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Customer Review
bpsmicro
5.0
A very decent camera at this price point.Reviewed in Canada on October 7, 2018
Executive Summary: A very good dashcam for this price point. Other than some potential annoyances with the mount, once you get past that you’ll enjoy a very capable unit. I’m rating it 5 stars not because it’s a 5-star camera, but because it’s a 5-star camera AT THIS PRICE. I have similarly priced units that don’t perform nearly as well, and the ones I have that do cost way more.Intro: I happened to be in the market for an “inexpensive but reasonably well-featured” dashcam for my son’s new job as a long-haul trucker, so timing was good. But mounting in a truck comes with certain challenges that may not apply to the average car-driver, making this a pretty decent test. My own vehicle has a high-end camera that cost about 7x the price of this, and in many ways, this meets nearly the same standards, just missing some expensive functionality.In the box: The camera, the suction-based mounting bracket, a USB cable, a cigarette plug power cable, and a small instruction manual. Note that there’s only the one mounting bracket (more on that below).Installing: So, I’ve always had bad luck when it comes to suction-based mounts. Despite all the various “tricks”, they never work well, or for long. Inevitably I always end up using the hard mount, if provided, or fabricating something. Here we find the one weakness of this camera, the mount. It’s a custom mount that can’t be dismantled. The suction cup is small and (pretty much as expected) didn’t work well. The other problem is that in many US states (I’m in Canada, but the truck would be going south of the border often) it’s illegal to stick things to the windshield. The exact laws vary, but the basic policy of many trucking companies is “nothing stuck to the windshield”. In the end I had to do some fabrication to get it mounted where we wanted it (top console, hard-mounted). Luckily, I have a lot of experience with this, but an average person might have challenges and end up resorting to various adhesives.The camera itself slides into the mount, and it’s a tight fit, but easy to remove if theft is a concern.That’s the bad part (and not all that bad in the grand scheme of things). But one big plus is that the power cable is extra-long. Like way long enough to run across the top, down the side and leisurely though the dash to the cigarette plug, with wire to spare. It’s a standard USB on the camera end, so you can use other cabling options if desired. I’ve seen many dashcams, including much more expensive ones that come with a measly 3ft cable, which is just dumb.Also in the box was a separate micro-USB cable to plug into the camera for file transfer, and it was also very generous in length. You could plug that cable into the camera to download videos without having to remove it from the mount.Note that this comes with no microSD card, so you’ll need to get one. It’s always recommended to get a good one, preferably an MLC-rated card specifically for dashcam use. I used a spare MLC-rated 64Gig card for testing, but the camera will take up to a 256Gig card (which is very rare in this space). Personally, for day-to-day use I wouldn’t go smaller than a 128Gig, and probably a Samsung Evo+ or one of the newer cards specifically for this use, like the Pro Endurance line. The smaller the card, the quicker it’ll fill up and start erasing old recordings. My 64Gig lasted a bit less than 24 hours of combined normal/parking (remember, this was in a truck driving 10 hours a day).If you go cheap on the microSD, expect to run into problems eventually (file corruption, lost recordings, etc.). This advice applies to all dashcams, not just this one. In my experience, many dashcam complaints stem from dying microSD cards.Operation: The LCD screen is pretty small. It’s really only useful for aiming and running through the menus. You don’t want to try to review videos on that. But that’s pretty typical for this type of camera, and isn’t a negative. The menus are pretty straightforward, and the options clear. A couple of the options are not well documented, and you’ll likely play with a few settings to figure them out.If you enable the parking mode (which is a significant feature of this camera at this price point), then it uses an algorithm that I surmised was based on how much of the overall screen area was “moving” to determine whether the entire vehicle was moving (this putting it back in normal recording). Sounds complicated, but for the non-nerds in the audience, it just works. Seemed to record normal when moving, parking when not. After the first week, I turned off parking mode but left the G-sensor on to record “impact” events. In a big truck, slamming the door triggered an “impact”, and recorded accordingly. This was as-expected, and it worked fine. You can adjust sensitivity.The manual is a bit confusing as far as “protecting” recordings or taking still pictures. It’s all based on the “mode button” on the top, but the manual wording is confusing. In fact, while we managed to capture a couple of still photos, we’re still not entirely sure how. For protecting a video (the more common requirement), the manual says to push the button while it’s recording. That’s not entirely all of it though. If the display is off (which it normally should be), the first tap of the button restores the display, but doesn’t protect the video. A second tap while the display is on protects that recording (only that one, not before/after, which would be my preference). A tiny icon (not really visible when you’re driving) shows the lock, but I’d have preferred some sort of sound notification. You shouldn’t be looking at the camera while driving to see what it’s doing.Video quality: The camera has a good-quality 1080p sensor that records at the typical 30fps. The videos generated were of very good quality. On playback, with a bit of squinting, it was quite possible to make out license plate numbers of close vehicles. Especially for this price point, the quality of the video produced was high, and I can’t imagine anybody complaining about that.The other plus is the wide field of view (160° according to the specs). In the truck, this covered well off to both sides, and with the hood mirrors the videos captured overtaking vehicles on both sides.There was some reflection from the windshield, mostly in the corners, but only the higher-end dashcams costing hundreds more support polarizing filters, so no points off for this.The “night vision” is pretty good, especially at this price point. But people do need to set their expectations appropriately. These things aren’t going to “see in the dark”, and there’s no IR lighting or anything (which wouldn’t work behind a windshield anyway). One downside to “night vision” is that if, for example, you’re behind a vehicle with brighter license plate lights, it’ll wash out the plate and make it unreadable.Viewing: I usually just pop out the microSD and stick it in my PC to copy the folders. Or use the supplied USB cable to connect to a separate machine, where it shows up as a standard USB drive, but only USB2 so copying will be slow. The camera also has a built-in mini-HDMI port. I don’t happen to have a proper cable, so I haven’t tried that out yet. But that’d be handy to plug the camera into an HDMI monitor or TV for quick viewing on the “big screen”.Epilogue: I may yet order the separate GPS unit (I’m watching for a sale). While some may complain that it sucks the GPS isn’t included, the reality is if they’d done that, the price would be higher, causing complaints from those who don’t need the GPS. And while there’s a Viewer app that would support the GPS, the Windows one seems to be broken (scripting errors from Google Maps, and it doesn’t actually seem to play recordings).
