I was sent this dash cam to beta and help work through some initial issues, I was granted permission to go ahead and post my unbiased review. I hope that its up to everyones satisfaction and if you have any questions about the product feel free to ask and I will answer the best I can.
For starters there is no retail packaging as I received this in a plane white box along with the window mount, wire harness, hardwire kit, and cigarette lighter adapter. We all know what most of this looks like so I didn’t bother to take any pictures… the only thing you guys might not have seen before is the hardwire kit, this is important to have if you plan on using this in your car and want to continuously have it monitor around the clock. The dash cam relies on the use of Super capacitors so it needs to have a power source at all time, the hardwire kit connects to your OBD port and is wired to a USB input. This way you can plug or unplug your dash cam as needed and leave it connected to your obd port at all times.
As for the camera, Its rather small and to be honest the screen size may turn some users away due to how small it is. But the small screen size allows this to maintain a small footprint and can be slightly hidden behind the mirror…I prefer this as its rather stealthy and less obvious to others that you have a dash cam yet alone a dual dash cam. I do not drive for uber or lyft so I have no worries about advising others that they will be recorded as only myself and my family will be in the car. I have the cameras overall dimensions at 4" X 1 1/4"X just under 1.5"
In my last photo you can see how easily the screen is scratched, and yes I did handle the dash cam a lot moving it from car to car. Initially I had a hard mount, but Roav sent me a suction mount as others including myself have preferred that. This allows for you to position the camera where it is ideal for you and not bound to one set position. You can also see that I have the interior camera Positioned differenty than stock, in the stock form you are able to adjust and swivel the camera about 60 degrees either up or down, the mount also allows you to swivel the camera left or right about 180 degrees…I often did this when I parked against a wall so that I can get emergency recordings if anything was going on around my car.
When set up you can have the display turned on and show just the front camera, the rear camera or do a picture in picture and have it display both cameras. You can also choose to have the screen turned off and not display anything. The following photos are various settings you can choose.
As for the actual recording and footage, I have found that the camera is much better than my previous C1 pro but only just slightly. The lens on this camera seems to capture everything better than the previous camera, but it still washes the colors out a bit and seems to overexposed. maybe its just me and they did release a few firmware updates to address various issues users had, but the video got just slightly better with each update. Now I know my unit was a beta unit and maybe the final release will be different but I do not know since i only have this one. I do like that when going over the files you can choose the interior files separate from the front files and they are not saved as a picture in picture. This was my biggest concern as you may or may not want to show the interior or exterior when sharing the files, so at least you can choose and separate them.
This is a screenshot of the file thumbnails, as you can see there are entries for the front and rear camera…hopefully you can see them
Here is a video of actual camera footage
here is a video of the c1 pro, you can tell the difference…
. Some questions…
