Thinkware F800 Techincal Specs...

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Dee_82

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Dash Cam
Thinkware F750
In 2015 Thinkware showed of its Flagship F750 Dual channel Dashcam being accredited with several awards the camera was almost perfect, just lacking in bitrate.

In 2016 Thinkware released the F770, which for all intents and purposes was an exact clone of its F750 cousin, to rub salt in to the wounds Thinkware then went out of their way to prevent F750 users upgrading its software to become F770 devices. Not cool Thinkware!

That brings us to 2017 and the Promise of a new F800 dual channel dash cam, can this device claw back some of their lost reputation? Thanks to @Maddog1974 we now have the technical specs of the F800 device and I think thinkware might just have a shot with this setup...

Powered by an Ambarella A12A55 SoC it has the potential for greatness. Below is the SoC specs, this is NOT to be expected on the camera itself, it merely depicts the brains behind the whatever we get and gives us an insight in to how good it might be.

https://www.ambarella.com/uploads/docs/A12A-Product-Brief.pdf
  • High Performance Automotive Video Engine ° Quad HD 4MP @ 30fps, Full 1080p HD @ 60fps
  • Simultaneous encode of two high-resolution Quad HD 4MP @ 30fps streams for front and rear cameras
  • Advanced Night Vision with super-resolution oversampling, 3D noise filters and dynamic tone mapping
  • Real-time geometric distortion correction (de-warp) filter ° Advanced automotive dynamic range engine with
  • local exposure, highlight and tone adjustment ° Automotive smart auto exposure (AE) with scene
  • detection, object detection and dynamic AE ° Continuous looping, motion detection and event-based/emergency video
With a Sony exmor R starvis IMX291 Sensor

This is a curious choice of sensor, its now fairly old and it has only got a 2MP sensor restricting it to 1080p, id have liked to have seen an 8MP sensor which would give a truly mind blowing dashcam experience but alas we are stuck with old 2015 tech giving us a maximum of 1080p at over 120fps, more realistically that will be 30-60fps but with a significant bump in bit rate over current gen cameras.

http://www.sony-semicon.co.jp/products_en/new_pro/february_2015/imx290_291_e.html

an awful lot more goes in to making a dashcam than the specs of the components and making them work together and the software interface is where it will all change, but I think there is a very real chance we will see some higher dual channel bit rates at 1080p and potentially 60fps. The camera will come with a lot of other bells and whistles, notably around low light performance. This might just be the upgrade F750 users have been waiting for, time will tell....
 
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I'm not so sure you're going to see the higher bitrates you're after when used with more than one channel on this chipset
 
If it can encode 2 x 4K streams at 30fps, then it surely must have the ability to handle 2 x 1080p streams. id expect 15-20 Mbps. h.264 doesn't typically use more than that on a HD movie and the sensor has the ability of 10bpc so the quality "should" be significantly better, whether it is or not is a different matter, they also need to get it to work without cooking itself as well, but id be hopeful of hitting 15-20Mbps or is something else likely to pull that down further?
 
I should have perhaps clarified what I meant by "very high" bit rates :) I wasn't thinking of 30-40 :D it would largely be wasted on dashcams and would be half what a bluray DVD uses!
 
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The dual channel A12 product that I've seen so far has still had the same bitrate limitations that the dual channel A7 products have had, not sure if anything has changed yet, time will tell I guess
 
3840x2160 @ 10bpc RGB @30fps using h.264 4% compression is about 40MBps
that's blue ray 50Mbps, I think that's unrealistic and they will be using a much high rate of compression

the question is how much are they compressing it, even if we multiply the compression by x4, 4k will still be using 10MBps per channel which is 160Mbps overall

even if we dropped the bitrate to 8 then doubled the compression again to a 32%, that's 5MBps per channel or 80Mbps overall.

we could double it again to 60% compression and still have 20Mbps per channel max.

course it depends on everything else but theoretically, we should hit 20Mbps... maybe lol
 
F880 is quite promising， at least on the paper， however one big issue they need to overcome is storage. For dual channel high resolution + high bitrate need high specs reliable memory card which will be able to work 24/7 to write and erase (overwrite) at the same time which creates a lot of stress on the card and generates a lot of heat.
 
I was wondering about that, sequentially the cards have the performance to record at a fast enough rate for a single file, even on an average spec'd card , however if you try and record 2 files at the same time there is a big performance penalty so if it were me, I would consider packaging the 2 streams in to a single container before dumping it to the SD card to get around that.

On top of that as you mentioned Niko is the reliability factor of the media itself.

I think Heat will be the biggest issue overall and will probably be the limiting factor in the design, but I still think 20Mbps is doable and will within the system spec
 
Dee_82 said:
I was wondering about that, sequentially the cards have the performance to record at a fast enough rate for a single file, even on an average spec'd card , however if you try and record 2 files at the same time there is a big performance penalty so if it were me, I would consider packaging the 2 streams in to a single container before dumping it to the SD card to get around that.

On top of that as you mentioned Niko is the reliability factor of the media itself.

I think Heat will be the biggest issue overall and will probably be the limiting factor in the design, but I still think 20Mbps is doable and will within the system spec
Click to expand...

there is a companion chipset which is available for multi channel use to mux the files to a single stream, some manufacturers have used this method but still had the same bitrate limitations as there are when writing dual streams, it seems the bottleneck is somewhere else in the design with Ambarella
 
Can anyone weigh in on the Cellink NEO unit's operation? the reason I am asking, I've fitted this unit (spliced version specifically for Thinkware cams) for my F800 pro, every aspic is working apart from one feature in the App. Every time I set the 'Sustained Parking' mode via bluetooth, the next time I connect again it says off, is this normal? I am getting the normal operational Beeps from the unit when it is being charged when the car's ignition is on and then when the dash cam goes into Parking mode. I am just curious why I have to constantly go into the unit's App to switch 'Sustained Parking' mode on again after the initial setup. Thanks for any feed back.
 
eSaF said:
Can anyone weigh in on the Cellink NEO unit's operation? the reason I am asking, I've fitted this unit (spliced version specifically for Thinkware cams) for my F800 pro, every aspic is working apart from one feature in the App. Every time I set the 'Sustained Parking' mode via bluetooth, the next time I connect again it says off, is this normal? I am getting the normal operational Beeps from the unit when it is being charged when the car's ignition is on and then when the dash cam goes into Parking mode. I am just curious why I have to constantly go into the unit's App to switch 'Sustained Parking' mode on again after the initial setup. Thanks for any feed back.
Click to expand...

I have a Cellink NEO purchased from BBMC. The App guide written by BBMC states:

"Continuous Parking Mode only applies to BMW vehicles manufactured for Korea use."

I know the app says "Parking Sustained Mode" vs Continuous Parking Mode as stated in the App guide.

I suppose this may be why the app turns itself off. I haven't wondered further about it as I can open the app while in Parking Mode and see the usable time decreasing over time.
 
Thanks for the reply and clarification, the manual’s translation to English is not very understandable instruction wise - can one download the BBMC version even though my unit wasn’t purchased through them?
 
I don't see a link on their site to download the NEO App User's Manual, sorry.
 
Thanks everyone as far as I can tell the NEO is working as it should, I just wish the manual was more clearly written - @ avionics12 my addy is esafeddie@gmail.com - thanks for the offer.
 
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