OT: Car dash camera

Looking to get a dash camera because the standard of driving is becoming terrible these days. I don't want to spend a huge amount of money but nor do I want the cheapest crappy ones so I'm willing to spend up to about £130 or £140ish.

It's got to be good for both day and night driving but also needs to be either 'fit and forget' or very easy to mount/unmount.

You can be involved in an incident just as easily on a 1-mile trip to the paper shop as on a 400-mile journey so ideally it needs to be in there for every journey but as we live in 'broken britain', as sure as eggs is eggs, some theiving scrote will break in to nick it unless it's small enough to be unseen from outside. Mounting/unmounting, unless very easy, will soon become a pain in the arse and it'll end up not being used.

So which make and model would you gurus recommend?

TIA

Reply to
John
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I recommend taking some time to learn more about the subject.

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I've had have a "Mini 0803" for year or two, hard wired into the car, but I see that it's no longer recommended because of "reliability problems" (I've had no trouble with mine and I'm still pleased with it).

A list of recommended cameras:

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Reply to
Mike Barnes

I have a Mobius dash camera, which has had good reviews from the techmoan site.

I also did a load of research and learning about the subject before I went and bought one.

I fitted a 4mtr USB cable into any of the possible recesses of my car from just under the rear view mirror across and round to a 2 port USB cigarette socket behind the hand brake. So all I have to do now is just plug the free end of the USB lead into the rear of the camera and stick it on the windscreen just under the rear view mirror. As soon as the engine starts up, so does the camera, and it takes great pictures both day and night.

The mobius camera can be configured in windows using a program called msetup.

Reply to
BobH

I have a £10 on from Ebay, and while I know you will want something more sophisticated, mine runs 24/7 even when parked overnight, and records 15 min files overwriting the earliest one already on the SD card.

Reply to
Graham.

This is what I chose:

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A bit above your target price, but it does give your position and speed as well as the video and, in the event of an impact, it creates a separate record of 10 seconds either side.

Reply to
Nightjar

I love these two

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Reply to
ARW

John explained :

Thanks folks, much appreciated.

Reply to
John

I am always puzzled by dash cams. Why is there not a cam in the rear, as many times cars are "rear-ended" so evidence there would surely also be useful.

Reply to
Broadback

On 26/04/2015 14:39, Broadback wrote: ...

That is a feature of many professional systems. Some allow up to four cameras, so you can have sideways views too. However, when I had somebody drive into the back of me a month ago, the dash can would still have been useful had he not admitted total liability. It showed that I was stationary at the time of impact. It also showed that I had slowed gently to a halt onto the end of a traffic queue and not braked suddenly or unexpectedly.

Reply to
Nightjar

I think that BlackVue now do a system with two cameras - front and rear.

I've got a single BackVue (front-only) camera which is "ok" - but not wonderful. It claims to be HD, but you need very favourable lighting conditions to be able to read number plates. Part of the problem (and this will apply to all dash cameras) is that, being inside the windscreen, you get reflections off the screen which degrade the quality of the image.

I think that later models than mine have a means of viewing recorded footage on a phone or tablet using BlueTooth but mine requires the micro-SD card to be removed and processed on a computer - which is a bit of a pain.

Reply to
Roger Mills

I have some sympathy for the guy after the lorry driver intentionally closed the gap.

Reply to
Fredxxx

The crash was wholly the lorry driver's fault for closing the gap. The caravan driver was incompetent, but the lorry driver was malicious and should be prosecuted, IMNHO.

Reply to
Huge

Roger Mills wrote in news:cq4hu2Fj6csU1 @mid.individual.net:

Try making a sort of lens hood that goes up to the screen.

Reply to
DerbyBorn

I think the 'road rage' is justified: caravan in wrong lane for turn, carries on in ghost island and tries to cut in.

Reply to
DJC

With a fixed iris that shouldn't make any difference how good the optics and (fixed) focus are is another matter. I'll have to dig out some of the HD footage taken on a "5 M pixel" phone via Autoguard and see what that is like.

Getting the lens as close to the glass as possible will alieviate things. By close I mean touching all but a sheet of papers thickness...

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Interesting thought. Not easy, because the camera is a horizontal cylinder mounted an inch or so behind a sloping screen. It's worth looking, though, to see whether I could come up a cardboard cone with its point cut off, and with the bottom cut off at an angle, and the whole thing attached to the camera with Velcro or somesuch.

Reply to
Roger Mills

Not an option with my camera, I'm afraid. The camera is held in a bracket which is fixed to the screen with a mirror-type sticky pad. The camera is cylindrical, with its axis horizontal and parallel to the screen. The only degree of freedom is to rotate the camera in the bracket to make the lens point in the right direction (up and down) - but there's no way of getting it closer to the screen.

Reply to
Roger Mills

In message , "dennis@home" writes

Equally the nearside lane user on roundabouts who then goes all the way round.

Also signalling intentions, while not a requirement, would contribute to easing congestion.

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Reply to
Tim Lamb

It would be interesting to know what was happening in the lead up to this incident. It looks as though the road works have caused traffic using the slip road to become a near continuous queue. Had the car driver got caught out by this and found himself alongside an unexpected long queue of traffic while running out of road before the turning or was he one of the chancers who drive down the outside of a queue like that and rely upon forcing their way in at the last minute, in order to save a few seconds on their journey time?

Reply to
Nightjar

On 27/04/15 01:52, Nightjar It would be interesting to know what was happening in the lead up to

As a general rule IME caravan drivers are not chancers - it's had to be a chancer when you have a big unstable deadweight on you arse and the acceleration of a tortoise.

But even so, unless he'd been trying to move over for the last 1/4 mile, he should have aborted and turned around at the next junction.

Reply to
Tim Watts

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