MateGo MG380G Impressions

Tungsten

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As a shift worker who spends 11 hours a night on the road in a company car I had the following requirements for a dashcam:

  • Excellent night time video quality.
  • Suction cup mount for swapping in and out of different vehicles.
  • Good build quality with minimal reports of failures.
  • Priced $200 or under.

The MateGo MG380G was one of the only dashcams that met these requirements.

I purchased it for $130 on eBay and chucked a 32GB card in it.

The Good:

Picture quality at night is about as good as it gets, no it's not perfect but you can see far more than what a smart phone or gopro can.

The suction cup mount is very strong in terms of suction, stronger than Garmin or TomTom suction mounts.

Build quality is quite good, it feels solid enough.

Menus are easy to navigate on the touch screen and it comes with a variety of languages built in.

It starts recording in around 7 seconds from the moment you turn on the ignition.

GPS acquisition is very fast, faster than my Garmin at times.

The not so good:

The physical button on the camera to manually save an event must be pressed twice, the first press turns on the screen, the second actually saves an event.

The length of time prior to an event that is saved seems to be quite random, I believe it saves whatever is currently I the file it's recording plus whatever length of time is needed after the event to make up the desired file length (I have it set to 1 minute.) There is no way to protect individual non event files from being overwritten after the card is full so this could potentially be an issue if you go a long time between downloading files. There is a potential to miss saving something you wanted saved by a few seconds.

Touching the touchscreen turns it on but if you tap it again by accident it will stop recording, this only happened to me the first time I was playing with it but it's potentially serious enough to warrant mentioning. Why someone thought this was a good idea when there's already a physical stop/start recording button I have no idea.

As with many Chinese dashcams it suffers from vibration noise on the audio, depending on what your vehicle is doing the whole car may vibrate enough to see on video, however there is also a distinct vibrating/clicking sound on the recording coming from the camera itself. This doesn't bother me overly since it's intermittent but it's a shame this is still an issue with dashcams.

Currently the accessories (suction cup, mount, power cable) are not available for separate purchase which could potentially be an issue if something breaks or is lost.


Overall I am very satisfied with the camera, it does everything I want it to and if you have the same requirements as I did for a dashcam I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

As a side note it appears there is a firmware update available on MateGo's website. However the firmware notes are in a text file, presumably in Chinese and I was unable to get it to render in order to translate them. As such I am not going to update the firmware yet as I have no idea what the new version fixes or breaks.
 
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As a side note it appears there is a firmware update available on MateGo's website. However the firmware notes are in a text file, presumably in Chinese and I was unable to get it to render in order to translate them. As such I am not going to update the firmware yet as I have no idea what the new version fixes or breaks.
Original firmware v1.01.03 notes (are in in simplified Chinese, this firmware is the latest):

优化IQ,加入全天侯曝光算法。
 
I have bought this for 100$ freeshipping from aliexpress. took 2 weeks to arrive in Vietnam.
The firmware is very basic and it need to add EV+- value, exposure value, metering mode (matrix, center, point). Overall the video quality is better at night than my RX300. Day video is about the same thou.

It also have a rear mount camera accessories for 15-20$ but I have not tried it yet.
 
The firmware is very basic and it need to add metering mode (matrix, center, point)

What exactly do you need? A dash cam or a photo camera?
 
Are all your cameras recording video at 12Mbps?
 
Are all your cameras recording video at 12Mbps?
With all firmwares I used (1.01.01, 1.01.02 and current 1.01.03) 15Mbps video recording. So official MateGo MG380G specifications aren't correct, don't know why.
 
It did used to record at only 12Mbps on older firmware versons - I've got one here somewhere I'll dig out.
 
I'm really satisfied with the MG380G, it has very good day- and night video quality. Use it with a Lexar 128Gb full sized sdcard and till today the cam runs flawlessly. Otoh it's a pity that MateGo support is a bad joke, they don't answer emails...
 
It is just a China market product so they probably only reply to Chinese emails - any support would have to be from the reseller.

Does it have the MPH option now or still logs everything in KPH please?
 
Regrettably logs only in KPH, to me it's perfect because I live in Europe, but I have full understanding that others will need or prefer MPH.
 
What exactly do you need? A dash cam or a photo camera?

I need a dashcam, of course, but the AWB is not as good as it should be..it needs to have +1/3 EV or +2/3EV to be perfect, in my humble opinion.
Also does anyone order the kit with rear camera ? the installation instruction is kinda confused, and I am also curious about the quality of the rear camera as well :D

And the bitrate in my Camera is 15 Mbps. Firmware version 1.01.3

I live in Vietnam which is very hot country but so far the battery-powered RX300 is still alive and kicking, but I am thinking about moving to capacitor based one, that's why I order the Matego 380G based on review here.
 
MateGo MG380G firmware v1.01.04 is released, list of changes is not available.
 
OnStar MateGo MG380/MG380G firmware v1.02.00 is released, list of changes is not available.
 
OnStar MateGo MG380/MG380G firmware v1.02.00 is released, list of changes is not available.

基于上一版本,所作改动如下:

1.优化录像品质

Google translator says:

Based on the previous version, made the following changes:

1. Optimize video quality
 
Sounds promising, thank you.
 
The motion detection on my camera flat out doesn't work. It always records even if there is no motion. Any chance the latest firmware fixes this problem?
 
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