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Customer Review
Pam
3.0
Iffy quality but worth it when it worksReviewed in the United States on August 8, 2021
I really, really wanted this dash cam to work. It had good reviews online, over 2,700 Amazon reviews when I bought it, with a 4.5 star rating. I also have several stalkers actively harassing me, and so far their minimally invasive measures have been enough to keep the police from arresting them. I've bought dash cams in the past, but they only showed the straight ahead vantage point, and I was lucky if I could get a single license tag number off of the footage, much less a face to prove anything. This dash cam seemed to be exactly what I've wanted for the past 20 years, but then the first one I ordered had issues, then the replacement had issues.The first unit's rear view camera didn't work, and neither did parking mode unless the camera was physically moved to wake it up. And yes, that's with motion detection on, which means it's supposed to record when it sees motion. I called Amazon support to see how to get the rear camera to work, but there wasn't anything else I could try -- it's just the one cable. And so Amazon ordered a replacement which came quickly. Meanwhile I'd asked a question of the Amazon community about how to get the rear camera to work, and someone said that the one cable sort of snaps into place. Well, I tried that and was actually able to get the rear camera to work, although the original unit's cables didn't snap together and you had to moosh them together pretty hard to get it working, which didn't seem right.The new unit did work with the rear camera, and the cable did snap in. There were little plastic notches in both cable ends to sort of guide you as to the orientation, and you had to be sure that they fit together to fit it in right. But then... after I set the resolution to the highest setting, the new unit stopped recording. I had footage of me putting the new dash cam in the window and changing its settings, but nothing after that when I got home. This was disappointing, as there was something happening along the road that night that the police would have appreciated seeing. And so I wondered whether it was because I hadn't connected the rear camera yet, or if the thing just doesn't record on the higher resolutions.And so I went about testing the camera after the rear camera was hooked up at different resolutions. I was able to get some footage, but the kicker is, the camera apparently lost my time setting, and so the 1st and 2nd round of tests are hard to figure out and I have to redo them. I can't say yet whether this 2nd dash cam is going back to Amazon or not.However, the parking mode does work better on the newer unit, though probably not well enough to prove it if a stalker is driving past my house 10 times a day. And I noticed something about the night vision in the new unit -- it seems to work via infrared, because you could see a part of my bra's outline in one of the interior videos I reviewed. I was wearing a dark blue shirt at the time with a printed image on it that made it impossible to see my bra under regular light. However with this dash cam's night vision, you could see the straps and upper part of the bra well enough to know it was there. That's if you turn on the cabin footage, which unfortunately I need to do because sometimes one of my stalkers breaks into the van and spends a lot of time there. Though he'd probably take the chip out and erase it, knowing his past history. (That's an issue mentioned by another reviewer -- the footage stays on a chip in the dash cam until you remove/replace it, it isn't uploaded to the cloud, though it generates so much footage that an upload wouldn't be practical. That means if someone smashes your windows to steal something, if they notice the dash cam and steal that, too, then you've lost your footage of the break-in.)I also ended up buying the VanTrue brand chips because it had a high capacity and is fast enough to handle video.Overall, I'd say that the quality of the electronics is iffy, but if you can get the features to work, it's great. I'm looking forward to hooking up my laptop to the big screen TV to see how many license tags I can read that way. I also saw a man who looked like one of my stalkers while the thing was running, and I want to find that footage to see if I can prove he was there. This thing just might help me get a restraining order and scare those guys off! If it can do that, it'll be worth all the money and trouble to get it to work, and then some.
