List Price: $399.99
Sale Price: Price Unavailable
Today's Bonus: 18% Off
This is an impressive and feature-rich dashboard camera with excellent video quality in both day and night conditions.
It is recommended to install the camera as high on the windshield as possible, as the lens has an extremely wide angle. Due to the wide angle details like license plates are very hard to see. The manual recommends audibly reading off a plate for the onboard microphone should you need to remember it.
Unfortunately the only way to mount the camera is to use adhesive that permanently attaches to the windshield. Thankfully the manufacturer also included a standard tripod mounting screw on the camera so it is possible to use third party windshield mounts. Just be sure to get one that can position the camera very close to the windshield. I do hope that they can consider including a suction cup option in the future.
Operating the camera couldn't be simpler: when it gets power it starts recording. The camera is configured through the included software that runs on both the Mac and PC via the Adobe Air platform. I would have liked to see an option to invert the video which would make mounting the camera upside down with a third party suction cup a little easier.
The camera will support SD cards up to 64 gigabytes in size and came with an 8 gig card that stores about an hour or so of high quality 1080p video at 30 frames per second.
Video quality is excellent and smooth even over bumpy roads. The included software will overlay the vehicle's position on a Google map as well as indicate the approximate speed at the time of the recording. It was remarkably accurate in my tests and did not take long to find its position. The camera includes a GPS antenna that can be mounted outside the vehicle for cars that have coated windshields that block radio signals. The gps and speed data is embedded inside the video files but they play fine in VLC and Quicktime on my Mac without the need for conversion.
The camera also features an "event" function that will preserve video files with a button push or a significant shock (there is an onboard sensor that detects g-forces). Those clips will be protected from being erased when the card fills up, although the manufacturer recommends turning off the camera after an accident.
The camera can record in 1, 5, 15, and 30 minute increments. But recording files above a minute in length will disable the "looping" feature that erases old files when the card fills up. There is no gap in recording between files but you'll just have a lot of them accumulating on the card.
Overall this is an impressive dashboard camera and well worth considering!
0 comments:
Post a Comment