BroncoAZ
New Member
I manage a fleet of 140+ vehicles and I’m moving from an overpriced/underperforming cellular camera and telematics provider to Geotab for telematics and SD card cameras. This change results in significant savings and better fleet management/telematics. The limitation is that I or my safety manager will have to travel to the vehicle to collect the data in the event of an accident. All of our vehicles are based within an 80 mile radius of the main office, so this isn’t a huge challenge. I’m looking for a front facing only solution that is tamper resistant and completely hands off by the drivers. Cameras will be hard wired to the fuse panel with fuse taps. Many of our 1500 and 3500 trucks have something that would block the view out of the rear window, so a two channel would have limited utility. We have interior facing cameras on the current system, but the drivers hate them (and cover them up) and they could be a liability if we were involved in a lawsuit. I don’t care about parking mode or other features, I just need simple reliable cameras that are tamper resistant.
My search lead me to the Blackvue DR590X-1CH with their tamperproof case. I purchased two test units from Amazon last month. Both are just plugged into the 12v outlet in the dashboard rather than hardwired yet. The video quality is fine, the only issue I’m having is with the included 32gb SD card being way too small and BlackVue‘s cards are far too expensive. At the max resolution I’m getting about two hours of recordings, cut down to normal mode I can get eight hours. If I’m going to make these work I need a larger SD card (128gb or 256gb) that costs $20-40, I’m not willing to buy BlackVue cards at 5x the market rate. I was looking at the Samsung Pro Endurance cards as a suitable option. I really need these cameras to be able to run for 1+ year at a time without needing to reformat. Most of our fleet doesn’t come back to the yard with any regular cadence. Before I drop $26K on cameras I want to get the opinion of the experienced user base here, please.
I personally have been using Aukey cameras for the past 5-6 years with great results. I was living in AZ for most of that time with the cameras in both vehicles baking in the sun for years at a time. I had a couple SanDisk (not High Endurance) cards fail in that time, but generally they worked well enough.
My search lead me to the Blackvue DR590X-1CH with their tamperproof case. I purchased two test units from Amazon last month. Both are just plugged into the 12v outlet in the dashboard rather than hardwired yet. The video quality is fine, the only issue I’m having is with the included 32gb SD card being way too small and BlackVue‘s cards are far too expensive. At the max resolution I’m getting about two hours of recordings, cut down to normal mode I can get eight hours. If I’m going to make these work I need a larger SD card (128gb or 256gb) that costs $20-40, I’m not willing to buy BlackVue cards at 5x the market rate. I was looking at the Samsung Pro Endurance cards as a suitable option. I really need these cameras to be able to run for 1+ year at a time without needing to reformat. Most of our fleet doesn’t come back to the yard with any regular cadence. Before I drop $26K on cameras I want to get the opinion of the experienced user base here, please.
I personally have been using Aukey cameras for the past 5-6 years with great results. I was living in AZ for most of that time with the cameras in both vehicles baking in the sun for years at a time. I had a couple SanDisk (not High Endurance) cards fail in that time, but generally they worked well enough.
