K&F Concept 4K Trail Camera Video Review

This is a video overview of this little 4K wildlife trail camera from K&F Concept.

I’ve been thinking about getting a trail camera for quite some time. Something to capture shots of the wildlife in my garden. We’re lucky enough to have squirrels, foxes, badgers, and owls, amongst a whole load of other creatures, mice and rats included…

Figuring out which was the best trail camera for my needs was a daunting task, Amazon is full of them, and they all look pretty similar. It’s ridiculous, just check THIS OUT. Bonkers mate!

Wading through the trail cam swamp was a bit disheartening, but at least deciding upon a spec that I needed was easy. I turned off Jeff Bezos dot com and tried to figure out what was actually important to me.

I needed something that could record 4K footage. It would need to be of a high enough quality to be shown on TV, because what’s the point in capturing video if you can’t sell it…?

It also needed to be able to capture footage at night. I wasn’t too fussed about the resolution here though, and I decided that I’d be happy with 1080P IR night footage. 

I wanted something that was small, easy to use, weatherproof, and had a long battery life. It needed to be a trail camera that I could leave out in the garden for weeks on end. Not worrying about it getting wet or damaged, and confident it could do its thing without running out of juice.

Enter… the K&F Concept 4K Trail Camera, its exact model code is the KF35.136, you can find it here https://bit.ly/3Ko2fJT  

Yes, I have a discount code too (“ChrisHomer” will save you 5%), but to be clear, I’m not being paid to say anything good or bad about this trail camera. It’s a genuine, no-BS, honest review.

I refuse those collaborations outright, I only give no-BS reviews, take note, potential collaborators: and take confidence, potential trail camera buyers.

That’s just how I roll…

Now, let’s get into it.

Video Quality

Often, my main concern when picking up a new camera is the video quality. I’m a professional specialist cameraman, and get to spend a lot of my time looking through the lenses of some amazing cameras that sometimes cost more than my house, so I often find cheap poorly made cameras grating.

Why bother wasting your time with cheap crap? It’s annoying. Capturing great content on terrible camera sensors is not only annoying but it can be downright depressing.

So with some potential for getting annoyed in the back of my mind, I was a little careful about which trail camera to pick up. I put aside the high-end Sony broadcast cameras, and the low-end Sony Alpha’s, and gave the K&F Concept 4K trail cam a go. Interestingly, it claims to use a Sony Sensor, which I found a little surprising, but I’m not gonna take it apart and check, and I’m not gonna nit-pick the tech spec too much either. This is not a high-end professional camera, it’s not supposed to be, it would be unfair to compare it to a Sony A7siii. This is a small, well-priced camera that anyone can pick up and use to capture some wildlife in decent-quality video and stills. I won’t be talking bit rates, I won’t be analysing pixels, and I won’t be looking at it across the table where my Alexa Mini sits. I’ll talk about it as a bloke who wants a cheap easy solution to capture footage of some foxes and badgers in his garden.

4K Daylight Video Quality

The footage is ok. There, is that enough?

You can see a 4K daylight video footage sample in the video, to see for yourself. I had a horrible time with the weather for it, but you can make out this cheeky little squirrel running off with my peanut-buttered bread.

I used 4K 30P as my video format, as I couldn’t find a 4K 25P option in the menus, which was a little disappointing. We need 25P and 50P options in the future please, for us in the UK. Maybe it could be done with a firmware update?

The video quality itself…. I find this difficult. I genuinely spend a lot of time looking through the lenses of $400,000 camera setups. The 4K footage from this little trail cam is ok. It’s saleable. Just. If you accept the soft blurry look and can do something about the noise. I gave the colours a tweak, and then… If you downscale to 1080P, I’d say it was usable.

That’s a good assessment to go by. In good light, the daylight video you capture with this K&F trail cam will be saleable, it’ll need a tweak, and they may need a little de-noising, but I’d be happy to stick short B-Roll clips into an episode of BBC Springwatch.

If you’re thinking more along the lines of recording clips to enjoy watching them back yourself, then yes, brilliant. It’s great fun taking your trail camera back into the house after a few days and scanning through the video. It makes you feel the same way as buying a few lottery tickets.

Night Vision Footage

Something I did notice is that the unit switches to night vision IR mode quite quickly. When the light starts to fade, there’s a built-in light meter that will detect the low light levels and switch to recording using the second camera, a 1080P night vision IR trail camera. I thought it did this early, perhaps a little too early, as it was still around dusk, but I think it does this for good reason, it’ll choose to record IR footage in moderately low light levels rather than attempting to give you 4k daylight footage in difficult conditions. 4K footage that would I guess, be far too soft and noisy, so it’s a great move. Happy to take IR footage in those scenarios.

Now, the IR night vision quality itself…

Again, there’s an example in the YouTube video.

I don’t work with IR footage on a day-to-day basis, but again, in my past life, I spent many hundreds of hours operating a $1 million IR camera. So I’m not going to make any comparisons or too many judgments. I’ll just offer the sample footage and say that I was quite impressed. It is what it is, and it does the job well.

Yes, it’s a bit soft and a bit noisy, but it does the job of identifying wildlife just fine.

The only issue I had was with the IR illuminators, we’ll come on to that next.

Sensors

The K&F Concept trail camera has a few different sensors built into it, three PIR sensors for detecting movement and triggering recording, which it does great. It has a light level meter, a recording indicator and above all that and the dual cameras, there’s a rectangular panel housing some IR illuminators.

One of these sensors, or something inside the unit, was alerting the foxes in my garden. I got this a little wrong in the video, and attributed it to being the recording indicator. What I now think was happening is that at night, there is a faint red glow from the IR illuminator panel. It has two of them, like little devil eyes in the night, and I think it is these that were putting the clever little foxes on edge. I’m not sure anything can be done about that, you need them for it to work at night, but perhaps the foxes will get used to them.

Still Image Quality

Ah, almost forgot about this. Still image quality. Honestly, I was a little disappointed in this. Luckily, I don’t have much interest in capturing wildlife photos with this, and it was not the reason for choosing it. Again, at risk of sounding like a pompous prick, I have access to high-end 1600mm video lenses and regularly use a Sony 200-600mm lens on a Sony A7iii for photography.

But alas, here are a few samples. You can judge for yourselves. DOWNLOAD.

I’d say that this trail camera is much better at video than it is still images. They’re slightly more soft, more noisy, and have even less dynamic range, and there’s no ability to shoot RAW.

I want to be careful not to bash it too much. Again, my yard stick is more unusual than most, I use the best of the best. I don’t want to be too unfair. It does it’s job ok.

Build Quality

Here’s where this trail camera excels. The build quality is great, it’s a hinged waterproof case with an IP66 rating. This means that it is erm… very waterproof. I stuck this outside in the British monsoon season (January-December) and it survived just fine. The insides never got remotely damp and it still functions perfectly. I also dropped it off the kitchen counter onto my hardwood floor, and it has been hit with a football more than once.

Battery Life

Another strong point. This little thing is very power efficient. 

It takes 8 x AA batteries and when I received it, of course, I didn’t have any. So I did what everyone else would do, and borrowed them out of the TV remote controllers, who wants to be iditot-ised in front of a box anyway?

I then stuck it outside for a few weeks, in the monsoon, with those mismatched half-drained batteries… and it worked just fine. Not only that, but it still said 90% power remaining and I’m still using those exact batteries to this day. Remarkable really.

This long battery life paired with the build quality is where this trail cam stands out. It’s exactly what you need. Something that you can chuck out into the wilderness and return a few weeks later knowing that it has been doing its job.

The box claims that this camera should last a huge 6 months! Which I can believe, although I’ve not tested it that much yet.

What’s in the Box?

It comes in a nice little box with a few accessories. A little steal monopod type thing that screws onto the bottom of the camera. It’s a normal screw-type thread, so you can easily swap it out for another tripod if you’d prefer.

It also comes with a USB cable and a strap that can be used to attach it to a tree trunk.

Ease Of Use

It’s fairly intuitive, but I did use the instructions. See video…..

However, the menus are well laid out and easy to navigate, (take notes, Sony!!!), I had it up and running in no time. I like the clunky buttons and old-fashioned beep and feel to it.

Price & Conclusion

You can wade through Amazon using THIS LINK to search for it, there are a lot of options, some genuine, some imitations.

For this exact model, I’d recommend going HERE, and you can use my code (ChrisHomer) for a 5% discount.

In conclusion, the K&F Concept 4K trail camera does its job just fine. It’s well built, waterproof and robust, with a long battery life and allows you to easily capture wildlife video and images with its fast trigger time and q small subtle profile. It’s not a high-end camera system, it’s not a professional bit of gear, and it’s not something that was ever designed to be so.

If you think you’ll enjoy watching your garden wildlife back or sharing clips on social media, then I’d recommend it.

Check out the video, I hope it’s helpful.

Any questions, please stick them in the YouTube comments. Cheers

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Not only do I write about capturing badgers, but also hiking, wild camping, filmmaking, and photography, but also deep fried peanut butter coated chocolate bourbon biscuits. Don’t miss out…