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Dash cams
Varinn
Vancouver, BCRegistered User regular
Vancouver, BCRegistered User regular
I've had this on the mind for a while, but a recent event has piqued my interest.
I live in a townhouse complex, and I'm currently parking 3 cars outside where in the last couple months there's been a couple rounds of cars getting damaged. My neighbors car was hit on the weekend around midnight (narrowly missing mine) and it tweaked the back end pretty bad. Mid January someone jumped on the hood of my weekend car and caved in the center of it, splitting the paint in a few points. In both cases we all know who it was; a kid across the way from us who's known to be quite the dink and frequently rolls into the complex drunk at night. In both cases we've got no proof, so both myself and my neighbor are forced to take the hit through our insurance.
I'm looking to buy a new townhouse soon that will have parking for 2 cars inside, but one will have to remain out. What I'm trying to find is a good, compact dash camera. Preferably one that will be able to idle when left in the car overnight and in the case of something happening boot up and record the event. Even better would be one that sort of landed along the lines of these features:
- Compact, I would like it to be as discrete as possible. Either mounted behind the rear-view mirror or with a "dash mount" style base
- No screen. I'm fairly picky about interior lighting and really do not want it to have an annoying LCD screen at night. If the screen could turn off when not using the controls that would work as well, as long as it's not on during the drive or parking.
- Easily detachable base/power supply cable. If I could leave a base/cable installed in each car it would give me the choice to swap it between either of mine, or plop it in the girlfriends car should we want to take hers out somewhere.
- No GPS, not that I'm totally opposed to it but I don't feel the need to pay for features I don't necessarily want. This is more for protection when parked than on the road... and let's just say I do enjoy driving "spiritedly" sometimes (so maybe speed tracking isn't the best thing :bigfrown: )
I live in a townhouse complex, and I'm currently parking 3 cars outside where in the last couple months there's been a couple rounds of cars getting damaged. My neighbors car was hit on the weekend around midnight (narrowly missing mine) and it tweaked the back end pretty bad. Mid January someone jumped on the hood of my weekend car and caved in the center of it, splitting the paint in a few points. In both cases we all know who it was; a kid across the way from us who's known to be quite the dink and frequently rolls into the complex drunk at night. In both cases we've got no proof, so both myself and my neighbor are forced to take the hit through our insurance.
I'm looking to buy a new townhouse soon that will have parking for 2 cars inside, but one will have to remain out. What I'm trying to find is a good, compact dash camera. Preferably one that will be able to idle when left in the car overnight and in the case of something happening boot up and record the event. Even better would be one that sort of landed along the lines of these features:
- Compact, I would like it to be as discrete as possible. Either mounted behind the rear-view mirror or with a "dash mount" style base
- No screen. I'm fairly picky about interior lighting and really do not want it to have an annoying LCD screen at night. If the screen could turn off when not using the controls that would work as well, as long as it's not on during the drive or parking.
- Easily detachable base/power supply cable. If I could leave a base/cable installed in each car it would give me the choice to swap it between either of mine, or plop it in the girlfriends car should we want to take hers out somewhere.
- No GPS, not that I'm totally opposed to it but I don't feel the need to pay for features I don't necessarily want. This is more for protection when parked than on the road... and let's just say I do enjoy driving "spiritedly" sometimes (so maybe speed tracking isn't the best thing :bigfrown: )
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Even though you have no proof, that doesn't necessarily mean there wasn't witnesses or that he won't admit to it.
That being said, our local government regulated insurance (Canada, BC) not only accepts dash cam footage for claims but most claim adviser's recommend installing one for owner's protection. I just spoke with an advisor a few minutes ago who told me that in both cases the deductible would still be paid by the owner, regardless of the outcome of the police findings. With that in mind I'm not really looking to find legal advice on pursuing a police report for vandalism that happened overnight with no proof a month ago. I'm looking for a camera.
They'll have more power and leeway here, also they'll be able to tap into power to support cameras.
Dash cameras kind of rely on a working car, at most you're going to get an hour or two before it needs to be plugged in or the battery swapped out.
Even discreet spy cameras like you see in pens and teddy bears can only record for an hour or two. So you have a short window to catch stuff.
After all of that, I'm hoping to buy my own place in a month or two anyways. As a renter, I have no vote towards complex happenings.
In the sense of battery life, I kind of assumed that some cameras were set to utilize the car's battery to provide an idle power for the G sensor similar to how the car maintains +12v to maintain clocks, radio, etc. Switching to the higher draw only on detection.
On the note of spy cameras, I can assure you I am not looking to creep on any babysitters or locker rooms!
EDIT: Called and spoke with the RCMP, they directed me to their department that explains the laws and the guy said there is no issues with having one for surveillance. He uses one himself, as do many coworkers.
I think your best bet is a camera in your house you can plug in and record from and point to your vehicle. It'll be cheaper and definitely more manageable.
I dunno about a car camera with motion/mass detection, that seems like it'd be in the realm of an actual physical camera stuck to a building. Google and amazon aren't really being much more helpful than babysitter spycams that need to be plugged in, or a pen camera that only records for like 30 minutes.
@Thomamelas knows some things about cameras, maybe he can point you in the right direction.
Generally most systems, analog or IP, have functionality to block out areas from being recorded. But this is easily solved by spending a moment thinking about what the camera's field of view is. Also if you're going to seek a consult about the legality of something, you're much, much better off talking to a lawyer.
The in car idea is a bad one because you'd need a 360 degree field of view and you have lots of handy obstructions blocking you. So I'd drop that idea unless you plan on going the Google Maps route. Mounting a camera to a building allows you to cover the whole area with a smaller field of view.
The downside that i've always seen is that they work off accelerometers to detect a bump to the car before they start to record, and as such don't actually record until a few seconds after whatever event happens to set off the system.
The feature you'd be looking for in a dash cam would be a parking mode.
I have used their products in the past for security/remote start and liked them. Customer service about 4 years ago was also real nice and helpful when I had to call about my busted remote (was ~6 yrs old).
PaD id - 346,240,298
Marvel FF - Lil bill12
https://dashcamtalk.com/
I haven't bought one yet, I generally research the crap out of my purchases first.
I ended up getting a BlackVue DR550GW-2CH. That's an older model. They now have the BlackVue DR650GW-2CH. As I understand it, it's basically the same thing but it now is compatible with microSD cards up to 64GB (mine can only use 32GB). The card capacity just affects how much video you can record before you have to start overwriting existing recordings or swap out the card. It's about $300, but they go on sale on Amazon and other places sometimes. Installation can be pricey depending on who you have do it and how you want it done. It's totally possible to do yourself. However, I wanted the cables to be totally hidden (especially considering one has to go all the way between the front and rear cameras) and so I got a professional install. I wasn't comfortable tearing down my car's interior myself.
My primary concerns were:
Highest possible video quality and framerate
Front and rear video
Not too big (my concern here is that I didn't want it to be that visible to me as the driver; from my point of view, it's hidden perfectly by the rearview mirror, but it is completely visible from outside of the car)
Ability to run constantly if desired
Telemetry data
Ease of viewing video/file management
There are some things you'll want to be aware of. It sounds like you want to run the dash cam constantly. This presents two problems for you. The first is that if you want to run the camera when the car is off, then it's best that you get a separate power system, otherwise it can drain your car battery. BlackVue has one called Power Magic Pro. There are other such systems. They don't have to made by the same manufacturer as your camera and they don't have to be made specifically for use with dash cams. There are a bunch of these power systems for cars because people use them for different reasons such as supplying power to car alarm systems, after-market accessories such as remote start systems, fancy stereos, etc, etc. I actually don't have this problem because my car is fully electric, so my camera is just tapped into the car's 12V line for accessories.
The other problem you'll have is that many of the dash cams are not reliable when active for long periods of time because they start to get very hot and then it starts running into errors as computer chips are known to do once they get outside of their normal operating temperatures. For this reason, I unplug my camera when I go somewhere where I'm going to park for really long time, like at work. However, when I go out to lunch or something, it's fine, I just leave the camera on, which is great because it will catch it if someone hits my car or something. There have been plenty of times where I have accidentally left the camera plugged in all day. In colder, cloudier weather, it actually works perfectly fine. If it's sunny and I've left the camera on for many hours, I have sometimes opened the car door to the sound of the audible warning telling me that the microSD card has become corrupted. Oh that's another tip, I have two 32GB microSD cards and keep the extra in the car so I can always swap them if necessary. The camera will roll over the files, so running out of capacity isn't a problem (unless you want to make sure to save everything), but having a spare is handy in case the card gets corrupted or something. Even that is not that big of a deal though since the camera has the on-board ability to reformat the card.
There are dash cams that have a motion sensor capability (my BlackVue 550 does, but I keep it disabled). When enabled, the motion sensor feature requires the camera to be constantly powered, but it will not record video constantly. Instead, it will only record video when motion is detected via the G-force sensor (accelerometers) in the camera. However, this is mostly useless because the video will only start after the motion/impact has been detected, meaning that you will miss the actual event. I suppose it's better than nothing, as you might catch a car driving away or something, but still, I don't put much stock in this feature.
Speaking of G-force sensors, the BlackVue, as well as other cameras, record 3 dimensional data about the forces experienced on the camera (which are the same as the forces experienced on your car assuming your camera is firmly attached). The BlackVue video player has a nice display where it shows this data synced to the video. There is also a GPS location and speed feature. The speed is determined using the GPS data, so it's not perfect. Also, unless they've since enabled an option to set it, it's kind of annoying that with the BlackVue, the date and time stamp of the videos are also set by GPS. The reason that's a problem, at least for me, is that my windshield blocks radio signals somewhat, and 99.9% of the time, my camera can't connect to GPS. So for months, my videos just had completely incorrect timestamps on them until one day the camera managed to connect for a few seconds. I never have location and speed data because of this. When I get around to it, I have been meaning to find out if I can open up the camera and maybe solder on a wire to act as an external antenna for the GPS and maybe direct the antenna to some part of the car that can get a signal.
The BlackVue has a nice feature by which you can connect your computer, tablet, or phone to the camera wirelessly and view the videos and even copy them off of there. It supports iOS, Android, and Windows 8/Surface. A guy I know actually wrote a program that he runs on a laptop he keeps permanently in his garage so that when he pulls into his garage, his app connects to the camera and automatically downloads the videos, so he never has to deal with physically swapping the cards (he also flashed the camera with custom firmware he found on some dash cam enthusiast site that records the video at a higher bitrate, but that exacerbates the overheating problem).
Anyway, I quite like the BlackVue camera and their software. I've had it for about 8 months I would guess. One downside is that they are a Korean company and some of their instructions and website materials aren't as clear as they could be.