Vortex Radar
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 26, 2014
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- 716
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- Location
- Seattle, Washington
- Country
- United States
So this past week I went on a trip for just over 5 days and wanted to get parking recording running the whole time so I popped a U1000 w/ radar module hooked up to a Powercell 8 into the car to run alongside my Blackvue DR970X and Viofo A139 Pro. I flew home today and am reviewing the footage now and I gotta say that I'm particularly impressed with the U1000 right now, including for reasons I didn't expect.
The Viofo in low bitrate recording lasted only around 8 hours as a 2CH setup with Front/Interior cams. It was hooked up to a Cellink Neo. I don't know if the battery was fully charged when I dropped the car off, but still that's nothing to write home about either way. The battery should have had some juice left in it from before I drove to the airport and should have gotten close to full after the 50 min hardwired drive to the airport.
The DR970X-2CH with cloud on, I'm not totally sure how long it lasted since it only saved motion detection clips, but I know it recorded for at least 21 hours hooked up to a B-124 and expansion battery. Again I think it recorded for a bit longer and just didn't have any motion to detect and save, but either way again it died without being able to record the majority of the trip. Basically less than 1/5 of the trip.
The U1000 lasted the entire time and I still had 50% battery remaining in my PC8! I could have gone for twice as long and the U1000 still could have recorded the whole thing.
Now getting the longer parking record times with the Thinkware in energy saving mode wasn't particularly surprising. What caught my attention was the lack of unwanted recordings and how it restarted recording when I came back from the trip.
The U1000 didn't have a single clip recorded during parking mode. This tells me that no one hit my car at any point since the camera's impact detection didn't save anything. The Blackvue had a ton of recordings of cars coming and going and people walking by. That's fine, but ultimately not needed in this instance. It also would sometimes weirdly change its HDR effect at dusk leading to a bunch of pointless recordings as the look of the image changed. The Viofo was set to low bitrate recording since I'm not totally sold on Viofo's implementation of buffered parking recording with auto event detection so it just recorded continuously until the battery died.
The other thing was that because the Thinkware was still up and running when I came back from the trip, when the parking guy came to get my car, the Thinkware was the only one that recorded when he was pulling out of the parking spot and driving through the start of the tight parking lot to get back to me. The Viofo and Blackvue had to wait a while to kick on and start recording to the point where they missed almost everything until the guy literally parked the car for me to get into it.
So I gotta say, for long term parking recording, I'm liking Thinkware's approach more than I thought, and for reasons beyond the obvious of recording for longer than the other dashcams.
Edit: Oops! I was just looking through my U1000’s settings and I had it set to shut off after 48 hours. I didn’t intend on having that enabled. I guess if it had run continuously, it would have used more battery. Interesting that it still booted up again quickly regardless though.
The Viofo in low bitrate recording lasted only around 8 hours as a 2CH setup with Front/Interior cams. It was hooked up to a Cellink Neo. I don't know if the battery was fully charged when I dropped the car off, but still that's nothing to write home about either way. The battery should have had some juice left in it from before I drove to the airport and should have gotten close to full after the 50 min hardwired drive to the airport.
The DR970X-2CH with cloud on, I'm not totally sure how long it lasted since it only saved motion detection clips, but I know it recorded for at least 21 hours hooked up to a B-124 and expansion battery. Again I think it recorded for a bit longer and just didn't have any motion to detect and save, but either way again it died without being able to record the majority of the trip. Basically less than 1/5 of the trip.
The U1000 lasted the entire time and I still had 50% battery remaining in my PC8! I could have gone for twice as long and the U1000 still could have recorded the whole thing.
Now getting the longer parking record times with the Thinkware in energy saving mode wasn't particularly surprising. What caught my attention was the lack of unwanted recordings and how it restarted recording when I came back from the trip.
The U1000 didn't have a single clip recorded during parking mode. This tells me that no one hit my car at any point since the camera's impact detection didn't save anything. The Blackvue had a ton of recordings of cars coming and going and people walking by. That's fine, but ultimately not needed in this instance. It also would sometimes weirdly change its HDR effect at dusk leading to a bunch of pointless recordings as the look of the image changed. The Viofo was set to low bitrate recording since I'm not totally sold on Viofo's implementation of buffered parking recording with auto event detection so it just recorded continuously until the battery died.
The other thing was that because the Thinkware was still up and running when I came back from the trip, when the parking guy came to get my car, the Thinkware was the only one that recorded when he was pulling out of the parking spot and driving through the start of the tight parking lot to get back to me. The Viofo and Blackvue had to wait a while to kick on and start recording to the point where they missed almost everything until the guy literally parked the car for me to get into it.
So I gotta say, for long term parking recording, I'm liking Thinkware's approach more than I thought, and for reasons beyond the obvious of recording for longer than the other dashcams.
Edit: Oops! I was just looking through my U1000’s settings and I had it set to shut off after 48 hours. I didn’t intend on having that enabled. I guess if it had run continuously, it would have used more battery. Interesting that it still booted up again quickly regardless though.
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