Blackvue releasing Starvis 2 models, DR970X Plus

[Agie]

Wow!
So excited for BlackVue.
Only needing one Wi-Fi source for two dash cams is going to make a lot of people happy.
And great job providing both Codecs, (H.265 and H.264).
Congrats BlackVue.

Now only need the IQ to hold up and could have a home run on our hands heh

 

[TonyM]

At the show Blackvue provided me with some sample footage from the DR970X Plus, as well as some day and night comparison footage with the original DR970X

Regarding the lens aperture, something I didn't realize is that the DR970X has an f/2.8 lens (smaller than I realized) and so the jump to an f/1.7 lens is a 1 2/3 stop improvement which is a big deal, letting in more than 2x as much light.

Using an f2.8 lens would explain a lot about the relatively poor performance of the DR970X. Combined with the higher sensitivity of the Starvis 2 sensor, the new Plus has significantly less motion blur both day and night.

 

[Nigel]

So looks like no HDR, H264 is still limited to 25 Mb/s and phone viewing/cloud uploads are at 0.66 Mb/s.

But if you use the space saving H265 and put the memory card in your computer, then you can have 60 Mb/s.

And they now have a good image tuning engineer.

It will be interesting to see the test results...

 

[ozguy]

60 MB/s HEVC that i would mark as very desirable, then again i would probably also want another kind of storage than a small card.
I suppose that 970 BOX plus is the high bitrate thing ? i would assume it take something like that to successfully pull that off.
Even if it dont look to have very much space / way of improved cooling, TBH i would expect something with the volume of a 4 pack ( can ) of beer / softdrink to really be useable.

They should or could put a very lower power cooling fan in the box?

 

[kamkar]

I think a good heat pipe or vapor chamber cooler would do it, at least for normal operation and the exchange happening outside of any size box, should be a lot better than just a hunk of ALU

Mind you in PC, before heat pipe ASO kicked off there was also a few massive copper CPU coolers, Zalman had their huge Zalman CNPS7000C, a chunk of copper i later managed to mod onto a GFX card

Became so heavy that i had to make a GFX support bracket, something that only " now " are seeing its way into GFX cards with huge fat triple slot / triple fan GFX cards, i guess i was a decade or 2 ahead of the curve.

 

[ozguy]

I think a good heat pipe or vapor chamber cooler would do it, at least for normal operation and the exchange happening outside of any size box, should be a lot better than just a hunk of ALU

Mind you in PC, before heat pipe ASO kicked off there was also a few massive copper CPU coolers, Zalman had their huge Zalman CNPS7000C, a chunk of copper i later managed to mod onto a GFX card

Became so heavy that i had to make a GFX support bracket, something that only " now " are seeing its way into GFX cards with huge fat triple slot / triple fan GFX cards, i guess i was a decade or 2 ahead of the curve.

Holy ****...you could put that in the middle of the sahara desert and ambient temp would drop by 20 degrees..lol

 

[kamkar]

It was also one of my last air coolers in PC, its pretty much been water cooling since then.
My new AMD 7800 XT card also came with a support bracket, just will not fit in my case, so by chance i saw that my reservoir / pump combo, if i added 15 mm of foam below that it could support the GFX card.

The HUGE Heatkiller IV cooler on my threadripper CPU is also just shy of 1 kilo in dry weight, not something you will want to drop on your foot.

 

[Dashcamuser567]

The current flagships have been a disappointment imo so i hope they realized this and make good real world improvments. If only thinkware would use starvis 2. the u3000 is a let down.

 

[Bono]

Let’s hope they do proper QA testing on this model so there are no “out of focus” issues like with the 970X series. On a different note, anyone with the 970X LTE having issues with being unable to playback via. the cloud or download videos from the camera tab since earlier in the week? I’ve tried rebooting, reinstalling the firmware and wiping the SD card to no avail. The videos will stream when connected to the dashcam wifi and if I upload then playback the videos they will work but just not direct streaming

 

[Vortex Radar]

The current flagships have been a disappointment imo so i hope they realized this and make good real world improvments. If only thinkware would use starvis 2. the u3000 is a let down.

The U3000 does use a Starvis 2 sensor. It's the same IMX678 used in the A139 Pro, A229 Pro, N4 Pro, etc. There's no HDR and it obviously has Thinkware's image tuning, but it is a Starvis 2 dashcam.