If you hole hop, scout around or fish deep water over say 25’ or so depending on water clarity use a flasher hands down every time. If you are on the meat, staying put, and fishing shallower, a camera is the way beter option and here’s why. The Camera doesn’t lie! You can tell exactly what is down there. If you see some whites come thru and you are fishing something big for Walleye like a rattle bait or something you can get up and back down lickety split like your saving lives with something else that a white will take. If fishing for Perch you can for example yank your bait away from the little dinks as well as see how the intended targets react to your presentation in order to make changes if needed to entice more bites. You don’t want to be sitting there oblivious to what is the mark on your flasher, jigging your Perch tungsten jig with a mealworm on it when the mark on your graph may actuallly be your 1 chance at a keeper Burbot of the day who wants a big glow jig with a big gob of hacked up minnows on it instead....and for these reasons, a camera is indispensable and absolutely necessary in my book. A flasher only tells you something else is in the cone angle, it can’t really tell you exactly what, but they too are indispensable if using any of the other methods described above. Good luck, ideally you need both in my personal and professional opinion to cover all your bases effectively. The fish I have mounted on my wall would never have been caught had I not seen what was down there on the camera. If I had been using a flasher that day I would have never caught it. I was actually panning the camera around in a circle when I spotted it swimming off in the distance horizontally away from me when I then started jigging my bait high in the water column and very aggressively. It stopped on a dime, turned and swam straight in towards me. I followed it right in on all the way on my camera as I lowered back down and watched the hit real-time, gave it an eye crossing hook set, and the rest is history! I don’t catch that fish without a camera or panning around to spot something.
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