New xiaoimi yi camera on the horizon

I couldn't even find the Yi4K+ on amazon.co.uk. However the older Yi 4K is selling for £237 reduced from £289!!! :eek:
....

Well, Yi 4k+ is not on sale anywere....and you see reduced yi4k because they have to flush out old stock before the new model pops out. Somebody(kamKar1) said (look above posts) april 1st for the Yi4k+
 
Probably before April 1, during March is a option.

I too wouldn't mind paying a little more to buy local and have better EU warranty and return.
Though i should say even though sales is done under your local ( EU country ) rules, that dont mean the local seller cant give you a lot of grief.
But a local seller you can do something with, a deep space internet seller you can at best file a amazon or Ebay dispute over, and it will still be going to cost you a lot of money.

As i understand it Chinese sellers get gooberment help with those free shipping, maybe Chinese gooberment can help in Chinese sellers getting help and warrenty centers all over the world.
 
all action camera advertisements are filmed with a gimbal, this is not a marketing fail lol.
 
Off course, no need to display the shortcomings of your product, and capturing action and make it look good demand more than just a good camera.
And it dont matter if it is a gopro / yi or a RED camera, if you are in a shaky environment then that will translate to the footage and it will look bad.
So thank god for gimbals that are now at prize levels where mortal man can join in too.

It is the same with dashcams, the footage the maker use to sell those are also filmed under optimal conditions, and so day footage will be nice bright sunny days or at least days with plenty of light Vs the speed of traffic, and same for night footage that you will notice are filmed in a city with a ton of light and in slow moving traffic so you can see license plates on the cars passing by.
So there is no telling about all the shortcomings dashcams still have and will have for years to come, and you see that often in here when people question their own footage from a good dashcamera.

Myself i know and all i expect of my dashcams at night / in low light is log my lane holding / speed and the color of the intersections i pass thru, and at least in Denmark that should be enough to prove that is something nasty happen, then i am not the one to blame.
 
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I am sure the yi 4k+ will make a awful dashcam, maybe not so much the footage it will make, that will probably be just fine.
But for all other aspects i could not see myself use a action camera as a dashcam, maybe journey cam now and then but never day to day driving documentation.

Not sure why you think action cams make terrible dashcams.

What's the difference apart from loop recording and power on start, both of which the yi has? Plus its very small. If an action cam you like buys you better footage, then you're better off not paying for the dashcam label.
 
They are not shaped well for dashcam use and i would have to remove it every time i leave the car, and they will have to hang off far from the windscreen where i prefer a dashcam that cling to it.
They have a battery - they dont have the GPS i like - normally the USB plug is on the side so a wire coming off the camera there just look silly, off course some form of angled adapter could fix that.
Also with the higher bitrates they will be generating huge files, and i think the 700 MB ones generated by a mobius 2 camera on first setting above normal is more than enough for 3 minutes of recordings.
If you record 4K/60 i assume a 3 minute file will be 1000 - 1200 MB in size, so if you save your drives you can have 1000 of those 3 minute files on a 1Tb harddrive.
And off course the 4K sensors will be more limited in night performance than the larger pixeled ones used in current dashcams. ( not that this worry me a whole lot, it seem more important to other people )

The weather have been awful here so i have not yet had a chance to test the SJ7Star in good weather, but to be honest the 4K footage of it captured in bad weather or late at night is a let down to me, the 4K aspect of the recordings just drown in all the things that go on in the low light recordings.
But sure when i am stopped at a intersection things look good in 4K, but i cant really use that for anything.

Okay the SJ7Star also had some issues with 4K and low light where it have seemed to drop to 15 FPS making for laggy footage.
 
They are not shaped well for dashcam use

TBH, I can't agree with you there. Mobius apart, most dash cams are as large and also box or awkwardly shaped:

Is this small Yi box any worse than:

g4-670x450.png


Vico Opia 2 - also a small (possibl;y a bit larger box) but vertically mounted:

vico_opia_2_07.jpg


or Nextbase:

_82822593_dashcam.jpg


and i would have to remove it every time i leave the car, and they will have to hang off far from the windscreen where i prefer a dashcam that cling to it.

Any visible camera is going to be vulnerable to theft unless you remove it, and all the above popular models I chose to compare it with above also "hang off the windscreen".

They have a battery - they dont have the GPS i like - normally the USB plug is on the side so a wire coming off the camera there just look silly, off course some form of angled adapter could fix that.

Battery OK constant charging is not good for them, but it really makes no difference to dashcam use if connected to a power supply as it runs from the power supply. GPS, is personal preference - I'd rather not have GPS - proves YOU were over the limit if you're not careful! Side USB, think the Vico has one but yes angled adapter can be the cure.


Also with the higher bitrates they will be generating huge files, and i think the 700 MB ones generated by a mobius 2 camera on first setting above normal is more than enough for 3 minutes of recordings.
If you record 4K/60 i assume a 3 minute file will be 1000 - 1200 MB in size, so if you save your drives you can have 1000 of those 3 minute files on a 1Tb harddrive.

The price of quality. Use a large SD card eg 64GB, and it's not an issue with loop recording, after all you only need the few moments of crash footage, not the whole day.


And off course the 4K sensors will be more limited in night performance than the larger pixeled ones used in current dashcams. ( not that this worry me a whole lot, it seem more important to other people )

Not necessarily. Depends how they are configured and the quality of the sensor, plus what tricks if any in the software are used to produce night footage eg merged exposures etc. However, you have to be careful when choosing a camera for sure.

The weather have been awful here so i have not yet had a chance to test the SJ7Star in good weather, but to be honest the 4K footage of it captured in bad weather or late at night is a let down to me, the 4K aspect of the recordings just drown in all the things that go on in the low light recordings.
But sure when i am stopped at a intersection things look good in 4K, but i cant really use that for anything.

Okay the SJ7Star also had some issues with 4K and low light where it have seemed to drop to 15 FPS making for laggy footage.

Can't comment on the SJ Cam as no experience. However, every camera is different.
 
Yeah if you bin 4 pixels from a 4K sensor into 1 pixel in 1080p footage then sure that will work too, but then you only get 1080p footage at night, and not that there is anything wrong with that.
Also i am not sure if current chipsets actually support pixel binning, Im not that nerdy about all this.
I dont think A12 do or the current novatek chipsets, but the H2 of the new YI might,,,,,, i do think its a cool way of upping the low light performance of a high pixel ( 4k or more ) sensor, at the expense of resolution off course.

I would love sweet 4K/ 30 or 60 FPS footage for daytime and nice 1080/ 30 or 60 FPS footage for night time in a dashcam, and i do think its out there and on the way, but just not in the hardware people are building with now, but it night be on the long term plans of some brands.

I have just recorded some 1080/120 footage with the Sj7 Star, thats giving ample room to detect those license plates :cool: but this is off course slow town traffic on a less fortunate day though there is a little sort of sunshine in the footage.

I just have to cut out 1 minute of that slow it down to 25% and then upload it, but first i have to stuff my face with something.

Above is off course my personal feelings on using action cameras as dashcams, i would prefer to have around 4 hours of footage, but this is due to me exposing people on youtube, and if my out drive get recycled by my drive home then all i captured then i wanted to share is gone.
But i can make do with that, rarely do any longer drives, plus if i was to start using the manual event button to save events then that would make saving things on longer drives easy-
 
Presale on GEARBEST
But with a caveat "Dispatch:Ships after May 01"
Ouch!!
 
Presale on GEARBEST
But with a caveat "Dispatch:Ships after May 01"
Ouch!!
Interesting they updated the price to 299, same as the price found at Geekbuying (even if they do not offer pre-sale yet). I have bad experience with presale at Gearbest (had to wait more than a month more for an android media player, and at the end I ended up asking for a reimburse...), so I will probably pass....I also want to see if there are no bugs being the first release.... :)
 
Interesting they updated the price to 299, same as the price found at Geekbuying (even if they do not offer pre-sale yet). I have bad experience with presale at Gearbest (had to wait more than a month more for an android media player, and at the end I ended up asking for a reimburse...), so I will probably pass....I also want to see if there are no bugs being the first release.... :)

Well, GEarbest is less accurate than bangood with stock accuracy, but they are improving. I had to wait for banggood on a pre-sold item too.
But Gearbest uses faster delivery service compared to bangood. I learned the hard way just to wait.
Generally I prefer to wait too. But sometimes you have to wait MORE if you to buy cheaply, after pre-sale is ended price spikes up before falling back to more reasonable one. And this has happened before with Yi camera prices.
 
when you're not buying from official sales channels you have to gamble with availability, what they have to sell depends how much they can buy each day in the local market, one thing that is certain is that they will keep taking sales whether they have stock or not, get the money and worry about it (or not) later, the reality of the business model used unfortunately
 
when you're not buying from official sales channels you have to gamble with availability, what they have to sell depends how much they can buy each day in the local market, one thing that is certain is that they will keep taking sales whether they have stock or not, get the money and worry about it (or not) later, the reality of the business model used unfortunately

I have been buying quite regularly from banggood in the last 3 years (106 orders which could also translate in multiple shipment each). I have to say that in the last 2 years what was declared "in stock" was really in stock and have been shipped on the same day or in the following 2-3 days.
What I have seen is they are a bit playing with shipment advice (e.g it looks like it has been shipped but it's only pre-advised to the forwarder).
For me the biggest issue is not their stock/no stock information, but the forwarder they choose + my national post service which sucks (with xmas in between, 90 days! And I was seeing from the tracking service it was already in the country sitting in the warehouse!)
 
not aimed at any of the sellers in particular and it will vary depending on what you're buying as well but this is something that happens to some degree with quite a lot of these Chinese online sellers, some play the freight delays into the bargain to buy extra time, the freight in general is initially slow to get anywhere though which just exacerbates the problem as you often don't know if the delays are genuine and expected or just being used as an excuse to buy extra time
 
I got my new phone VIA banggood, and i have to say it was supposed to ship before January 25, and so it did as it shipped on the 16.

Still it took a whole month to get up here, for some reason it was routed via Austria though that dident make up for the bulk of the slow shipping.
And my new phone was marked as a MP3 player, no need for that here as phones are exempt from taxes other than the sales tax and the handling fee.

It was indeed the slowest shipping i ever seen out of China.
 
Well, Yi 4k+ is not on sale anywere....and you see reduced yi4k because they have to flush out old stock before the new model pops out. Somebody(kamKar1) said (look above posts) april 1st for the Yi4k+
Yesterday, I was on Gearbest's site and they have a presale of $299.99 for the Yi 4k+ until 4/29/17
 
Yesterday, I was on Gearbest's site and they have a presale of $299.99 for the Yi 4k+ until 4/29/17
yes, If you look back some posts I linked that. But if you pay attention Gearbest will deliver AFTER may the 1st....there are also some Q&A about it on that page...
 
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