Just arrived Street Guardian SG9663DC dual camera dashcam

Truchaos

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I preordered the SG9663DC dual camera dashcam directly from Street Guardian back in Sept for $299. It just arrived today. I own the single camera unit and upgraded to the dual camera system.

Looking through the box it seems quite similar to the single camera unit and with very similar contents in the box.

My initial thoughts are it looks good. I do see one small red flag at this point. The unit only comes with a cigarette adapter power plug like the original single camera unit BUT this one has an inline DC to DC converter which converts the 12 volt cigarette lighter socket voltage to 24 volts. Does the single camera unit run on 24 volts? If so, I hadn't noticed. While this isn't a major problem, finding a replacement power cable is not going to be easy if it's damaged or fails. Additionally, using an off the shelf hard wired harness tucked away in the headliner will be a challenge in finding one with a 12 to 24 volt converter or adapting a DC to DC converter to such a cable.

The 64GB memory card seems too small for a dual camera HD system. I use a 256 in my single camera unit and that lasts about 4 days. 64 is a nice start but I'll be swapping out the stock micro SD for something larger.

The rear camera is connected to the front camera with what appears to be a mini USB cable. Which is pretty standard.

The box contains the following:

1) Cigarette lighter socket power adapter Power with 12v to 24v DC to DC converter
2) Camera to camera cable
3) 64 GB micro SD card
4) Window mount GPS unit and cable
5) Trim pry bar
6) Adhesive window strips
7) Adhesive wire mounts for the cables
8) Various adapters
9) Quick start guide which seems well written and shows how to set the time zone!!!
10) Soft draw string storage bag

I'll update the review once I install it and give additional updates on operation and stability.

NOTE: The old unit did use a 12v to 24v converter. I just didn't notice it before.
 
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I do see one small red flag at this point. The unit only comes with a cigarette adapter power plug like the original single camera unit BUT this one has an inline DC to DC converter which converts the 12 volt cigarette lighter socket voltage to 24 volts. Does the single camera unit run on 24 volts? If so, I hadn't noticed. While this isn't a major problem, finding a replacement power cable is not going to be easy if it's damaged or fails. Additionally, using an off the shelf hard wired harness tucked away in the headliner will be a challenge in finding one with a 12 to 24 volt converter or adapting a DC to DC converter to such a cable.
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just to clarify, the camera input/power supply output is 5V over USB, the input the power supply accepts is 12v~24v, you must have had a much earlier version of the single channel model as we've used these external converter power supplies for close to 2 years already so nothing unusual about the power supply, they do require a decent quality power supply though which is something to be aware of if contemplating using a different power supply, a lot of the power supplies out there aren't great

The rear camera is connected to the front camera with what appears to be a mini USB cable. Which is pretty standard.

it's a 10 pin cable, not a regular Mini USB cable, spares are readily available though

The box contains the following:
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SG9663DC box contents.jpg
 
Looks pretty much perfect packet to me, tool 8 is the icing on the cake.
 
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#8 can open beer when done with use in car, though a drinking man can uncap a beer with just about anything, a pice of A4 paper are fine.
I once knew a guy that could open a beer with his eye, or rather the bone in the skull over the eye, and i saw a old bricklayer open a beer with the nail of his thumb, he just grabbed the beer and pop it was open.
Same guy could also life a chair lifting in 1 chair leg with one hand,,,,,,, with me sitting in the chair and not falling off ( i was 45 - 50 Kg back then i assume.
 
#8 can open beer when done with use in car, though a drinking man can uncap a beer with just about anything, a pice of A4 paper are fine.
I once knew a guy that could open a beer with his eye, or rather the bone in the skull over the eye, and i saw a old bricklayer open a beer with the nail of his thumb, he just grabbed the beer and pop it was open.
Same guy could also life a chair lifting in 1 chair leg with one hand,,,,,,, with me sitting in the chair and not falling off ( i was 45 - 50 Kg back then i assume.
Not so special skills, i bet after 2000 years or so nobody will remember him:)
 
#8 can open beer when done with use in car, though a drinking man can uncap a beer with just about anything, a pice of A4 paper are fine.
I once knew a guy that could open a beer with his eye, or rather the bone in the skull over the eye, and i saw a old bricklayer open a beer with the nail of his thumb, he just grabbed the beer and pop it was open.
Same guy could also life a chair lifting in 1 chair leg with one hand,,,,,,, with me sitting in the chair and not falling off ( i was 45 - 50 Kg back then i assume.
Completely naked you always have an opener if you think about it :D
 
Then i will need some place to store my little blue booster pill :D
 
I installed it and made a couple observations. While the window camera mount looks identical it isn't. The new camera will not attach to the old mount. Once I got the old window mount off the window there is a minor difference. This was not a big deal.

I like that the menu has a lot more features. I also like that I was able to set the time zone from the display instead of plugging it into a computer.

I didn't get it installed until the sun was setting but I thought it would be a chance to take some video in poor conditions.

The video looks pretty good and the light level with the polarized lens is virtually identical to what it looked like to my eye which was not the case with the older single camera unit. However, there's a problem with the video. There's a pulsating pixelation of the video affecting the bottom 1/2 of the display. I also noticed that the REC light flashed constantly (don't know if that's normal) and the pixelation seems to match that pulsating REC light in frequency.

I uploaded a video to youtube but with their video smoothing you can't see the pixelation and even in HD the video quality looks worse than it actually is. The pixelation is much more dramatic when viewed on the computer screen. It affects both the front and rear video.

I'm going to mess around with it tomorrow to see if I can resolve the video issue.
 
I also noticed that the REC light flashed constantly (don't know if that's normal) and the pixelation seems to match that pulsating REC light in frequency.
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not sure what you mean by this

I uploaded a video to youtube but with their video smoothing you can't see the pixelation and even in HD the video quality looks worse than it actually is. The pixelation is much more dramatic when viewed on the computer screen. It affects both the front and rear video.
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if you see some sort of weird video effect that you don't see after uploading to YouTube that could indicate a playback/codec issue on your PC, if you can share a raw file so we can have a look would help to determine if that's the case

also can you run through which settings you have changed from their defaults

which model camera did you have previously?
 
The REC button flashes red continuously. It's just an observation that the pixelation in the video seems to pulsate at about the same rate the button flashes red. I've noticed the pixelation in the rear video is much less than the front camera. When I look at the pulsating pixelation it makes me think of a turn signal flashing as if it were causing some sort of interference but of course the turn signal isn't on.

I'm uploading the video to my gmail account so I can view it on an Apple laptop. I'll also try viewing it from the SD card on the Apple computer.

I didn't change many settings. Just the time zone, I set the view to front camera only, turned the audio record on,
 
The REC button flashes red continuously. It's just an observation that the pixelation in the video seems to pulsate at about the same rate the button flashes red. I've noticed the pixelation in the rear video is much less than the front camera. When I look at the pulsating pixelation it makes me think of a turn signal flashing as if it were causing some sort of interference but of course the turn signal isn't on.

I'm uploading the video to my gmail account so I can view it on an Apple laptop. I'll also try viewing it from the SD card on the Apple computer.

I didn't change many settings. Just the time zone, I set the view to front camera only, turned the audio record on,

REC light flashing while recording is normal

Make sure you have frequency set to 60Hz (the default setting is 50Hz) if you don't set this you will see flicker in the video from any incandescent or florescent mains powered lighting (LED lights will still have some flicker regardless)

Recommend using the standard PIP view
 
The last customer that said they had video flicker it ended up being a computer playback issue. Share the raw videos and we'll confirm how they look on our end.
 
@jokiin
You may recall I mentioned pulsating vids with my cheap G1W clone which also is in time with the blinking LED. With my junky cam I think there's not enough power reaching the processor when the LED is on. And mine isn't a player issue as I've tried several and they were all the same. Hope this post/info may be of some use to you ;)

Phil
 
@jokiin
You may recall I mentioned pulsating vids with my cheap G1W clone which also is in time with the blinking LED. With my junky cam I think there's not enough power reaching the processor when the LED is on. And mine isn't a player issue as I've tried several and they were all the same. Hope this post/info may be of some use to you ;)

Phil

yeah not a problem I've seen before, we really need to see some video samples to be able to look into it further
 
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