K100 Mirror DVR Dash Camera NT96650 / AR0330 / F1.6 / WDR-HDR / 6G lens

[dbizzle22]

Looks pretty good! I'm sure Youtube is killing some of the quality too. License plates in your area are VERY easy to read. Much better contrast on your plates versus the California ones I have that are white with smallish blue lettering. Blah!

I ordered mine earlier from Foxoffer. Hope it gets here soon so I can start testing. Also hope that the lens doesn't aim at the sun shade dots I have above the middle area of my rear view mirror.

Question for you Tweety: You labeled the movies GT700. I thought you have the K100 mirror DVR?

 

[tweety889]

Question for you Tweety: You labeled the movies GT700. I thought you have the K100 mirror DVR?

The one at Foxoffer is labelled K100, while I got it from Niko's link it was labelled as GT700 .

 

[billknow]

Someone sold it as GT700 in Taobao, actually gt700 is same as k100.

 

[tweety889]

Hey guys, better hold on to ordering this model. I have just discovered a bug, in that the date (MM) cannot be adjusted for the months from January to September. The error was discovered when the date increased from 2013/12/31 to 2013/13/01! I manually adjusted it, but it will only show 2014/10/01, no matter how much I tried to adjust it to January or the other months stated. Only November and December are able to be shown correctly. Now I have to switch date stamping to 'off' while I try to sort this out with the supplier.

Has anyone encountered this before? May be need a firmware update you think?

p.s. followed up with the supplier n he said that they will amend/update this in their next firmware, hopefully within the next few days.

 

[dbizzle22]

Hey guys, better hold on to ordering this model. I have just discovered a bug, in that the date (MM) cannot be adjusted for the months from January to September. The error was discovered when the date increased from 2013/12/31 to 2013/13/01! I manually adjusted it, but it will only show 2014/10/01, no matter how much I tried to adjust it to January or the other months stated. Only November and December are able to be shown correctly. Now I have to switch date stamping to 'off' while I try to sort this out with the supplier.

Has anyone encountered this before? May be need a firmware update you think?

p.s. followed up with the supplier n he said that they will amend/update this in their next firmware, hopefully within the next few days.

Good to hear that a firmware fix is expected. I ordered mine last week and expect it shortly. Please keep the thread updated once you hear about official firmware release

 

[tweety889]

Good to hear that a firmware fix is expected. I ordered mine last week and expect it shortly. Please keep the thread updated once you hear about official firmware release

A firmware fix was published about the same day of my feedback. Kudos to the Taobao seller!

 

[dbizzle22]

A firmware fix was published about the same day of my feedback. Kudos to the Taobao seller!

Link please?

How's the new firmware behaving on yours?

 

[tweety889]

Here you go:

http://url.cn/Isua9k

There will be 2 blue buttons. Click the left one to download, or scan the CR code with your handphone.

This update mainly to deal with the bug for the date display. The correct date shows up now

 

[Jack Dakota]

I just got this unit last week from FoxOffer. Ordered on the 12/12/13 and received it on 1/3/14 in Los Angeles. I was hoping for better video quality because of the sensor and chipset but I'm just overly disappointed. The video from this unit is very noisy when you compare it to GT300W, which I also have. GT300W is amazing at night but K100 is just very bad at night. Night video is very noisy and just not sharp. I would consider night video to be useless at this point because you can't see the license plate number clearly unless you're a foot away from the car in front of you.

I'm not sure if it's better but K100 file uses AVC 4.1 profile at 15Mbps. GT300W uses 4.0 profile at 15Mbps. It doesn't seem to have WDR/HDR and the EV adjustment just adds more noise to the footage. Picture on FoxOffer site does show HDR in the menu but it doesn't show up on my unit. K100 is rated at 1Lux min illumination so I know I wasn't getting better image at night when compare to GT300W's 0.3Lux min. But GT300w appears to me to be at least 4X brighter and sharper. The video from K100 just looks like 720P extrapolated to 1080P. It's just not sharp.

The microSD is on top and the slot is very recessed. You pretty much have to take the thing off your mirror to remove the memory card. You'll need a long fingernail for a male to press the memory card that it would eject. You can't really adjust the lens angle much unless you move the mirror to the point where you can't really see behind you. If I aim the lens to get a good front view then I can't see the middle and left side of anything behind me. It's just a very poor design. With so much space on the unit, they should have used standard SD card instead of microSD. That would at least help fix one issue.

The battery on it is either defective or not meant to be used more than 1min. I let it charge overnight and was only able to get max 1min of usage before it turns off. This really doesn't matter much if it's easier to remove the memory card to copy the videos. But because the card is so hard to take out without removing the whole mirror, I have to cut power to the unit and use the USB port to copy the video off it. The USB port should have been moved a bit lower. At the current location The USB is at the top so the USB cable will hit the headliner of your car unless your stock mirror is mounted pretty low. This makes it difficult to unplug the unit to copy the video files off because you have to tilt the whole mirror forward to unplug the cable.

Had I not have the GT300W, I would think that it's borderline acceptable but because I have been using GT300W for over 6 months, K100 is just a big disappointment to me. I was really looking forward to have something more discrete but I will have to keep using GT300W for now until something better comes along.

I will try to upload the video comparing the K100 to GT300W later on.

 

[Gurkha9]

Thanks for an informative review, this is what I was waiting to read as I had higher hopes for this model.

 

[tweety889]

agreed that the night video is not as good as the publicity ones (although it was better than my older cam). I wonder if they had used other cams for such clips in ads. how do we, as buyers, check for the authenticity of such clips?

 

[Gurkha9]

how do we, as buyers, check for the authenticity of such clips?

By looking at clips from real users rather than from ads and such.

 

[Jack Dakota]

Some video clips as promised. Even with Youtube compression, you can clearly see that GT300W, which uses the same sensor & chipset is much sharper during the day and brighter and sharper at night. I mounted K100 & GT300W next to each other so that you can easily compare the two. I haven't updated the firmware yet so the date bug is still there and reads 14/10/03 instead of 14/01/03.

K100 Day Clip 1

GT300W Day Clip 1

K100 Day Clip 2

GT300W Day Clip 2

K100 Night Clip 1

GT300W Night Clip 1

K100 Night Clip 2

GT300W Night Clip 2

I'm not trying to completely trash the K100. I can live with the shortcomings of the battery and bad placements of usb and memory card but the image quality needs to be good. Given the same sensor and chipset, I was just expecting GT300W video quality in a more user friendly and discrete form factor.

 

[dbizzle22]

Thanks for the clips. Really sad to hear that the k100 is so disappointing. Especially since it's on its way to me in the mail.

I'm new to the dash am world but would the k100 problems be fixable via firmware versions down the road? Or what would make the cameras with same chipsets so different in quality?

 

[jokiin]

Firmware may improve things, good chance though that the lens quality is not the same

 

[tweety889]

The K100/GT700 looks very similar to this one GL2000 by Shadow (also touted as a GT300W upgrade):

http://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?sp..._id=&am_id=&cm_id=140105335569ed55e27b&pm_id=

No detailed specs were given other than the usual sales talk. I guess most of these brands are just buying off stock from some factory in quantities that justifies printing their own logos on it.

Anyone here swears by the Shadow brand to give us better quality than other fly-by-night swim-by-day companies? Even if they look the same.

p.s. forgot to add that this Shadow branded one is more expensive than the GT700 (RMB598 vs RMB388).

p.p.s. if the attached video links are genuinely from GL2000, then I can safely say that K100/GT700/GL2000 night time video quality looks about the same.

 

[dbizzle22]

Here you go:

http://url.cn/Isua9k

There will be 2 blue buttons. Click the left one to download, or scan the CR code with your handphone.

This update mainly to deal with the bug for the date display. The correct date shows up now

Just got mine and want to update the firmware. I have the file downloaded and used WinRAR to open. Now I have a .bin file. What's next?

 

[dbizzle22]

Just got mine and want to update the firmware. I have the file downloaded and used WinRAR to open. Now I have a .bin file. What's next?

Oh figured it out. Just copied file to MicroSD and booted the cam. New splash screen now and everything was in Chinese. Was able to change it back to English and now the date works fine.

We'll see how the videos turn out!

 

[tweety889]

Do you have any tinting done on your windscreen? I have a strip across the top part of my windscreen and I suspect that may upset the exposure. Hope your videos can verify if there is any effect, when comparing with your day/night videos.

 

[dbizzle22]

Do you have any tinting done on your windscreen? I have a strip across the top part of my windscreen and I suspect that may upset the exposure. Hope your videos can verify if there is any effect, when comparing with your day/night videos.

No tint. But I do have the dotted black area above the rear view mirror.