Going from a G1WH to a Papago GS 520

Sprite23

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Just a quick heads up, I am not a professional reviewer or anything like that, so please excuse my quality of pictures taken with my crappy phone. I'm not going to review so much the quality of the dashcam but hopefully help some people out thinking about coming from the G1W series dashcam.

Well, let's get on with this! I'm coming from a G1WH which was working great but I wanted a 2k dashcam and I happened to catch the GS520 for 147 on Amazon, it has since jumped up to 179. I had some concerns and after googling and searching this forum, I couldn't find many answers, so I'm going to try and put some information out there for anybody looking.

First off, the mount, I did not want to use a suction cup mount because I'm afraid it would fail in the heat. I wanted to use the same one I used with my G1WH, here it is
https://www.amazon.com/gp/B00KJTRKVY
Does it fit? No, no it does not. Will it fit with some modification? Yes, yes it will.
Here it is before modification
beforemod.jpg

Here it is afterwards
aftermod.jpg

It's not pretty, but it works! Basically I used a pair of sharp needle nose cutters and trimmed it a bit and took off the side clip because it was blocking the USB port. The result?

Rear
mounted.jpg
Front
mountedfront.jpg

It takes some muscle to get it to slide in, so if you're going to be mounting/dismounting the camera it's kind of a pain, but if you're not, it's great because it's pretty secure.

Next issue, I wanted a polarizing filter, I had a CPL on my G1WH and I wanted the same for this camera. I picked up a 30mm CPL made for another dashcam and used a glue gun to mount it to the camera. It's easily reversible and will not leave any permanent marks on the camera if you decide to remove it in the future.
Here is the CPL I bought, I got the link from LjKearny.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/B00QT3Q024
I also wanted to cover the Papago logo, I used some electrical tape + painters tape. Why painters tape? Well, heat + electrical tape will leave sticky residue behind should I decide to remove the tape later on, so I put electrical tape on the painter tape then covered the logo, should I decide to remove it in the future there will be no mess.

Here is the result of the logo cover + CPL installed
side.jpg front.jpg

Next up, SD card. No 64GB will not work, nope not even if you format it in FAT32. It just won't work, the camera won't see it. I tried using a Samsung UHS-1 EVO 64GB card formatted in FAT32 and exFAT, I tried a Sandisk UHS-1 64GB formatted in FAT32 and exFAT. It's not like the G1WH where you could use a 64GB card even though it's not officially supported. I am currently using a G.Skill 32GB UHS-1 FAT32 card and it's working fine. I also tried a Samsung 32GB UHS-1 FAT32 which also works.

Last thing, hardwire kit. I had an EDO Tech hardwire USB kit I connected to my fuse box, it worked great for my G1WH. Not so much for the GS520, when I had the USB plugged in all the way, the GS520 would not get power, I had to pull it out slightly for the GS520 to get power. Oddly enough, I tried with the cigarette lighter USB that the camera came with and it was defective! What are the chances? I contacted Amazon and exchanged the camera for another one. Maybe it was the camera's USB port which is why my EDO Ttech hardwire kit didn't work? Nope. I connected the second GS520 and it was the same result, but at least the cigarette lighter USB worked on this one. So I ended up removing the EDO Tech hardwire kit and I soldered in a female cigarette lighter port and connected it using the cigarette lighter USB the camera came with instead. This worked.

As of right now I can't really say video quality wise which is better the G1WH or GS520, but I can tell you for sure that the GS520 has a wider field of view from a few quick comparison between my G1WH videos.

If anybody has any questions, please feel free to reply or PM me, I'd like to help.
 
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