Hi all.

So I've been on the market to find a good dashcam for my SC and possibly even for other cars in the future. I've been using my GoPro H2 as a dashcam but the battery only last two hours not to mention having to manually delete the video file when the memory card gets full.

Anyone have any good suggestions or websites for dashcams?

Looking for a dashcam that I can power via the car battery/cig lighter, auto-loop recording so I don't have to manually delete videos, good video quality. Price, up to $300 maybe $400.

I have been involved in an accident today where a driver backed up into me. I'm afraid of the driver claiming I rear-ended him. Unfortunately I didn't have my GoPro on, damn batteries are shot.

 

When I go on YouTube I see lots of dashcam videos from Russia. It seems strange that such a set up is so common there and not so here ( other than police cars).

I would be interested to see what responses you get.

 

In April, I purchased a Livue (aka Winey) dash cam off of eBay, I think it was this one. It was around $100.

I hard-wired it into my 2IS by tapping into the power in the rear-view mirror, and have it mounted to the windshield just to the right of the mirror stalk (so it is almost entirely hidden from the driver's view by the mirror).

I'm very happy with the set-up. It turns on when the car turns on, and off when the car goes off. It has a small battery to enable graceful shutdowns, and the 8gb card included with the camera means it stores the last 3 hours of footage, automatically writing over the oldest stuff. If you want to store more footage, you can swap in your own mini SD card.

Overall, picture quality is decent. Not amazing, but good enough to pick out license plate numbers when the car is close. I'm satisfied with the quality, particularly for the price.

There are a few quirks with the camera. It has bright blue LEDs in the front that you can turn off in the settings. It's a Korean model, but you can flash English firmware. The front is also glossy black and silver, so I popped the cover off and spray painted it a dull black so it blended in better with the mirror. It also has an accelerometer that they use to detect "events", and you can't turn it off. So it will store normal footage in one folder, but "events" in another. In theory, a good idea, because it would allow you to easily find accidents and such, but in reality the accelerometer is so sensitive that it thinks going over speed bumps and potholes and such are events.

But overall I'm happy with the quality for the price, and it's still going strong 6 months later.

 

Don't count on any dashcam to run for any significant time on battery.

Out of cheap ebay models, the only good one seems to be Smartcam 2 HD, they are shipped from UK.

 

Where in MD are you? I'm working on that same subject matter project now. Stay tuned.

 

10 min down the road from the Redskins stadium/Fedex field.

I think I'll get that SmartCam 2

 

theres a deal going on on massdrop right now

https://www.massdrop.com/buy/blackvu...ncement%201014

looks pretty interesting

 

I use a GoPro Hero 3 with a USB cord that continuously charges the camera so it wont run out of power. As for a full memory card, I use a 32G card and so far I haven't had full memory problems. I usually start off with a freshly deleted card each time I used it. If nothing significant happens that day I delete everything.

 

I have mine set up like this too, but something is wrong with the GoPro casuing it to shut down after only a few minutes.

To make a permanent install, I went ahead and ordered the Blackvue DR500GW-HD. I will get it installed this weekend.