Improvements I would like to see in the panorama II and/or S

spotnz

spotnz

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hi all,

Having had my Panorama II for a couple of months, I've come up with a few items that I'd like to see changed or improved upon. Before the next model appears.

In random order
- currently the GPS display displays the speed to 2 decimal places. Is this overly accurate? I suspect that rounding off to the nearest kilometre would suffice.
- have the GPS recordings capture the Height in metres ( or imperial for those who desire it ) above Sea Level.
- allow Times set manually to overwrite the GPS settings, even after the unit is switched off & on again.
- do the GPS co-ordinates need to be recorded to 6 decimal places?
- What use do the X, Y & Z values have in practice?
- allowing the choice between speed in Km & imperial measurements
- being able to retrofit filters to a Panorama II.
- being able to use a UV filter. I know that CPL are important during daytime. BUT from my casual observations they're somewhat problematic during heavily overcast and/or rainy weather. At which times a UV filter is an improvement on filterless.
- Being able to able to choose the filters I want fitted. So that I can quickly change them when damaged, or weather conditions require it. Being able to source on from our local camera shop, for me, is more desirable & quicker than internet ordering.
- proper translation of the manuals. Whilst they're respectable & much better than the 2 chinese dashcam manuals I've seen. They are distinctly Korean translated directly into English. Which make for comprehension difficulties. EG the manual for the Constant Power Cable is in English, but for me undecipherable. Both are not the same quality as the DVR.
- proper “printing” of the manuals. the Panorama II manual looks like it was printed on a hi-res dot-matrix printer. Rather than a ink-jet or laser printer, which would be considerably clearer & easier to read.
- Supplying the Constant Power Cable manual as a proper PDF. The version I got from shpkorea had ALL 6 physical pages squashed onto one PDF page. & therefore unprintable. Before anyone asks, I did point this out to him, which was time wasted, as he didn’t think that there was a problem.

In producing this, I’m trying to get improvements made to ensure that these units as as good as they can be. & keep ahead of the competition.

your thoughts & ideas on these are solicited & appreciated.

thanks in advance
david
 
  • Locking video with one push when LCD is off. You have to press LOCK button twice to lock video (first to put LCD on and second push to lock video when LCD is OFF)
  • Date on screen could be in format: DAY/MONTH/YEAR
 
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Good points you raise there @spotnz

The one change I would like to see is to have the speed (as determined by the GPS) displayed on screen in the same line as the date and time. There is room to the right of the time. And yes, speed only to the whole kph, not to two decimal places.

The lens is very wide angle. Great for it's field of view, but hurts resolution. It can be difficult to even read license plates any more than 20 metres away. Not good enough. Although having said that I think I need to try to improve focus a little.

The GPS coordinates to so many decimal places is good. The resolution is just about good enough to indicate which lane of a road you are on. Can even see where you've changed lanes.
 
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Hmmm. Yeah, I know it is the eternal compromise between field-of-view and resolution. But it is what the whole dashcam industry is going to need to improve on to increase their usefulness.
I know the model you are developing is 96 degrees horizontal angle as opposed to 135 degrees of the Panorama. That's quite a difference and I think yours shouldn't have much difficulty in making plates legible at 20m or more away. (At same 1080P resolution.)
 
really I think if something is 20 meters away then it's not all that important in the scheme of things if the finest details aren't legible, closer than 10 meters is probably the critical area, there is always a sweet spot to any lens and making sure the objects that are within that area are as sharp as possible is what matters most
 
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I'll remember to suggest a few of these next time a new R&D cycle is opened up.

The two I have are
1) Daylight Savings Time (for now just set +/- 1 off as needed)See (Jokiin's response below)
2) The Option/Ability to turn off hard recorded OSD (and rely on soft embedded data via registratorviewer app)

There is no ETA on next R&D cycle, but I'll be sure to remember to suggest a look at this thread when I find out, thanks for your input.

I may re-work the English Manuals myself and create a new PDF in the near future. We want our future RoadCam.com support section to be high quality.
 
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Updates in the works! (no ETA)

Q: I know you'll be busy working on new products, but do you anticipate having time for a future R&D cycle for the Panorama? Some customers prefer the violet enhanced night mode of the older firmware (maybe create option for both on newest firmware), would like to see GPS auto time daylight savings time, and ability to turn off hard recorded OSD (and rely on soft embedded data via registratorview)

A: I will add some, need gui amend
 
RoadCam said:
would like to see GPS auto time daylight savings time
Click to expand...

auto time from GPS is possible using location based tables and info from the GPS, the GPS signal does not carry detail of the DST offset though, hard coding this would be a massive job, not impossible but very impractical I think so a manual offset setting to be changed twice a year is the most logical approach
 
Good to hear @RoadCam . Very encouraging to see manufacturers and the retail chain actively trying to improve things.

Two points.
I'm wondering if there is case to argue that for the dashcam market it could move away from trying to achieve wide distortion free video imagery. Instead use asherical lenses that give variable magnification across the image. Bit hard to explain and I don't know what this particular lens type is. But I'm thinking that for say the middle 40% the lens would have the equivalent magnification of a lens that has say 70 degree horizontal FOV. Then either side of that the magnification gradually goes much wider to say the equivalent of a lens with 160 degrees or possibly even more. Yes this would distort the images considerably, but it would achieve the best of both worlds somewhat. Have both the wide overall FOV yet still bring objects close enough to get details when nearer to the middle of the image. Dashcams don't need to be distortion free cinema quality imagery. It doesn't matter if the colours are off slightly. It does matter if they are warped a bit. They just need to be able to capture the details under as wide a variation of lighting conditions as possible.

The other point, we've all seen some awesome video from the GoPro cameras. The hardware and basic system is similar to most dashcam, yet the resulting video quality is vastly superior. I know they use the latest and greatest hardware and they sure work on the firmware to make the most of it, and that does come at a premium price. But should we expect dashcam video quality to be approaching this quality too?
 
DJR96 said:
The other point, we've all seen some awesome video from the GoPro cameras. The hardware and basic system is similar to most dashcam, yet the resulting video quality is vastly superior. I know they use the latest and greatest hardware and they sure work on the firmware to make the most of it, and that does come at a premium price. But should we expect dashcam video quality to be approaching this quality too?
Click to expand...

best to judge that only based on amatuer end user videos, GoPro themselves are a bit naughty when it comes to the footage they show, not always from production spec cameras, likewise the cameras are used quite a lot these days in the professional industry but more often than not with a different lens to the standard consumer lenses
 
jokiin said:
best to judge that only based on amatuer end user videos, GoPro themselves are a bit naughty when it comes to the footage they show, not always from production spec cameras, likewise the cameras are used quite a lot these days in the professional industry but more often than not with a different lens to the standard consumer lenses
Click to expand...

I've heard the same thing from multiple sources. Many of the GoPro commercials make you assume they are using their product to shoot the video shown, when it's actually a $50,000 camera.
 
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So what do reckon jokiin, is your GT7S model going to challenge the GoPro video quality?
 
jokiin said:
$250k actually, shoots at 2500 frames per second, ever wondered why the slow mo stuff looks so good
Click to expand...

I can't speak to whether GoPro is using other cameras and lenses for their commercials but I watched an interesting video tutorial offered by one of the GoPro employees from their production team who does the slo-mo stuff and he showed how they do this in Final Cut Pro along with other specialized software (Twixtor). He said it only works with certain types of scenes where the subject is up against a pure blue sky with nothing else in the background because of how the algorithm functions and then said something like "You'll notice in our videos this is the only kind of scene you'll see this done this way." He went on to explain how the whole thing falls apart into a jello- y mess if there is anything textured behind the subject. I'll try to track down the link where I saw this.
 
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