buying a car is a major decision and you'll want to do everything you can to
protect your investment oh oh god oh
what the that guy just hit me good thing
I caught his license plate on one of my uh many trusty dash cams this one's kind
of crap this one too well surely my
expensive one will no come on it's
unusable what the heck is going on here
I spent over a th000 us on a dozen of
the top rated dash cams on Amazon and almost every single one sucks to the
point of being basically unusable how did this happen I did my homework I got
the most recommended I got the highest rated units I thought I picked up
something reliable why aren't these things decent like our sponsor build
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your new build today this video started over three years ago when my wife came
across some hilarious examples of blatant insurance fraud that was
prevented by dash cam footage she asked me to get some dash cams for our cars no
problem said I and I headed over to Amazon where to my surprise nearly
everything was obscenely priced full of
misleading specs covered in obviously paid reviews or sometimes all three long
story short I settled on a cheap and cheerful unit with decent reviews and
bought two of them not one of which even managed to power on so I gave up then
one of our new writers overheard me recounting this story and went I can
look into that I need a dash cam too and 2 weeks later we've learned a lot to
start with the dash cam Market is still not as straightforward as one might hope
marketing materials for cheaper dash cams can be confusing using and
contradictory and their performance it's basically impossible to compare without
trying them side by side in the real world dash cams take all the issues of
reviewing a regular camera and they add on a ton of extra usability features
that need to be evaluated parking mode discreetness loop recording gravity
sensors even the length of the cable matters too long and you've got an
unsightly coil of wire to hide too short and it could be a challenge to reach
your power source it's a lot to take in the good news is that that if all you
want is proof of fault or lack thereof in the event of an accident it's still
pretty hard to go wrong our value pick is the thinkware f70 it's pretty Bare
Bones in terms of features lacking Creature Comforts like GPS data or even
a screen for that matter but it is a dead simple to set up since it doesn't
need to be paired to an app the included 3M mounting tape is quite permanent and
while it won't be winning any awards for image quality we were able to clearly
identify the vehicles and people in our our footage and we could even make out
license plates at least on stationary cars that's pretty okay especially for
just $70 but there were situations where it
left us wanting a bit more now our Target price was under $100 and we ended
up with a wide range of features and image quality so let's make our way
through the rest of them from cheapest to most expensive this is the a20 from
bayun a brand with no website but they
do have the lucky number eight spot in the Amazon bests Sellers List you might
not expect much for $60 and if that's the case boy are you ever a Savvy
Shopper image quality during the late hours of the day is lacking and at night
is so bad that you'd think you were filming on a potato making matters worse
the screen doesn't automatically dim so you'll be constantly vibrantly reminded
of how little useful information your camera is capturing the bt13 comes in at
$10 more ranks number six on Amazon and
and just like the Bon it comes courtesy of a mystery meat brand with no website
this time called chow it's not that hard to have a website guys I've got one it's
full of great deals like these $9 mystery cable ties LTT Store.com
daylight quality is grainier than the a20 for sure but text is actually
slightly easier to read indicating that Chow might be using a better sensor but
what they aren't doing is much in the way of postprocessing to enhance the
image quality and this is a especially Apparent at night where the a20 actually
looks somewhat decent in comparison also
like the B own the screen stays on by default annoying but one interesting
feature it has at least is that the rear camera input is mini HDMI so if you
wanted to use a decent camera for your rear view the chort toow could act as
your screen and save your backups otherwise we stand by our recommendation
of the thinkware f70 at this price and at $80 for that matter these two chuny
boys didn't make it into our side-by-side tests due to their
considerable bulk both have cabin facing cameras though so realistically they're
designed more for an Uber driver audience anyway the T1 comes from eway
the first manufacturer with an actual website and in broad daylight driving
away from the Sun like ideal conditions
it can't seem to make out the words on many road signs let alone other
important details not a good showing for the second highest rated unit with a C
camera chunker number two is the d3h from Provo they claim it's a 4k camera
which if true could be a really great value but out of the box the metadata
for the files clearly reads 1080p with
that aside in the daylight it can read signs which is an improvement over the
Bon and the eway but license plates are
still elusive unless at a complete stop and positioned just right one cool
feature though is that it uses capacitors instead of lithium batteries
unlike the rest of the cameras we've talked about already this is a nice to
have because lithium batteries especially when subjected to heat and
when they're constantly fully charged wear out more quickly which can lead to
battery swelling and in extreme cases fire let's step up our budget surely for
$100 this sponsored listing for the rexing V1 4K will be a good choice right
I mean it has 4K right in the name right and Forbes named it the best dash cam
for a tighter budget of 2022 let's see how that's
going actually not too bad Forbes
looking at the videos from around dusk it is slightly clearer than our $70 f70
but only slightly field of view colors
ability to make out text all of that is pretty much the same which means that
unless you really need the screen it doesn't feel worth spending 43% more
maybe Garmin can change my mind they used to be very well known for their GPS
offerings their compact dash cam Mini 2 was a little out of our price range at
$110 but hey what's 10 extra bucks for
the much better brand name one right
well not right but at least not wrong it
performs about as well as the V1 4K maybe a bit better or worse depending on
the circumstances and it has some nice features available but those features
require an app and that app requires an account and that account requires you to
give Garmin your information which is super now surely the number one
pick on Amazon is going to ride in and save the day right at $120 it is now
firmly beyond our original price Target but what's another 10 bucks if it's a
lot better right here we
go really at dusk the RO R2 4K manages
to capture less detailed than our budget
f70 and at night it's more of the same
signs are readable sometimes if you're
lucky but there is one last hope it's
the darling of budget dash cam stands across the internet and it happens to
nail our $100 budget exactly it boasts
true 1440p recording with easy and secure mounting and comes from a
manufacturer that accepts Community feedback and maintains their products
through firmware updates it's even popular enough to get into the top 20 on
Amazon and it's the viofo a19 V 3 all of
which sounds great but what about the image
quality I mean In fairness it is the
best we've seen so far especially when it comes to the finer details and it's
$20 cheaper than some of the competition but I can't help but be a little
disappointed it just feels like no matter which brand we buy and no matter
how much we spend we're ending up with pretty much the same crappy image even
from our best camera so let's do something I wouldn't actually recommend
and completely blow our budget these are
the black View Dr 750x plus and the
thinkware u1000 the Dr 750x is black
View's second most expensive one-channel dash cam at
$270 it has dualband Wi-Fi a back illuminated image sensor with enhanced
night vision and support for LTE cloud storage backup and the thinkware u1000
will that's think weare's Flagship device the best of the best 150° viewing
angle 1440p 60 FPS recording Geo fencing
with push notifications red light camera detection and picture quality that oh
come on the black view is as bad as the crappy Chinese cameras and the u1000 is
barely better than the a19 V3 if at all
does have some Creature Comforts I mean I guess it's nice that it tells me when
there's a red light camera coming up ahead red light in 200 M so that I can
stop at it instead of just blowing through like I normally would I mean
this thing's going to pay for itself in save traffic tickets and the Geo fencing
feature okay that legitimately could come in handy once my kids are old
enough to drive and maybe black View's cloud storage would come in handy in
case the camera got destroyed in a crash
but at more than double up to quadruple the prices of these other options I am
frankly blown away that there's anything
but a colossal Improvement in the
quality of capturing video out the front of my windshield you know the entire
purpose of these devices what is going
on here I mean if I were to put a $400
GoPro in my car instead of one of these cameras it would look amazing how are
these all so bad well here's a hint you
might see nine dash cams attached to
this car you know what I see two dash cams in n n different plastic shelves
listen to these startup
Chimes video mode please insert micro SD
card look at these default folder structures heck even just look at the
rear cameras that come with some of these notice any similarities the thing
is there are hundreds if not thousands of dash cam Brands but there are only a
handful of companies that actually manufacture the two most important
components the S so and the simos image
sensor in s so's the major player is
Taiwanese fabulous semiconductor manufacturer novitech not to be confused
with the Russian Natural Gas Corporation of the same name their bread and butter
is LCD controllers for companies like ASUS or Sony but on the side they also
make camera s so's like the nt96650
with the numbering scheme not easily obtainable by the general public it's
hard to tell ex exactly what the specs of these chips are or when they were
designed but from what we could glean online the
96660 was built sometime around or before
2017 and the last two digits appear to be the series end iteration so of our 10
dash cams in that near $100 range eight
of them were using novatech S so's and vopo was one of the few examples we
could find of any camera using an S so where the second to last digit was
higher than six meaning most of them are using 5-year-old technology at best
identifying a novatech system is fairly easy they often have the same startup
sounds video mode or use the default backup cameras or even have folder
structures that include the name novatech other manufacturers of s so's
include High silicon from Huawei think wear's manufacturer of choice amorella
and the Very infrequently used all winner in our limited searches we could
not seem to find thec manufacturers for black view or for Garmin products though
it's fairly likely that they're using one of these three as for seos image
sensors nearly every company uses Sony starvis a subcategory of their xmore
sensors xmor are used in nearly everything from phone cameras in Apple
and Samsung phones alike to high-end consumer cameras to the lowest end
webcams and the starvest line is the type that is specifically designed for
security cameras and other similar applications that require decent low
light performance the most common sensor to find in dash cams right now is the
IMX 335 it's a perfectly fine sensor
actually capable of 1440p video with a reasonable enough level of clarity even
in low light the Rove and the vopo both
use this sensor so then you would think they would have the same image quality
right clearly there's a difference though what it could be is something to
do with Rove using its limited processing power to upscale the image to
4K or it could have to do with the Road using an
nt96650 for the several hundred more that you
would pay for the thinkware u1000 you're getting a starvis IMX 334 which appears
to be the next level up from the 335 totally intuitive but the difference as
far as we've been able to see isn't that great if I could put it in PC Gamer
terms it's kind of like upgrading your graphics card from a 3070 to a 3070 TI
but for double or triple the price there are a few other sensor manufacturers
like omnivision or Galaxy Core but these are only used occasionally and image
quality at least going by the other reviews doesn't seem to be a huge
Improvement there either one great thing about Sony being the Big Kahuna and
image sensors is that they're pretty open with their data sheets so if you
know what image sensor a camera uses you can at least find some basic information
on it but that's only going to take you so far without having information on the
so or probably more important ly the
software algorithms that will be running to process the raw image the biggest
takeaway here then is that no matter which dash cam you choose there is kind
of this hard limit on image quality that can be achieved at the moment and some
of the low-end models they're already pretty close to that limit so you're
either going to be settling for good enough or as we suggested before you
could throw a GoPro up on your windshield with all the associated inconvenience that comes with that did I
remember to roll it and the problem is I doubt that this is going to change any
time soon because the top Dash camam companies seem to be more interested in
adding features like the ability to string five cameras together or let you
review your footage with full gyroscopic readouts rather than actually making a
camera that can read a bloody license plate 10 ft in front of you so if you're
in the market for a dash cam ignore the Amazon reviews f70 for the budget
shoppers out there and viofo a19 V3 for
pretty much everyone else their video quality isn't nearly as far off the top
of the line as you would think and neither of them is going to put you at
Major risk of having your window smashed to steal your dash cam if you want to
add a rear cam as well the a129 Plus or similar offerings from bofo will allow
you to do that as well also without breaking the bank now let's break our
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Linus if you enjoyed this video our first dasham video is a treat you can
watch Luke threaten me with wait is that a crowbar no it's an ice scraper I think
I'll be all right what the heck is going on here stop forward as one might
hope you what the cuz it's and
everything is the included 3M Mount keep
doing it definition of insanity right here we go boys