My DVR-207 experiences

[Ramshackle]

Ok, tried it out for the first time today.

Some weirdness to report:

1. Makes loud, tinny ♪♫ sound when it you start the car (I suppose I can turn that down)
2. Stopped in town, then an hour later started again, but this time did not hear the ♪♫ sound. :shock: Opened the screen but it was off. Pressed on/off switch, nothing happened. Took out battery and put it back in, and it was on track again. Hope this is not a serious glitch.
3. Got it home and took it inside to charge it on my PC with a USB cable. Hooked it up and walked away, but when I came back Windows 7 was having a fit (making the USB attach/detach sound every few seconds). Error message in W7 giving me a USB "Device did not install correctly" type error. I've never seen Windows do that before. I plugged it into another USB port and this time opened it up in explorer, and this seemed to work.
4. Pulled a few files over to my PC and ran them with Media Player Classic and also Windows Media Player. 2 problems:
   • Video is dark
   • You cannot click on the timeline to advance the video at all (WTF?)

Pleasantly surprised by the 720p/30fps video though. Would be extremely useful in court.

Comments welcome.

 

[Thief]

1. Makes loud, tinny ♪♫ sound when it you start the car (I suppose I can turn that down)
2. Stopped in town, then an hour later started again, but this time did not hear the ♪♫ sound. :shock: Opened the screen but it was off. Pressed on/off switch, nothing happened. Took out battery and put it back in, and it was on track again. Hope this is not a serious glitch.
3. Got it home and took it inside to charge it on my PC with a USB cable. Hooked it up and walked away, but when I came back Windows 7 was having a fit (making the USB attach/detach sound every few seconds). Error message in W7 giving me a USB "Device did not install correctly" type error. I've never seen Windows do that before. I plugged it into another USB port and this time opened it up in explorer, and this seemed to work.
4. Pulled a few files over to my PC and ran them with Media Player Classic and also Windows Media Player. 2 problems:
   • Video is dark
   • You cannot click on the timeline to advance the video at all (WTF?)

Pleasantly surprised by the 720p/30fps video though. Would be extremely useful in court.

Comments welcome.

1. Yeah, it's pretty ****ty sounding, though I didn't find where to turn it off. It's nice to know they thought of some way to let you know the thing is powering on though if your screen is closed.
3. You probably need to go into Device Manager in Windows and within power management of the USB root hub, uncheck the "allow Windows to turn off this device to save power" option.
4. I had the same issue, but I fiddled around with a couple of my codec settings (K-lite codec pack + Media Player Classic) when I was trying to get the recorded videos to open up in VirtualDub and it's OK now. (My ffdshow filter was set to disabled for handling H.264)

 

[Ramshackle]

Hey, thanks man! My ffdshow was also disabled for H.264. I changed that and it's fixed! Ta

 

[ecnar]

I also had the blank screen experience. I just started using my DVR-207 two days ago. On each day the screen turned dark and the camera would not function until I removed the battery and put it back in.

 

[Lajos]

2. Stopped in town, then an hour later started again, but this time did not hear the ♪♫ sound. :shock: Opened the screen but it was off. Pressed on/off switch, nothing happened. Took out battery and put it back in, and it was on track again. Hope this is not a serious glitch.

I also had the blank screen experience. I just started using my DVR-207 two days ago. On each day the screen turned dark and the camera would not function until I removed the battery and put it back in.

My new 207 seems to be unreliable too. A black out on the first day I took it to use. I also removed the battery and put it back in. That helped, but do I have to do so daily? Not very nice.

 

[CheckYourLights]

For the sound issue at least on my 027 i have the volume to one and it is not to bad. I don't know how to turn the start up noise completely off, but it is pretty loud at first i thought this would effect my sound record volume, but it only seems to be for the boot sound and i am guessing effects on device playback as well.
You mentioned you got your videos working so that is good. I just wanted to throw out there that i use VLC for video playback on a PC and everything works OK.

 

[Ramshackle]

If the unit is going to hang every time we use it, they should recall it, fix the bug, and send us new product.

Looks like we are guinea pigs! :x

 

[Ramshackle]

If anyone else is having persistent issues with this unit becoming unresponsive at unpredictable times, please post here.

The symptoms seem to be:

1. When you start the car, you do not hear the ♫♪ sound
2. The screen is black
3. The on/off switch is unresponsive
4. Battery must be removed to correct fault

 

[Olli]

I asked the seller about camera unexpectedly shutdown, and here is the respond ~

Hi,friend,
We think it is the problem of its memory card!Some poor memory card can not be compatible with this camera,so it will be power off when card fully;
If our buyers can test it without any memory card plug into,you can find it can power on always!

So,if you find its screen go blank,we suggest that you can use one class10 memory card,and with brand memory card for this camera,thanks!

 

[Thief]

I asked the seller about camera unexpectedly shutdown, and here is the respond ~

Hi,friend,
We think it is the problem of its memory card!Some poor memory card can not be compatible with this camera,so it will be power off when card fully;
If our buyers can test it without any memory card plug into,you can find it can power on always!

So,if you find its screen go blank,we suggest that you can use one class10 memory card,and with brand memory card for this camera,thanks!

Interesting. I got this card on sale for $20 and I've had no problems so far. Knock on wood.

 

[ecnar]

I made it through a day without the blank screen! It may have been the card for me. I have the Sandisk 32gb class 10. I previously had files on the card from another camera (RCA EZ 2100) It uses .mov files and also had a DCIM folder. I removed these files yesterday and did not have the blank screen problem. I will try again today. hopefully this fixes the issue.

 

[dashcam.br]

I asked the seller about camera unexpectedly shutdown, and here is the respond (...)

If you haven't done that yet, you can always try to format the card on the camera to make sure it's in a format that your camera know how to handle. On another thread, this solved a shutdown recording problem.

(Edit: Found the original thread that mention formatting on the camera.)

 

[Ramshackle]

I got this one

I will swap it out with another brand name one from my camera and see if that helps.

 

[Ramshackle]

If you haven't done that yet, you can always try to format the card on the camera to make sure it's in a format that your camera know how to handle.

I did that right at the start with the card mentioned above, but note: it took about 4 seconds to format it, and there was no confirmation message, just back to the screen, so I am left wondering if it did a "quick format" or none at all :?:

 

[Ramshackle]

I've inserted an old 512MB (lol) Sandisk card in there (it took about 2 seconds to format). It's not class 10, but it's a brand name. My recordings are 2 minutes (about 90MB each), so should work.

For good measure, I connected the camera to my PC and fully formatted the card as FAT32, default allocation unit size. That took much longer than 2 seconds.

 

[shafferb0b1]

Had some similar issues with mine. Power up, nothing happened, shut back off by itself. Card had been used in another digital camera. Formatted card with Fat32 on my Mac, and problems completely disappeared. Tried on some other cards, same problems, same solution. No big deal. Great test is to not put any card in it, and power it up. If it powers up OK, it's the card's format that's the problem.

 

[shafferb0b1]

OK, so got to try mine out today and here are some overall impressions:

The good stuff

1). Works well, easy to use once you learn the menus a bit.
2). Included mount is pretty stable, though my RAM mount is a lot better
3). Battery life is MUCH better than I expected, got about 45 minutes of 720P out of it today, no problem
4). Yes, you can turn the noises down (or completely off)
5). You can also tell it to just continuously record without chopping the video into 1,2, or 5 minute segments
6). No glitches when it is going from segment to segment, no appreciable time delay
7). Sound quality is acceptable, should catch tires squealing and metal crashing together very nicely
8). File sizes are quite manageable, I use a 16Gb Sandisk Type 10, and that's a LOT of video
9). Color balance outside is quite good in overcast daylight (indoor color balance is awful, but that's not what this little camera is for anyway)
10). Better made than expected frankly. Dropped the sucker on a marble tile floor as it was unpacked (naturally) and didn't even put a ding in it.
11). Did not have any FM interference, likely because I just used the battery (I got a couple of spare Nokia's just in case). Don't like wires running around.
12). You can adjust the EV (exposure values) to jack up the sensitivity, but it introduces noise, and is only adjustable while recording, no menu setting I could find.

The bad stuff

1). Image is fairly grainy, not noisy mind you, just a bit grainy
2). 720P at 30 FPS seems to be the sweet spot, any higher and you're down to 15 FPS and that's just useless. Good advertising I guess though.
3). Image was "subtly jumpy", just tiny "glitches" once in a while, seems like even a class 10 may not be perfectly fast enough. Or their video buffering isn't fast enough to keep up which is a lot more likely. And, I was running continuous video, not broken up into little bitty segments as might be more normal.
4). I did see some minor "rolling of focus", which seemed to come only with rain. That of course makes no technical sense at all since it's a fixed focus lens.
5). Playback from the camera is confusing at best, but not sure that matters too much, at least to me. I always slap the SD card in the computer anyway to watch the videos.

All in all

Useful for what it's designed for, but for doing videos of my off-road travels and such like for posting to YouTube or Vimeo in HD, I'll stick with my Tachyon XD/HD or my GoPro, quality is much much higher, as is the price. But for 70 bucks as a "documentary assistant", it's pretty darn good.

 

[Ramshackle]

Thanks for the detailed comment, Shaffer. I will experiment with the unit using different cards, formatted one way and another, etc.

I'll report back.

 

[CheckYourLights]

I asked the seller about camera unexpectedly shutdown, and here is the respond ~

Hi,friend,
We think it is the problem of its memory card!Some poor memory card can not be compatible with this camera,so it will be power off when card fully;
If our buyers can test it without any memory card plug into,you can find it can power on always!

So,if you find its screen go blank,we suggest that you can use one class10 memory card,and with brand memory card for this camera,thanks!

I had totally forgotten about that. When i first bought my 027 i had this problem the camera would not boot and i needed to format my card in a PC and then put it in the camera and that fixed it, but the most recent time i grabbed a memory card that had files on it and stick it in the camera it did boot and displayed a big red F on the screen and i was able to format it through the camera.

1). Image is fairly grainy, not noisy mind you, just a bit grainy

This happened with the 027 when you go into photo mode or go in to the menu and then come back out to record mode the camera image can become grainy you can fix this by aiming a flash light or pointing the camera into your cars map lights let it self adjust to the bright light, and then point it back towards the front and let it adjust again or possibly turning it off and on again.

 

[Ramshackle]

Reporting back: using an ancient 512MB Sandisk card, formatted in the camera via my PC, the unit performed without a glitch

However, the night video is extremely dark and grainy. This is perhaps because I am in a country region without street lights, so all you can see is the headlights.