Another 2x mini0806 bite the dust...

[SergeiF]

Since release of 0806, I had 8 0806s pass through my hands.
Out of those 8 only 3 are "alive", ie not crashing. Out of 3 "alive" 1 has dead battery. Remaining 2 are in the wild in unknown condition (owners do not bother checking or maybe running them).

So the first ever mini 0806 bought by me was on 31/03/2015. I received after a month (thanks gearbest!) so it was in my hands on 01/05/2015. It was faulty. The replacement was also faulty (straight form Megtech).
Recently I discovered that friends supposedly "good" mini0806 was also crashing consistently (he never checked the recordings hence not noticing missing data).

Since I contacted megtech directly regarding my issues with mini0806, I was put on their promo list and constantly receive bulk offerings with their new products.
One day I got an offer for mini0806.

I sent them this:

Hi,

It look like you are still producing this camera, so how did you address all the major issues with it?

So far out of 8 cameras that I had dealt with 3 where faulty.

First camera that I ever bought I returned to Rayman, only to receive back one with the same fault. The fault was crashing after short period of time (the crashing could be induced by stopping and starting recording a few times, or selecting 1296p resolution).

Other two faulty mini0806 would not shutdown cleanly, so the last recording would be lost. They also were crash prone (similar to my first camera).

I decided to look into it crashing issue and basically it looks like the problem was with heaksink being glued between RAM and SoC chip, and because they expand at different rates and RAM chip has bigger BGA balls, the SoC basically was pulled off the board. What should have been done is for heat sink only applied on the SoC. This is major design flaw. Note that the 0805 didn't had that heatsink and thus didn't had these crashing issues.

Sergei.

Note: at the time of writing I was only aware of 3 faulty (other 2 were discovered when checked with owners).

I got back this:

Dear Sergei,

Have a good day !

I have submitted your idea to our engineer and their opinion as below:

The heat silicone is soft , it can not pull the SOC off the board.

For the crashing of the dash camera, there are mostly two reasons:

One is the card, mini0806 compatible high speed card class six or class 10. Please check the card and try to use a new high speed card.

The second, maybe the battery is broken.


Anyway, we thank you very much for your suggestion. We try to do our best to improve our quality of our products.

Yeah, right.... Blame it on SD card... Cards that work in other Mini 0806 OK (and all other cameras) magically cause crashing in specific Mini 0806.

Ostrich policy strikes again.

I feel like grinding up all the faulty mini ("Will it blend?" style) and send them back to Megtech.

 

[Harsh]

I would've cut mine and the other's losses and moved on after the first replacement turned out faulty too. My extremely unreliable Mini 0805 worked when it felt like and has been replaced with the SG9665GC. No more anxiety.

 

[jokiin]

Ostrich policy strikes again..

you can lead a horse to water ......

power regulation in this model is poor also which also contributes to its erratic behavior, there's a long back story to this product, a lot of the problems are political in nature

 

[SawMaster]

It would be an interesting story, but you being a gentleman I understand your not sharing it publicly

I was pretty new to the scene when that cam was put onto the market and watched the numerous problems everyone was having, which helped me avoid making that mistake myself. The form factor has a lot of appeal, however reliability is paramount in a dashcam; if you don't have that then you have nothing. I got burned on some G1Wc's similarly but finally got a good one; the difference being that there are some good ones of that model.

Phil

 

[lacibaci]

I feel like Meg's stuff is generally well engineered but badly executed/manufactured and not tested at all. My Mini 0903 has been 100% reliable with very good picture day and night. Of course the horrible construction of the mount and GPS module negate all of that.

 

[richcam]

My 0806 died a few months ago having been returned to the supplier who checked it and sent it back to me, apparently the unofficial firmware caused the problem, except the 'unofficial' firmware is listed on the 0806 website to improve the video quality which it does do.

Needless to say I've given up with the Mini 0806 range of dash cameras. It's a real shame because the Eprance 0801 dash cam has performed flawlessly and if it had the ability to record onto SD cards larger than 32GB would be perfect.

EDIT: Can I just add that the Mobius 1 which I purchased at a similar date has also worked flawlessly, have now purchased a Mobius 2 and a Auto-Vox B60 dash cam as replacements.

Will be interesting to see how they perform over the next few months both in terms of video quality and reliability.