Am I looking for too much in a Dash Cam?

[RideShareNJ]

I am starting to get back into ride share once my wife and I have the vaccine.

I will be using either a 2013 Honda Civic or a 2019 Subaru Outback

I want a camera that will record the entire front view with enough night clarity to record licence plates and record the entire passenger cabin. Recording out the rear behind my car would be a nice feature but not required.

I want GPS and the recordings to be accessable from the internet in realtime. I have a mobile hotspot that can be used if the camera does not support LTE.

 

[lacibaci]

Unfortunately the answer is yes for both.
In most cases you will not be able to read license plates, especially not the US ones.
Today's dashcams are not good in low light.
Real time access is also not possible simple because of the amount of data you would have to push to the cloud.

 

[kamkar]

Welcome to the forum RideShareNJ.
Yes.
The only chance you have at capturing a plate at night is if toe total difference in speed between the target car and your camera car are no larger than walking pace.
This is a limitation for all consumer cameras no matter of the price and hardware.
And there are precious little in the way of cloud backup in dashcams, some have some cloud feature but i think it is not at the level you ask ( no personal experience with these cameras )
Also often the smart cameras, are smart for a reason and it is not unknown that it is at the expense of image quality.
Also if you had to constantly stream all your footage from 3 cameras to the cloud, you will have to be in near perfect 4G territory all the time, and you would need to have close to a flat-rate data subscription, which are not exactly cheap,,,, in Denmark at least.
3 cameras would need to upload about 1200 MB / 1.2 GB data every 3 minutes, so if you could, the data level would be large.
And then come the price for a large chunk of the cloud for that footage, also not cheap as i understand it.

As for 3 channel cameras right now, the viofo A139 are what i would go for if ride share was legal in Denmark ( which it is not ) and i was into it.
But it is a conventional system with the memory card in the main unit on the windscreen, but i like that the cabin camera are also remote and so you can put it just about anywhere along the top of the windscreen.
With my test sample i had the cabin camera on the mirror stalk as this is dead center and up high in the cabin and so give the best coverage of the interior of the vehicle.
And the cabin camera have IR aid for when it is dark, but it can still be forced to stay in color mode if preferred, but then footage will be very dark in dark places and you will only get good footage when the ride enter the car while the cabin light are on.
The A139 do support wifi and a app, but nothing smart in it, just to do settings and maybe DL and share a file.

Sadly my car was broken into and my test camera vandalized so i have not yet gotten much footage up from the A139, but i did make a clip from the front 1440p camera a few days ago ( it alone and so in 60 FPS )
With all 3 cameras going they are only 30 fps.

A little footage from the front camera at night, paired with footage from my side system.

My inboxing video i made yesterday, just talking hands.

Damn cold in Denmark ATM so have not been in too much of a hurry installing the cabin and rear camera of the replacement camera, but i will get around to that soon ( you can find more viofo A139 footage on youtube )

 

[Nigel]

and the recordings to be accessable from the internet in realtime.

I was also going to suggest a Viofo A139 until you added that bit.

Realistically, streaming video to the internet can only be done at low bitrate, especially if you have multiple channels, and then the recordings are of limited use. Of course the customers don't need to know that your camera isn't streaming an 8K interior video with quadraphonic audio to the cloud! If you press the lock button/remote on the A139 it will announce that you have protected the video, should make them think:

 

[kamkar]

This is from another camera system, but it do show the view i get fron a high center mounted cabin camera, granted in my little Japanese 5 door hatchback.

 

[kamkar]

You can always "threaten" that your car are fully backed up to the cloud, and tamper proof local storage, the person in the back would have to be into dashcams to know that is a lie.
But a little lie now and then dont hurt, and it might well make people think twice before they try anything stupid.

The first 3 channel system with all 3 cameras remote are not here, but if it was you could put the main unit with the memory card in a hard to reach place in your car.
There are only 2 channel remote systems, but then there are no stand alone 1 channel systems with IR light for backup to act as a cabin camera, and TBH the cabin footage are probably what a desperado would want.
At some time we might well see remote cameras for 2 channel systems with the IR aid / features, but then you just have a 2 channel system, though to be honest in the decade or so i have used dashcams i have only " had use " for rear footage when i was rear ended, but my front footage was plenty to tell that him ramming us 2 cars, well not our fault, and the guy did also admit it right then and there so no fuss.

The front camera always register what you do, and if you do nothing wrong, then what happen off camera can not be your fault.

 

[RideShareNJ]

Thank you all.

My wife is a tad bit overprotective and would like the ability to see the inside of the car to check if I am alright.

My cell carrier is Tmobile and I have unlimited data on my plan. I also have unused phones which I could use as a hotspot. I was thinking to hide one under the dash connected to power over USB and running an app to provide location information.

 

[kamkar]

Aiiii think there are some with like a intercom feature, but right now i am blank, it might have been one of those startup cameras.
But also cant remember if this was audio or video too.

But something like this are much more doable than streaming all your footage in quality to the cloud.

 

[kamkar]

Could be the waylens ( bankrupt or something ) or maybe owl cam ( unsure )
Often these kickstarter cameras have these kind of features thats not really seen in dahscams, like geo-fencing / speed alarm and 2 way communication.
Either way they are probably costing quite a few hours of ferrying people around / expensive.

 

[RideShareNJ]

I had an owl cam. It failed after a few months and the new company would not honor the warranty.

 

[kamkar]

I see smart dashcamaras as just more things that can go wrong, but of course i am also just a old retired Dane driving my little car now and then.
He say having his car broken into a month ago and vandalized,,,,,,, so he had to go buy a new CCTV camera and get the home security up and running again.

 

[SawMaster]

Clearly visible in the back window of my van under the G1W/s cam is a sign stating in part "You've just been uploaded to the cloud" Anyone who knows much about cams knows this is BS, but crooks tend to not be very smart so perhaps they believe the sign. Many people have seen my little sign but nobody has ever questioned the "cloud" part though most know what that is about, and know that it can be done- just not with a cheap old G1W/s So while it may not let 'wifey' keep an eye on you, a sign like this can be a good deterrent for bad riders who might be thinking about misbehaving.

For the cam itself, the B2W does good vids day and night and the 'cabin cam' has IR illumination along with auto-switching for the IR filter so that at night you get sharp monochrome images. But it's not a small cam and it's form-factor doesn't fit well in a fair number of cars. The two lenses built into it can be rotated by fingertips over a great range where you can get a view in every direction, but not as in 360 deg all at the same time. It's very reliable and one of my favorite cams mostly for the aimable lenses.

If you want better, the new A139 does great vids daytime, fair at night, has a good IR-equipped cabin-cam module separate from the main cam body, and has a similar non-IR rear cam. The IR illumination is user-switchable and has an 'automatic' setting too. IMHO it's the best 3-channel cam available today.

At least one of the A129 versions can be had with an IR cabin-cam option, and it also does well in all regards save for issues with certain parking mode functions. IMHO it's probably the best imagwe qualith in any 2-channel 'rideshare' cam you can get today.

Thinkware and Blackvue have cams with far more advanced connectivity features but the vid quality doesn't measure up in viewing even though the hardware specs are good. Not real-time video, but you can grab snapshots from afar when it's connected to the network, as well as upload files over wifi easily. Very overpriced for a cam but if you mainly want connectivity, that is their forte'

Phil

 

[Matt_V939]

Thank you all.

My wife is a tad bit overprotective and would like the ability to see the inside of the car to check if I am alright.

My cell carrier is Tmobile and I have unlimited data on my plan. I also have unused phones which I could use as a hotspot. I was thinking to hide one under the dash connected to power over USB and running an app to provide location information.

She can check your location with those ''Find my phone '' apps on your regular phone.
And you might use again your normal phone to livestream yourself with your screen facing camera, no need to use the dashcam.

 

[DD20]

The only chance you have at capturing a plate at night is if toe total difference in speed between the target car and your camera car are no larger than walking pace.

Hmmm interesting....is there some sort of speed detector that you can laser into the car in front of you to tell you how fast they're going and then you speeding or slowing down to whatever speed that are going at to get a good clear video of their car?

 

[kamkar]

No such thing, you will have to go by dead reckoning.

If you notice sales / promotional videos from dashcams, the night footage are often filmed in a major town with a high ambient light level, and in traffic that more or less are at the same speed in 2 or more lanes.
And so you can read plates at speed. and everything seem to be OMG, and then people buy the camera and get sad when they cant get plate captures at night, under more normal conditions.

 

[DD20]

No such thing, you will have to go by dead reckoning.

Cops have one, how do you think they tell how fast you're going? "Oi, that guy was speeding - doing 300km/hr in a 50km/hr zone, sirens on bois, we just got our high speed pursuit chase!"

 

[kamkar]

The police do not use a camera for speed measurements, they use radar, something a few dashcams also have but for use with parking mode as a alternative to motion detect which tend to create a lot of false recordings as pretty much any movement will trigger a motion event.

 

[kamkar]

I have also seen some footage of cars ahead framed by a box like you will see in CCTV cameras with AI, but i think that was done post processing fron image analyzing, but it also only have a distance nothing with speed.
So not something i have seen in a commercial camera.

 

[kamkar]

Now self drive or close to that cars like Tesla cars, they do image analyzing in a live mode and can detect cars / pedestrians and other stuff, but they have far larger CPU powers for such things, so probably not something we will see in dashcams anytime soon.

 

[DD20]

The police do not use a camera for speed measurements, they use radar, something a few dashcams also have but for use with parking mode as a alternative to motion detect which tend to create a lot of false recordings as pretty much any movement will trigger a motion event.

oh, where does one get a radar? And which dashcams have inbuilt radar?