Capacitor cam with 128GB minimum memory

[Northern_Mom]

My husband has been a commercial truck driver for many years. He has been lucky enough to find a truck driving job that takes him back to our old home. Edmonton Alberta to Dawson City Yukon. A dash cam with good daytime video, capacitor run as temps will be at both extremes and most important, the ability to use 128Gb cards.

The record time calculator here says a 12 Mbps bit rate with a 128Gb card should hold ~72 hours. That will cover 99% of his driving time. It may be cheaper to be willing to drop to 64Gb capability and that will be 3 cards a week until he gets home.

G-sensors are a must. Rear facing isn't needed at all but a wide angle range would be best partly because this cam will be in a long nose 90s model Mack truck. A camera with an adjustable up/down lens may be best due to the high long nose of the 90s Mack truck.

Reading reviews can be depressing. The A118 model may be good but the charger seems to be problematic. The mini 0806 can hold two 128Gb cards but I don't want a battery. The SG9665 model is supposed to smooth out voltage waves when a big rig diesel truck is first starting up but it only holds a 32Gb card. That isn't enough.

 

[jokiin]

128gb card will get around 20 hours before recycling, think the calculator must be broken, our cameras all support 128gb and greater but it's not going to get you 70 hours of recording

 

[Northern_Mom]

I'm sorry, I checked for the 8Mbps bit rate with a 256Gb card. Knowing the Street Guardian cams can support up to 128Gb cards will be a big decision maker for us. A 64 Gb card should record 12 hours at 12Mbps. Three 64Gb cards sounds to me to be a good compromise in price and recording length. 3 or possibly 4 cards that are switched out sounds good. After some time of getting *bored* with the same video/photos, my husband can drop to just 2 or 3 cards and one can go in my daughter's cell phone. Thank you jokiin, your quick response adds more checkmarks to the good column for SG products.

 

[jokiin]

The SGZC series cameras have selectable bitrate and you can lower it down to get longer record times, the calculator doesn't take into account file system overhead and recycling, it's a guide but it's not accurate, 12mbit will get you around 10hours from 64gb, the SG9665GC is fixed at 15mbit which will get around 8.5 hours from 64gb

 

[kamkar]

I think Jon at Pier28 have tried or is running a 200 Gb card in the SG9665GC.

But you guys dont have to save the whole trip, its only when things go wrong you will need to save it for documentation.
The rest is just waste data so to say, offcourse a guy like me from little Pancake flat Denmark would love to see footage from over there, but for the local ppl i assume they are harder to impress with the vistas.
Pressing the event button when somthing go wrong lock that file from beeing overwritten, but offcourse if its a massive spill then it can be hard to do that, but thats hopefylly not somthing you guys will ever have to worry about.

 

[dash riposki]

does he carry a laptop with him in the truck?

The G sensor may be more trouble than it's worth. (Unless you want saved files for every pothole or caribou carcass he runs over)


The temperature extremes may not be such a factor if he idles the truck all the time.
(As long as it's warm inside) Most of the high temp problems seem due to the cameras being in car windshields, parked, in high temperature areas with bright sunlight.
Think 'greenhouse'.
Truck windshields are more vertical, and probably a 90's era Mack has some sort of visor over the windshield, anyway.

I still prefer capacitors in truck dash cams, mostly for longer life of the cam.

After messing with dash cams for 2-3 years in trucks, I tend to favor reliable stuff, over excess features.

Is there some reason you want 70 hours of recording time? I'd make sure he has a few spare memory cards with him, whatever you end up with.