Full description not available
G**T
Packs a LOT of features for a very reasonable price
I just received and started using this mirror camera a few days ago and so far I'm impressed. For a very reasonable price it includes a ton of features and the picture quality is very good. I don't yet know how well it will hold up but so far I would recommend it.My only complaints so far are minor - the instructions aren't very specific or in-depth and were obviously written by someone whose first language was not English, so there is some guesswork involved when you're first learning how to get it set up and in operation. The good news is, IMO set-up and operation was pretty easy to figure out.Next, the factory-installed rear view mirror on my car has some electronic stuff built in to it (it displays the outside temperature in the corner, etc) so it's thicker than most rear view mirrors and fatter from top to bottom in the middle. That makes it a little more awkward to mount the video mirror over it and it really stretches the mounting bands about to their limit, but I managed.My other complaint is the so-called ADAS gives a lot of false alarms, so you either start ignoring the warnings or you just end up turning that feature off. Of course, either of those alternatives defeat the purpose in having the feature, but the frequent false alarms do get annoying.March 2019 UPDATE: After a couple of months of use I'm still happy with the camera for the price. However, like the ADAS feature being too sensitive (false alarms) and thus pretty much useless, the G-detector feature is also too sensitive even on the lowest setting. That's a shame, because the G-detector is a feature that could come in handy. It's supposed to save to memory the current loop file if something jolts the vehicle. That could be critical if you're not there to manually save the file (your vehicle gets hit-skipped while parked and unoccupied) or you're unable to manually save the file if you're injured in a crash. The camera is designed so that the G-detector feels the jolt and automatically saves that video loop to memory. However, even on the lowest setting it's too sensitive and constantly reacts to false alarms. I found this out one evening when the camera gave me a warning that the memory was full. That was odd, since I hadn't manually saved anything. I opened up the memory and there were dozens and dozens of saved files. I started replaying them one by one and it quickly became apparent that every time I slammed the car door or hatch, or apparently even occasionally when hitting a bump in the road, the G-detector auto saved the file and it quickly filled up the memory. I had it set at the lowest sensitivity setting, with the only alternative being turning the g-detector all the way off. That's a shame, because it could end up being a really important feature in a crash.The other pain is that clearing the memory has to be done file by file, which for dozens of false alarm auto save files takes a while to do. As far as I can tell there is no provision for checking off multiple files and clearing them all at once. Unsurprisingly, the poorly written instruction card does not address the issue.Still, for the money I'm happy with the camera. If I had paid a few hundred dollars for it I would be far pickier about the overly sensitive features and poor instructions, but at $60 it's better than not having a camera at all.
J**A
TAGS STILL ARE NOT READABLE! Rear camera is poor, but functional. Probably as good as it gets.
I bought this to replace a pretty low end dashcam. It's not as much better as one might think, but it is generally a better overall quality. The visual quality is certainly better than it was on the old one, but unfortunately, tags are still unreadable on the road despite this. All record in 1080p, but internally I suspect they actually are significantly lower. The old one was probably 480 at best, probably a bit worse. This one maybe is actually 720 at best, maybe a bit worse. The image isn't so bad when you're sitting still at a sign/light or in a parking lot, but, unfortunately, on the road it's still blurry enough that you can't make out sufficient details on tags or anything like that. (Looks like one really horrible driver just got really lucky tonight because there were at least three laws broken visible in the video, but no tag number.)Generally speaking the firmware aspect of this one is mostly a lot better than the cheap dashcam I had before. It has its imperfections, but overall things are a lot easier to use. The touchscreen is also kind of a benefit because it's actually a lot less work to do things and when you're driving you want to just tap quickly on something, not sit there and work buttons. More importantly, this one is smart enough to _ACTUALLY_ loop. My old one had a so called loop function that looked and acted a lot like this one, but didn't actually do it. So the card would keep filling up and it would quit recording. That's just plain bad. Not only could it fail to record something important, but that means that if you want it to start recording while you're driving you can't sit there and delete individual videos but just have to format the whole card (erasing old stuff) just to have it record again. This one isn't incorrectly locking files and is correctly looping as far as I can tell (at least it hasn't complained of lack of storage yet, but maybe later. I haven't found anything being incorrectly placed in the lock location, but I turned off the motion sensitivity due to my experience with the old one. I guess I'll wait and see on that.)The rear camera is pretty awful. It's 480 at best, probably worse and of course it's an extreme fisheye lens. It's worth noting here that the screen inside does not fill the actual mirror's width, so the frame of view is very weird squeezed into the actual display. Probably most of the time the rear camera isn't that important -- it's not like most states have front tags with numbers or anything like that anyway. But I had kind of hoped it could be left with the screen on and set to show the rear camera (btw, it will not come up with this by default -- you have to swipe to the left after you turn it on to see the rear unless you hook up the backup sense wire to a rear light and then it would only show while backing up) all the time so I'd have less trouble with glare since approximately one out of five people in my area can't figure out how to operate the switch to dim their headlights (even on the highway!) but the rear camera just isn't good enough. It's not just lack of resolution, but it doesn't have very good night handling and you can't really see enough in it for it to be safe. It's still best just to use the "screensaver" mode where the screen shuts off quickly and just look through the normal mirror part.One other slight annoyance is the fact that it can't do anything while recording. You can't change any settings at all -- not even simple stuff that won't affect video encoding like the clock. It simply won't allow it. Even if it absolutely had to stop recording for doing any other functions, it could just simply pause recording for a moment, do whatever the user wanted, then resume automatically. This is a device where it is strictly necessary to absolutely minimize how much actual interaction the user must do, and I'm not sure that the creators fully understood this.One other annoyance I had is the shape and placement of the camera part. It has an extra thick bit of plastic sticking out at the bottom that is completely unnecessary and it's not all the way at the very edge of the dashcam. The problem is that this means it has to stick pretty far out on the left side of your stock mirror. Unfortunately, I found it impossible to fit this in there along with the sun visor. The visor had to either be pushed all the way up so it barely even did anything at all (and never pulled down) or it had to be too far down and blocking part of the mirror besides. I ultimately had to actually turn the stock mirror all the way upside down to fit this on there (due to the angled shape of the stock mirror this gave it enough room to just barely fit. Barely. The visor misses by about a centimeter now.) I'm actually a little surprised more people don't have this problem because my stock mirror was super tiny and the visors are pretty much standard size, so I don't think my car is so unusual, but this is something you may have to watch out for with any of these (probably not exclusive to this one.) Even just some sort of indentation or something would have been sufficient to help enormously. I don't know if I can necessarily recommend flipping the stock mirror like I did -- for starters you may have to remove it first even to fit it and it changes the height and angle (actually an advantage in my case since I'm in an older car and headlights from newer vehicles pretty much go straight in at eye height) but in some cases it might be the only way. It might be better (and I may still do this) to find some sort of mount made for stuff like this and simply ditch the original mirror entirely.The last thing that I consider a design flaw is that, despite being so wide, it will not show anything more than the stock mirror. Which is actually a neat trick given that it's significantly larger than the stock mirror was. Previously I had a strap-on mirror that showed a wider view including a little bit of my right blind spot which was kind of nice since I could see more around me. This one somehow manages to be as focused as my tiny stock mirror was, showing a very limited view. I think they actually magnify a bit too -- the third party one I had on there before was about 1:1 (so objects in mirror were about as close as they appear with it and with this and stock they're actually _further_ than they appear. Perhaps that's on purpose so people are more careful backing up? I'd rather a better view of traffic around me and just being careful when backing up.)Honestly, while I'm still a bit upset that this still can't get tags, this is probably about as good as it gets in this pricerange. I suppose you have to go at least to the $100 range to be able to get tags while in motion. On the up side, if anything does happen you will still have a pretty good record of the entire incident. Adding on the rear camera you're doubly protected. As always, bear in mind that a dashcam can also incriminate you if you were the guilty party (so don't be the guilty party) but if someone comes flying up, swerves around you from behind then swerves into you too close in front and slams their brakes, it will be extremely obvious to show in court and they'll be paying for a long time for it. When they try to claim that you were following too close and hit them you'll have quite a laugh.EDIT: After a while the rear camera suddenly started causing problems. First it would make the screen flicker with lines through and finally now the whole device shuts off when it is plugged in and will not turn on until I unplug it. I really needed the rear camera recording, so this is quite disappointing for me.EDIT2: It turns out that the wires in the cable for the camera are so super thin that the entire thing crimped far too easily and must have shorted one of the wires. I'll have to splice in a new (tougher) wire to make it work.
Trustpilot
3 weeks ago
2 months ago
