Thanks for the welcome!
Also, it seems that the street guardian is motion sensor parking mode. What are you thoughts on motion sensor vs g sensor in terms of getting the license plate of the potential hit and runs?
Hi Josh,
I would favour a combination of g-sensor and motion sensor.
G-sensors provide the facility for the event to be tagged, which should make it easy to identify the event file among all of the other recorded items, whilst motion detectors ensure that a recording is taken prior to impact. It's possible to think of situations in which the combination of both might work well together. For instance, car parked in a narrow, double-parked street, when a car stops to drop someone off and the passenger hits their door on yours: the motion sensor records the car approaching yours, whilst the event recording acknowledges that there was impact (though audio recording should pick this up as well). In this scenario, in a 2ch set up, motion detection would also give you "two bites at the cherry" in getting the number plate - fore and aft.
I wouldn't rely on the motion sensors in the Blackvue to give you much protection from thieves or vandals, rather than careless drivers, since without the lights of a car in a dimly lit street the quality of the Blackvue recordings isn't up to the job (probably true of the majority of cams out there, though possibly not all).
Where a g-sensor can particularly benefit is where the dash cam is configured to protect event files from being overwritten, or else stores these on a separate card or internal memory. The Blackvue doesn't have this facility.
Personally, I have found the Blackvue DR650 to have a good range of adjustability for the G-sensor - at least, in providing low sensitivity when driving, so that files are not being continually recorded as events. I have seen past posts criticizing the Blackvue's g-senor sensitivity, however, so possibly this is an issue that has now been fixed, though I would note that my car has quite firm suspension. The g-senor in parking mode can be independently set, though I have yet to test for sensitivity (by gently knocking on the car
)
@samsara if I understand it properly, the motion sensor parking mode would only record when it detects motion right?
Yes. Again, most (if not all) dash cams with motion sensitivity will have facility to adjust the sensitivity, to reduce the number of 'false positives'. Unfortunately, Blackvues have a very limited range of configurability for this and, unless the car is locked in a garage or else you are parked in a very low-lit street in the very depths of night, will record continually.
The two issues here are (a) power consumption and (b) recording capacity.
Experts on this forum have suggested that there is very little difference in power consumption for a camera on stand-by and for a camera that records continually. A way to test this would be to disable the motion-sensor (but to leave on the g-sensor) in parking mode - something I will look to do this week. If I find a significant difference in consumption I will disable motion detection and do without this, since having to charge the battery each day is less than ideal.
Regards recording capacity, as noted, the Blackvue does not have the facility to protect event files. Potentially, this issue can be worked around by reducing the quality of its recordings (through the settings) and/or using a 128gb card (which the DR650 is able to support).
