Spartan cameras are the most unreliable cameras I've ever dealt with
I've bought 9 spartan cameras and have returned 4 due to either out of the box failure or failure without a month. My 5th just failed last week. Customer service is completely useless trying to get this garbage running by informing people to format the card in the camera or other useless "advice". It doesn't matter what sd card is used; it doesn't matter if you did a test photo and sent it. These cameras are garbage. If I can't return this crap, I'm going to take a sledge hammer and smash every one of them... At this point, I'm going to smash the three remaining good ones. I can't in good conscience sell this crap to anyone.
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I bought brand new cards that you specifically recommended.
I have a PhD in engineering; you should fire every engineer that stepped foot on your building if he contributed to firmware that you sell as a product that arbitrarily fails at a rate of 50% within the first three months.
You're response demonstrates the fundamental problem; you nor any of the staff there are competent. You have a Word or Adobe document with a numbered list of excuses to rattle off as to why your system's reliability is so bad, yet none of you understand how firmware relates to the issue.
How would, for example, firmware being out of date cause the system to arbitrarily fail? Does the system have an internal clock that times out at 2 months and shuts itself down if it's firmware hasn't been updated?
If the firmware would require updating in order to continue working it was not ready for the market. Why didn't your engineers simply test the firmware before installing it?
The answer: utter incompetence.
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A lot of the firmware updates are to deal with changes made by the cell carriers and they are tested before being released. In a cell camera the SD card is responsible for a lot more than just storing pictures and it's critical it is to spec and formatted properly. SD card issues make up a large percentage of the issues people have. What issues are you having exactly? Can you post some status reports from the app? You may have to set your phone to desktop mode in order to see the insert image icon here. Make sure that the screenshots include everything from the top of the report to the SD card info at the bottom.
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For someone with a Ph.D. in engineering, you don’t seem to understand anything about firmware. One of my printers recently had a firmware update. I’m not sure why, didn’t pay attention, but it wasn’t because of incompetence by those who developed it. Maybe there were enhancements, maybe there were some bugs that were found, who knows?
Computer companies release firmware updates reasonably frequently for various components. That doesn’t make them incompetent.
Apple and Microsoft release software updates pretty frequently.
BTW, surely you’re aware that no matter how thoroughly things are tested, there is no way to test every possible scenario. Even big companies like Apple and Microsoft have to release updates to fix bugs that were discovered after software was released.
As Johnny said, a lot of the firmware updates have been because the cell carriers have changed something with their towers and/or service. What used to work doesn’t any more. I’ve seen a few cameras with firmware dating back to 2019. I have no idea how those cameras have worked for the last couple of years as the 3G service began to be shut down and things changed to make way for 5G.
No, we don’t have any documents with a list of “excuses”. We do know, however, that SD cards can cause a plethora of problems, from preventing the camera from even powering on to preventing it from storing pictures and videos and several things in between. We just know what things to try that fix the problems in the majority of cases. We always go through those things first to rule them out. Sometimes the cameras do need to be sent in for repair or replacement.
A camera can take/send a test photo with a bad/unformatted SD card. I also walk test any time I touch a camera (which isn’t often because all of mine are running on solar or solar + external battery).
I understand that you are frustrated and I don’t blame you for being so. I don’t know whether you had the bad luck to get several lemons or if there’s something else going on. Johnny asked for screen shots from the app because that may show something or it may rule something out.
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