Dash Cam Recommendations

Grand Cherokee - wife's ride. Not an option. You can turn it off, but like many conveniences you get used to it. We only use it for highway visiting reltives in nm. Mo, ks, fl, tn, ga, & ny. 2012 with 90k miles.
Of course its not an option - this is Amerika.
 
I won't drive without a dash cam now. My mother-in-law has been hit twice by someone running a red light in the past two years and my wife was hit by a red light runner earlier this year. Thankfully my MIL's second crash and my wife's crash were both recorded on dash cam.

With my wife's crash, there were no injuries and it initially looked like minor damage. The other driver stopped and my wife called police to get a report for insurance. Waited for over an hour but police never showed (turns out there was a shooting a few miles away around the same time and all the officers were sent there). Since there were no injuries, the operator on the phone said to just exchange insurance. The other woman said "I will gladly pay for the minor damage to your car."

Good thing we had video. She denied to her insurance that she ran a red light and the insurance company wanted to put my wife at fault, even after our adjuster made it known we had clear video evidence to the contrary. The insurer made it very difficult to upload the video and even then took a long time to authorize repair. Even thought the damage looked minor it ended up totaling almost $7,000. Minor indeed :rolleyes:

We've been lucky that the cam has worked when we needed it, but I wouldn't recommend the brand we have. While it has a lot of nice features, too often it will stop recording, freeze, or just plain shut off. I've updated the firmware every time a new version is available that claims to "fix the problems" and it never does. From my brief research, there aren't a ton of "great" options. We just keep our eye on it regularly and hit the reset button if needed.
 
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I run Nextbase 222's in our cars. They record to a Micro SD in 3 minutes increments. You can purchase extra mag mounts if you want to run one camera in multiple cars.
 
This thread is timely, I've been thinking of getting a dash cam recently. I was liking the F 70 too until I noticed it didn't also have a rear facing camera. They have an upgraded version with the rear facing camera too I'll likely go with, their THINKWARE X700 Dual Dash Cam Front and Rear Camera for Cars.

Or heck, it just occurred to me to maybe just get two F70 cameras for front and rear use. Though now I'm thinking how do I get power to the rear camera lol. Hmmm... and can anyone tell me how long the supplied F70 power cable is?

And can anyone think of any drawbacks to just using F70 cameras front and rear vs. going with the X700 dual dash cam setup?

Thanks for the information!!
 
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I use a Garmin dashcam 56 (the current version is the 57). 140* field of view, 1440p. Small, unobtrusive and easy to use. It also accepts up to a 512 GB microSD so you can use it to record travel videos if you choose rather than frequently recording over images in a loop as with a lower capacity card. It takes stills as well with a push of a button or voice control, and has a g-force sensor that automatically saves videos of accidents/impacts so you can't accidentally erase or record over those images.

I have it linked to a Garmin Dashcam 47 for the rear, and purchased extra mounts so I can easily move the pair between Jeep and Sprinter

It may seem like overkill, but I found them useful for recording the journey on several extended overlanding trips and month-long journeys in Baja.

As for Baja, the Federales, and the frequent military checkpoints in Mexico - I have an old and now inoperable cheap Chinese dashcam that I mounted inside the cab of my Sprinter in plain view pointed toward the driver's window that I can swivel to point to the inside of the van. Cops and soldiers think the exchange is being recorded even though it is a dummy - no more demands for mordida and no more attempts to pilfer stuff.
 
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Yea, that reminds me that I need to buy a cigarette lighter split thing, off to do that now...

Get a hardwire kit that plugs into the fuse box. That way you don’t take up your main accessory plug and you can hide the wiring. Plus it will turn the camera on and off with the ignition.

The kits are under $20 on Amazon. Just make sure to get the correct plug for your dash cam (micro vs mini usb).
 
Get a hardwire kit that plugs into the fuse box. That way you don’t take up your main accessory plug and you can hide the wiring. Plus it will turn the camera on and off with the ignition.

The kits are under $20 on Amazon. Just make sure to get the correct plug for your dash cam (micro vs mini usb).
I put in these
Electop Car Charger Power Cigarette Lighter Female Socket Cable Plug Adapter https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FJ8OXX2/?tag=wranglerorg-20
and
4 Types 12V Add-a-Circuit Adapter... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085MGP931/?tag=wranglerorg-20
And
USB C Car Charger, Anker 32W... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097N94PWM/?tag=wranglerorg-20

Let me do fast charging for my phone + any other usb device and I can swap cables if I need.
 
Get a hardwire kit that plugs into the fuse box. That way you don’t take up your main accessory plug and you can hide the wiring. Plus it will turn the camera on and off with the ignition.

The kits are under $20 on Amazon. Just make sure to get the correct plug for your dash cam (micro vs mini usb).

Totally different situation. I have a "cig lighter" inside my dash for my GPS, I'll just split it to run the dashcam.
 
Update: Installed it (Thinkware F70) today. There's a bit of a snafu with the power hookup behind the glove box, but that isn't a cam issue.

The good news: Its easy to install and it works. About the hardest thing was getting the plastic peeled off the 3M double stick pad on the thing - it fought me pretty hard! Temporarily lost an earring because my head was upside down under the glovebox, other than that, it was easy.

From a driveway test, the video is nice and clear, and it has good audio. We'll see how that pans out driving the Jeep tomorrow.

The bad news: The support software is wonky in a bewildering array of ways. You set the thing's clock using the support software which writes the current date/time onto the SD card, then you hurry up and get it into the camera and powered up to accomplish the actual setting. But the software doesn't always allow the current time to be written to the card - in a way that I don't understand. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn't. Not sure what I'm doing when it *does* work.

Both windows and mac versions of the software are included on the SD card, so you load the card into your computer and run the install. The mac version - predictably - seems buggier than the windows version. The windows version wanted to self update - and the new version will only work on windows 8+, and I had to find that out the hard way. I do have a windows 10 laptop here that I could try, maybe the software works better than on my old 7 box. *shrug* Not sure I care.

The unit comes with an 8 gig SD card. That's the good news. The bad news is that there's only about 1.8 gigs free on it - took me awhile to find out why. Turns out there are skillions of temp files created, each just slightly less than 80 megs in size, leaving not a whole lot of room for videos. I probably don't care, but using the remaining space over and over as a ring buffer will probably wear the SD card out sooner than later. I think I'll be getting a 64 gig card for it just to prevent that.

As for operation, its dead nuts simple. Turn it on, and it starts recording video in 1 minute files. Press a button, and it will record for one minute starting at T-10 seconds into a separate directory. That makes finding an "event" easier - and there's also a shock sensor that will also do a similar thing into yet another directory, I think that one runs from T-10 til T+10. All videos are standard MP4 files that can be played with the included software, or any standard video player.

Inserting the Micro SD card is a bit of a hassle - the bottom facing slot is an invitation to dropping the card down the defrost vent. But in normal operation, I can't see removing/installing the card being done very often, just when you have something that needs looking at. It would have been handy if there was a USB port I could plug a laptop into, but all in all, it isn't bad aside from the wonky support software.

Oh, and it wanted to do a camera firmware update as well - which worked pretty slick - handled through the support software. The camera's voice prompts work well. I'll try to get some footage tomorrow driving, both afternoon and nite - and take a couple of stills of the installation as well.

Oh, and they tell you to NOT insert the micro-SD card into a smartphone - it apparently "can" scrozzle the thing and/or lose video. Don't understand why, but as far as I'm concerned, that's a feature!
 
Here's a couple of pix, sample video coming tonite/tomorrow:

DSC01870.JPG


DSC01873.JPG
 
Here's the sample video, both day and nite, taken on my way to/from dance class. Make sure YooToob is showing 1080 video, otherwise it looks terrible and doesn't show the actual quality. Probably best to watch it on YooToob directly.


In other news, their support software is apparently no longer being maintained nor supported, but still available. I'm not sure if that applies to the software that sets up the camera - sets the clock and whatnot. That is a separate program that is called by the main support program or can be run stand alone. The good news is that the main program isn't really needed, the bad news is that the setting program is the buggy one - at least when it comes to clock setting. This is a ridiculous situation, I have an email into their support dept asking WTF? With that said, as long as I can finagle the setting program to set the clock when needed, I'm good. Looks like I'll be buying a couple more of them for the other cars.
 
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