VANTRUE: High-end Dash Cam for Your Drive

2.0

You could do a lot worse but you could also do better than this dashcamReviewed in the United States on January 6, 2018

I bought this as an early Christmas present for myself after researching way too many others. I took it on a family road trip from Atlanta, GA to Chicago, IL just after Christmas to gather some footage and see if I capture anything interesting along the trip.SD Card: Contrary to many others - I didn't have any issues with the SD card I chose to use (Samsung 64GB 100MB/s (U3) MicroSDXC EVO Select Memory Card with Adapter (MB-ME64GA/AM)) - although I DID have to format the card IN the camera for it to work properly. Formatting on my computer wasn't 'enough'.Camera Mount: The mount worked great in super cold weather (it was -7°F in Chicago) - never came off the windshield and the camera was held firmly in place for the duration of the 10 day trip.Power Cable: The power cable (lighter mount) and built in USB port both worked as expected. I tucked the cable into the front edge of the headliner where it meets the windshield and ran it down the passenger's side A pillar and across the lower part of the dash as this was a temporary situation for the purpose of our trip.Set Up: The instructions are mediocre, at best, and it took a bit of trial and error to get most of the settings correct. I had no trouble with the date and time setting - but some other settings are not as clear and require a bit of experimentation to figure them out. I turned off the sound and disabled the 'interior' camera so that I could get the highest possible resolution out of the front facing camera.Dash Cam Use: One very big appeal to me is that the overall unit is VERY small. The screen is tiny and the whole unit was visually concealed when mounted just to the right of the rear view mirror - I couldn't see it at all. Again, we drove from Atlanta, GA to Chicago, IL over 2 days and then 4 days later, we drove back at the same pace. I captured 4 days of travel on this camera with random saves of clips along the way under different conditions, lighting and times of day.Here are my observations from 24 hours of footage:1. The picture, while clear, leans heavily on the BLUE tones - the sky was clear and the sun was out for the duration of the driving and everything is VERY blue. Perhaps the blue sky and white snow had something to do with it but I also took short video on my phone and had none of the 'blue' effect that was captured with the dash cam.2. I have watched nearly all of the footage and I cannot read the plates of the vehicles directly in front of us - in many cases, I can't even distinguish the state of issue, let alone the numbers. In contrast, I have a Google Pixel phone and have used it as a dash cam for short trips (15-20 minutes) and even in direct sunlight, I can very clearly read the plates of the cars in front of me, next to me, etc.3. The G Shock sensor is extremely sensitive. I left it on the default of "Medium" sensitivity and this resulted in the automatic capture of over 30 five minute clips due to pot holes, bumps and other road irregularities. I intentionally saved 3 clips by pressing the specified button and couldn't distinguish between my saves and those autosaved files. I had to watch them all to find the clips I saved. I could have turned the G Shock sensor off but then I'd have to remember to hit 'save' if something did happen...kind of defeats the purpose of the feature, in my opinion.4. Our windshield wasn't perfectly clean the second half of the trip but that didn't seem to affect the camera's picture quality as much as I expected.The first photo shows the 'blue' effect the camera has in bright lighting - the second photo shows how hard it is to read license plates even when the lighting is favorable. I did not upload video because Amazon's compression will make it look a lot worse than it is.Overall - it's got some nice features with some very annoying, but simple to fix, issues. For the price point, none of these issues should be present. It's not worth what I paid for it given the host of issues so it'll be returned as soon as I figure out how to get it back into the box. If I find additional photos/screenshots to upload after I've gone through the final files, I'll upload them. Fortunately, we had a very uneventful trip both ways so there's not much to see.