers are usb, you maybe able to charge via your 18v battery pack for plenty of extra power.

How clear is the image at 1,000 yards? I have a 40 power zoom camera I tried to look at at 40 to see a deer. Was fuzzy.

Let me see if I can explain some concepts here.

The Nikon P900, P950 and P1000 are outstanding cameras but you must understand how they are designed. The sensor used on these cameras is the 1/2.3in format.It measures 6.16mm X 4.62mm. Compare this to the standard 35mm camera at 36X24mm. Now, when you reduce the size of the sensor, this has the effect of increasing the magnification of the lens. (That's not really how it does it, but that's the ultimate result to you.) In this case the very small 1/2.3in sensor make a lens increase its magnification by a factor of about 5.5X. So the P1000, which in reality has a 539mm lens, makes it appear to be a 3000mm lens in 35mm equivalence.

In 35mm parlance, a normal lens, one that will produce images on the 35mm frame that have no magnification, will be about 50mm. Using 50mm as our "normal" lens, you see that a 3000mm lens would be the equivalent of 60X. The problem of course is that in a 35mm format camera, to have a 3000mm lens would mean a lens about 10 feet long. It would be heavy, and expensive.

Yes, we could have a catadioptric lens (one that folds the focus length using mirrors, but it would still be big and heavy. Using a smaller sensor means that we can have the magnification of a 3000mm lens in a hand held package. It's still a big camera and at 50 ounces, it's heavy. Oh, but the capabilities.

The Nikon cameras are not rechargeable using USB connectors. I have a few Nikon battery packs for my Nikons.

Now, let's talk digiscoping. There are essentially two types of digiscoping, The first one is the one that most people are familiar with where the smartphone takes a picture of the eyepiece. There are adapters that allow you to place the smartphone or camera at the exact distance from the eyepiece.

The second type is what is known as afocal digiscoping. This is the method I have been using with my Nikon cameras and my Kowa spotting scope. Kowa sells a photo-adapter that attaches directly to the body of the scope around the eyepiece at one end. At the other end of the adapter, I screw it into the bayonet mount of the Nikon body, replacing the lens. What this does is that the Kowa scope is now a full fledged camera lens directly attached to my camera, with the eyepiece at the exact distance from the sensor plane in the camera. I can see through the reflex mirror and then when the mirror lifts, the camera takes pictures or records movies.

I have several eyepieces for my Kowa and one of them is a 20-60X zoom. That's the one I use for digiscoping. I've taken may pictures of targets at 1000 yards at 20X, 30X, 40X, 50X, and 60X. I've also taken videos at about 30X so as to see the trace. Cool stuff.

I shoot F-class with a March-X 10-60X56 HM, arguably the bestest, clearest high magnification scope available today. I usually run it at 40X because subtension in the MTR-5 reticle and I'm used to 40X and can see the target number in the lens, so reduce crossfire possibilities. On great, spectacular days without mirage, I can discern the writing on the target, and I can sort of detect something in the target, probably an accumulation of bullet holes, but most days, the mirage prevents me from really seeing the fine details.

Whenever we restart the matches, I will be playing with my still-new-to-me March-X 10-60X56HM, and will be pushing to 50X and 60X and I will see if I can discern the bullet holes. My experiences with my Kowa in digiscoping mode tell me that mirage will definitely be an issue there.

I appreciate the replies, keep them coming. I picked up a Sony Cybershot with a Carl Zeiss lens and 50x zoom used for a song the other day to play with. It is not in the same ballpark as the Nikon p900 or p1000 but I think it will give me a change so play around with the long zoom and see if it is worth spending the extra money on the bigger camera. I am thinking of buying a compact spotter like a razor 11-33x55 or a Leupold 15-30x50 and then get a p900 camera as well. that way I could glass for animals with the spotter and switch over once an animal is located to judge the antlers and video. I'm not really an ultralight gear fanatic so the added weight isn't a big concern.

One thing you have to be careful with is what does the 50X zoom really mean in camera land. In riflescope land when we talk about zoom, it's the ratio from the lowest magnification to the highest magnification. The largest zoom ratio I know is the one in my March-X 5-50X56, which is a 10X; my scope goes from 5X to 50X. In a riflescope the magnification is always 1X or greater, so when you apply the zoom ration it will be taking from a somethingX to a bigger somethingX. You will never go below 1X in a riflescope.

In camera land, that's not the case. We have such lenses known as wide angle, extreme wide angle and even fisheye lenses. The magnification of these lenses is actually less than 1X (but still greater than 0, of course.) The fun part comes when the marketing literature states the zoom is 50X, but they may start at 0.5X. So instead of getting 50X as the top end magnification, you're only getting 25X, because you started as a wide angle lens.

In fact, the P1000 is advertised as having a 125X zoom, but in fact the top end is 60X, not 125X, because the base magnification was in wide angle territory at near 0.5X.

Tricky stuff, not devious at all but you have to know the application. If you post the complete name of the lens, we can look at see where it starts and end and that will be expressed in millimeters, not X.