John Sellers
New Member
When you "save" an accident recording, what is the behaviors that is best for individual potential customers like me?
I've sent back two orders for devices because of disappointing behavior. As a consequence, I had a fender bender without a cam that jumped my insurance rates because I had no evidence of the bad behavior of the other driver and was held 100% at fault as a result.
Here are some first hand observations, and I encourage all the vendors who do well in these regards to make it a best practice to state them in the up front device descriptions. Please put your money where your mouth is! Information about some of these potential problems are hard to come by when looking at competitive offerings
#1
Reliability of event reporting. If you think a device is going to capture an unexpected event, does it have a good track record of doing so? I've read reviews on units that can be in non-obvious modes which interfer with recording. And upfront statement that the device is adequately reliable in this regard would be useful.
#2
Others have a problem for which it would be very hard to start a manual emergency recording in time if it isn't automatically initiated before it is too late. For example one unit I sent back.only allowed 2 seconds of pre-event in a separate emergency recording. So if you had to trigger it manually, you only have two seconds to capture the event itself! The minimum guaranteed pre-accident recording should be up front whether the device has extra emergency recording or just looping. Since most looping videos increment at times independent of events so there is no guarantee of pre-accident saving unless the previous loop segment is protected if the current segment is too close to its start. This is important because you may need evidence of what happened just before the event.
#3
This brings up another point. California Law limits pre and post recording times of event videos to 30 seconds each. Many devices have a minimum loop segments of one minute. Also some emergency separate videos record 30 seconds after the event, so if a manual press button recording after the event it will go beyond the 30 seconds limit and strictly speaking, this might mean that loop evidence or the emergency recordings might be thrown out for violating the law. Also it is conceivable that triming off this extra time from the video at least in principle might violate the integrity of the evidence because it was edited by an interested party.
>>>> Understand I'm not a lawyer and my views in this post are only my own common sense observation and not a legal opinion.
#4
Will a recording be saved if external power of the vehicle is suddenly lost. Some devices have a battery or capacitor, and some depend on vehicle power. These are other facts that should be up front along with consequences.
#5
Will night vision either be too dark, or so sensitive to the the license plate light so as to completely wash out the license plate as I have seen in a certain video? This is another fact that should always be made clear.
I've sent back two orders for devices because of disappointing behavior. As a consequence, I had a fender bender without a cam that jumped my insurance rates because I had no evidence of the bad behavior of the other driver and was held 100% at fault as a result.
Here are some first hand observations, and I encourage all the vendors who do well in these regards to make it a best practice to state them in the up front device descriptions. Please put your money where your mouth is! Information about some of these potential problems are hard to come by when looking at competitive offerings
#1
Reliability of event reporting. If you think a device is going to capture an unexpected event, does it have a good track record of doing so? I've read reviews on units that can be in non-obvious modes which interfer with recording. And upfront statement that the device is adequately reliable in this regard would be useful.
#2
Others have a problem for which it would be very hard to start a manual emergency recording in time if it isn't automatically initiated before it is too late. For example one unit I sent back.only allowed 2 seconds of pre-event in a separate emergency recording. So if you had to trigger it manually, you only have two seconds to capture the event itself! The minimum guaranteed pre-accident recording should be up front whether the device has extra emergency recording or just looping. Since most looping videos increment at times independent of events so there is no guarantee of pre-accident saving unless the previous loop segment is protected if the current segment is too close to its start. This is important because you may need evidence of what happened just before the event.
#3
This brings up another point. California Law limits pre and post recording times of event videos to 30 seconds each. Many devices have a minimum loop segments of one minute. Also some emergency separate videos record 30 seconds after the event, so if a manual press button recording after the event it will go beyond the 30 seconds limit and strictly speaking, this might mean that loop evidence or the emergency recordings might be thrown out for violating the law. Also it is conceivable that triming off this extra time from the video at least in principle might violate the integrity of the evidence because it was edited by an interested party.
>>>> Understand I'm not a lawyer and my views in this post are only my own common sense observation and not a legal opinion.
#4
Will a recording be saved if external power of the vehicle is suddenly lost. Some devices have a battery or capacitor, and some depend on vehicle power. These are other facts that should be up front along with consequences.
#5
Will night vision either be too dark, or so sensitive to the the license plate light so as to completely wash out the license plate as I have seen in a certain video? This is another fact that should always be made clear.