Cheapo Chinese Dash-cams

Nick Odell was thinking very hard :

I bought a combined HD forward facing and remote mounted SD (rear window) cam unit, some 3 years ago, for around £29. Front cam is not very good in the dark, with no street lights, rear is fine. Collision sensor is not that sensitive, it needs a good thump to trigger it. Its tiny, fits tight to the screen, using a double sided tape bracket, so invisible from the inside or out. Its difficult to configure, via its tiny screen, but it has worked fine for all that time.

If you buy the expensive ones from the likes of Halfords, you are still buying the cheap Chinese ones, but rebranded.

I had an ?11 one the battery expanded .....

My first one didn't cycle the video files. Once the micro SD card was full, the dashcam stopped recording.

The second one, a Z-Edge Z1 is much better.

I've now been running it for 17 months, and it's working well. Ii does hang down a bit lower than the rectangular-shaped cameras (the Z1 is almost square), but I can live with that as I keep the sunscreen down most of the time anyway. I did try it on the left-hand side of the windscreen, but the wipers don't clean the screen there! The suction fitting is starting to play up a bit (sun ageing?), and I find it best to push it hard against the screen before pulling the locking arm down (by itself the locking arm doesn't apply enough suction to keep it on the screen for more than an hour at best).

Define "not too expensive" For less than £90 you can get a Ddpai M6Plus. I think you can see where the extra money goes compared to a £20 dash cam.

Jeff Layman pretended :

Mine was by default set for that, a simple option change and it overwrote the oldest files first.

On some that seems to be as a result of the crash detection creating a write protected section of video which creates a barrier where the new over-writing old will not cross. The SD card then needs to be reformatted to remove this barrier. The crash detection may have been caused by the camera being poorly fixed and falling off the screen.

Another Dave

This one actually stayed on the screen, but I get what you are suggesting. However, I always viewed the micro SD card on a laptop and then deleted the files (and indeed reformatted the card) so it was clean. The dashcam still wouldn't deleted the oldest file and overwrite it (it was set up to overwrite the files). A few of the reviews noted this as a problem - I should have paid more attention!

Thanks for the replies: lots of useful stuff in there and I appreciate it.

Nick

I had/have a 'mini803', not that cheap (~£80 in 2013). It worked well enough for a year or two but has become increasingly unreliable. It randomly switches off, on never switches on. Reformating the memory card or even re-flashing the software fixed it for a while, but it has got progressively worse. The problem with these things is partly the car environment: sitting just under the windscreen they get overheated on sunny days, in winter there is humidity and cold. But it is not impossible to make the electronics robust, but it would add to the cost. More significantly it would require a bit more care at the design stage, and that applies even more to the software. The rush to bring out the latest version with the 'improved' higher res chip seems to cause all these brandless manufacturers to cut corners. The software is never stable before they move on to the next version.

From personal experience ..

2) Test before forgetting. Then test again. make sure you can get the files off the device.

4) Get one with a screen so you can see that's it's working.