New B1W owner - some observations and suggestions

occamsrazor

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Hi,

Bought a BlueSkySea B1W as my first dashcam and am generally pleased with it. As my first dashcam I have nothing to compare it to, but I figured I'd write some observations and suggestions for improvement.....

Thoughts

Pros:
- Cheap price
- Small and discreet on the windscreen, this was quite important to me.
- Picture quality seems generally good
- Removeable from the windscreen attachment clip (I honestly didn't realize this at first)

Cons:
- Highlights of images sometimes a bit blown out, e.g. in bright sunlight.
- While the app is generally good, it misses some important functionality

b1w photo.jpg
[Image is a screenshot from video]

I do like this cam. I was always resistant against a dashcam as I didn't want something big visible in my windscreen from outside. This unit is small and discreet. I haven't mounted it properly yet but I can see once you hid the cable under the trim, it would be hard to see from outside. I am just using it plugged into the cigarette lighter, not hardwired, and not using parking mode. The picture quality I find generally fine, though sometimes in bright light it overblows the highlights and occasionally licence plates on white cars aren't totally readable. Not a huge deal though.

I didn't see myself viewing/reviewing footage on a tiny screen up in the window, so I was fine with buying a dashcam with no screen but with wifi app to use on my iPhone. I changed the wifi SSID and password, and the app connects reasonably reliably and quickly. Downloading of clips is not all that fast. My 1-minute clips are around 90mb, and I would have expected them to download quicker than they do to my iPhone 7. I'm not sure which flavour of WiFi the unit is using. The functions in the app seem to work as they should, but it is missing a number of critical features in my opinion.

Improvements

Deletion. In "Local File" there is the option to select more than once image, and also to delete those images. But when viewing the camera footage directly there is not. I'm kind of surprised that there seems no way at all to delete individual clips from the camera using the app... or am I missing something? It would seem the only clip deletion functionality is to erase the entire card. Really?

Ideally the app would add functionality that when viewing the camera clips you can:

- Choose/Select more than one clip at once
- Mark those files as "emergency" i.e. protected or normal, and vice versa.
- Delete file(s)
- Queue up more than one clip to download at once

Also, as some others have pointed out in this forum, it would be nice to have the option to set the date/time size to make it smaller. I'm still getting used to the device but am overrall happy with my purchase.

Thanks....
 
There is some over-sharpening of the video with this cam (my main complaint) but almost no other cams in this price range do nearly this well, and perhaps only one does any better. It is a budget-level cam and a very good one when seen that way.

Wifi downloads with all dashcams are slow; nothing like the speeds you can get with other devices, and the B1W compares well to other cams here. The app also compares well to other cams; these are all limited, buggy sometimes, and occasionally unusable with a given phone or tablet. Viewing and file work is always best done directly from the removed card instead of through an app; again this applies to all dashcams. Blueskysea has already done a lot with improving the apps and features with this cam, which is comendable as many companies do nothing once a cam hits the market. Perhaps we will see the improvements we want in time.

Phil
 
...
Cons:
- Highlights of images sometimes a bit blown out, e.g. in bright sunlight.
- While the app is generally good, it misses some important functionality
...
The highlights are intentionally blown out, it is normally more important to be able to see detail in the shadows than to see detail in the clouds, and since all cameras have a limited rage of brightness that they can cope with there has to be a compromise in difficult conditions.

We don't normally bother to delete files, they will be deleted automatically when the camera loops. If you really want to delete some then formatting to delete everything is easier and much quicker.
 
One (to me) important feature of this cam was audible message to say it was indeed working. My concern with a dash cam was thinking it got an accident recorded, only to find out that the SD card had been corrupt/broken and not recording.
I don't know how many other cams do this, but I don't think it's prevalent on many budget cams
I own 3 of these cams now. I trust them
 
Audio alerts are not found in too many cams in the lower price ranges, and even fewer will do an SD card check with audio alert on startup at any price level. This is a very good feature, but it does not protect against a card which fails while the cam is in use. There are very few cams which do this with an audio alert, although most will do some kind of visual alert if this occurs including the B1W where the LED will go from blinking to steady-on. And there are ways a card can fail which the cam may not detect; again a problem with all cams and not just this one.

I also feel that the B1W is utterly reliable with just one exception. Twice mine has stopped recording in use, apparently because the section reserved for locked files had been filled. Blueskysea is aware of this and may be working on a better solution, but this is easily avoidable by regularly checking the files and formatting the card which is best practice with any dashcam. I've not experienced this with any other cams I've used and when it happened here the LED stopped flashing so I knew something was wrong. So it's not a big issue, just one to be aware of.

Phil
 
One (to me) important feature of this cam was audible message to say it was indeed working. My concern with a dash cam was thinking it got an accident recorded, only to find out that the SD card had been corrupt/broken and not recording.
I don't know how many other cams do this, but I don't think it's prevalent on many budget cams
I own 3 of these cams now. I trust them

I have to say, mine were giving the "Recording Started" announcement, but were not recording. I had to redo the firmware update (parking mode) to get them to actually record again. Formatting the cards prior to the firmware update solved the problem.
 
Wifi downloads with all dashcams are slow; nothing like the speeds you can get with other devices, and the B1W compares well to other cams here.

Fair enough. As this my first cam I didn't have anything to compare to.

The app also compares well to other cams; these are all limited, buggy sometimes, and occasionally unusable with a given phone or tablet. Viewing and file work is always best done directly from the removed card instead of through an app; again this applies to all dashcams. Blueskysea has already done a lot with improving the apps and features with this cam, which is comendable as many companies do nothing once a cam hits the market. Perhaps we will see the improvements we want in time.

Indeed, generally I find the app OK. And one of the reasons I went with this cam was after looking on this forum and seeing that the developers have been responsive in terms of updates. So take my comments as intended for possible app improvements/suggestions... rather than a complaint.
 
We don't normally bother to delete files, they will be deleted automatically when the camera loops. If you really want to delete some then formatting to delete everything is easier and much quicker.

The problem with formatting is it deletes everything. I would like to review files, manually mark some as protected and keep them on card under Emergency, then delete the rest. Or, mark some unneeded files the camera had marked as Emergency as not needed, and then delete them. Or various combinations of similar. It doesn't seem to me like it would be all that difficult to add such functionality... but then I'm not a developer, so I don't know.
 
The highlights are intentionally blown out, it is normally more important to be able to see detail in the shadows than to see detail in the clouds, and since all cameras have a limited rage of brightness that they can cope with there has to be a compromise in difficult conditions.

I can see some logic there. On the other hand white/yellow licence plates are often equivalent to highlights, and may be critical info. Also, it's easy to pull up details from underexposed shadows, whereas when highlights are blown that details is generally unrecoverable. Would be nice to have some kind of fixed exposure compensation option controllable via the app, but not a big deal to be fair.
 
There aren't many cams with a lot of adjustability, but most have "Exposure" settings which you can play with. Some folks leave that once they've set it, others change it at night or seasonally. Plate capture is always a bugger with all dashcams, especially reflective ones at night. One "workaround" for that is to say the plate number you want to remember aloud and let the audio recorder handle it. Sadly, audio recording is the one area where the B1W tends to do poorly so you may have to shout :rolleyes: IMHO it's still the best budget-level cap-equipped cam even with it's few quirks (y)

Phil
 
The problem with formatting is it deletes everything. I would like to review files, manually mark some as protected and keep them on card under Emergency, then delete the rest. Or, mark some unneeded files the camera had marked as Emergency as not needed, and then delete them. Or various combinations of similar. It doesn't seem to me like it would be all that difficult to add such functionality... but then I'm not a developer, so I don't know.
I don't know if this is possible with an iPhone, but using Android this is possible by using a microSD card reader plugged into the phone. Then use a file explorer app to view, move, delete and copy files however you like.
 
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