Looking for a budget-friendly dash cam with buffered parking mode and and least 1080p resolution

ghpalias

New Member
Joined
Jul 1, 2019
Messages
1
Reaction score
0
Location
Buffalo, NY
Country
United States
This is my first foray into the dashcam world and I'm interested in a decent quality dash cam-would prefer dual but that's probably out of my price range at the moment. I'd really like a dash cam that has a good-to-great parking mode because I park daily in a garage with extremely narrow spots and have gotten many scratches of varying intensity as a result. I'd like something that will record if someone opens their door into mine, side swipes my car when pulling out, etc. I can back into the spots so just having a front camera should be fine, but I'm concerned that the lower-level cameras with parking mode have a lag that wouldn't capture the offending person/car. It seems like buffered parking mode would be the way to go but again, not sure if any exist in my price range (hopefuly $120 or less). I don't need CPS or a screen.

I'm also not especially tech- or car-saavy so I'd consider buying a separate battery for running the cam when in parking mode so I don't have to hardwire it into my car (this seems very complicated and I remember how much trouble my ex-boyfriend had installing just a simple front-facing camera on his car, and he was very tech- and car-saavy). I'm sick of people scratching up my car and not leaving notes (it seems to be common practice in this garage; I'm not the only one who deals with this). Any recommendations for particular cameras and/or whether the separate battery makes sense for my purposes? Thanks very much.
 
Welcome to DCT. I've tested a number of cameras and I've never been completely satisfied with the parking modes, especially anything that relies on motion or impact detection.

My personal preference and general recommendation is to record continuously when parked. If you choose one with low bitrate parking mode that will extend the length of recording you can fit on a microSD card. Since you are parking in a garage it sounds like you will not have to worry about the camera overheating with sun shining on a parked car.

A front camera will not be able to see what is happening at the sides of your car. Continuous recording with sound may at least hear if someone bumps or scratches your car.

You may want to consider something like the Viofo A129 IR, or the soon to be released B2W. The second camera mounted up front can see both sides of the car from within, which would help to identify the culprit.

If you don't like the idea of a camera looking you in the face, you can go for something small like the B1W or a Mobius installed at the back of the car but pointing forwards. Again this could see both sides from within the car.
 
I like the idea of having the rear camera facing inwards. I wonder if you could have a front inward facing camera and just stick some tape on it so that it can only see out the side windows.
 
Back
Top