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:
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.
- 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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