Newbie needs a dashcam a

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Jay Kan

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So, I need some advice. After a few near misses here where I live, I decided it's time for a Dashcam. I drive quite a bit, the family loves going on road trips, usually a few hours each way. We currently live in a hot desert climate. We are moving to South Korea at the end of the year and will be shipping our large American SIV over there with us, so a dashcam is a must. What I am looking for...... Good video, both day and night. Wifi is preferable over a video screen, I really have little use for a screen, but if it has one, as long as I can turn it off, I can live with it. Pre-buffered parking mode. Ability to hardwire it to the battery. Capacitor powered over battery due to our hot dry climate. Battery drain protection is ideal, but I guess I can get a separate battery drain protector. Wifi must be IOS compatible. Budget is flexible. Preferably 200 or less, but can go higher for a "much better" camera.

So, I was looking at the A119. I was also looking at the SG9665GC V3 but can't decide if the price bump is worth it. What are the main differences between the A119 and the SG9665gc?

Also was considering the f770, but that's quite a bit more than either the SG and the A119, and other than a rear camera, I don't see why an upgrade would be worth it.
 
Jay Kan said:
So, I need some advice. After a few near misses here where I live, I decided it's time for a Dashcam. I drive quite a bit, the family loves going on road trips, usually a few hours each way. We currently live in a hot desert climate. We are moving to South Korea at the end of the year and will be shipping our large American SIV over there with us, so a dashcam is a must. What I am looking for...... Good video, both day and night. Wifi is preferable over a video screen, I really have little use for a screen, but if it has one, as long as I can turn it off, I can live with it. Pre-buffered parking mode. Ability to hardwire it to the battery. Capacitor powered over battery due to our hot dry climate. Battery drain protection is ideal, but I guess I can get a separate battery drain protector. Wifi must be IOS compatible. Budget is flexible. Preferably 200 or less, but can go higher for a "much better" camera.

So, I was looking at the A119. I was also looking at the SG9665GC V3 but can't decide if the price bump is worth it. What are the main differences between the A119 and the SG9665gc?

Also was considering the f770, but that's quite a bit more than either the SG and the A119, and other than a rear camera, I don't see why an upgrade would be worth it.
Click to expand...
SG9665GC has a better design, more reliable, great support.
 
The A119 isn't a bad cam, but it's like a cheapened SG9665GC with lesser everything including lesser price which makes it a good value ;) I'd go with the SG for a best 'wedge cam' without parking mode. And therein lies the problem- very few cams have parking mode, and all which do have some kind of issue attached such as low FPS, too-small pre-buffered files, scarce firmware upgrades, reliability problems, etc.

No perfect dashcams yet and probably never will be :( The best you can do is to get your most important features then live with the rest, or buy several different cams and have the best of everything but no money to spend for driving :rolleyes:

Phil
 
You can buy both the vifo and SG cameras from a US based seller, but of the 2 SG have the outright best customer care and support.
Daytime they all give good footage, light time the vifo A119S might edge out the SG9665GC V3 but it is marginal and so not anything that should change the buying decisions as all current dashcams have limitations when it come to low light performance.

Be careful not to judge dashcams low light performance on some youtube clips where you will see really good performance, but that's due to the car being in a town lit up like las vegas and the speed the car is driving are 2 MPH .

Take any camera to a town with a normal level of ambient light, or a rural road, and add normal driving speed, and really all you see have a substantial degree of motion blur to it.

This low light issue are a global one, and based in hardware.
Sure some newer cameras using the most light sensitive sensors you can make out more in the night footage, but the more will still be suffering from motion blur so it are not really making that camera a lot better than another one.

A good example of a camera with the new sensors Vs another one with a sensor that use to be king of the low light hill are this video of mine.
And do note i don't drive that fast, and really what you can see more in the one camera are not really something you could use to anything in case of a alteration of some kind.
But it do demo the low light performance you can expect now in dashcams Vs the best we had like a year ago, but ap speed it dont really matter and i would argue both IMX 322 ( old king ) and IMX 291 ( new king ) are still top end low light performers in equally dialed in cameras.


O and welcome to the forum Jay
 
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But dashcam with imx291 are all un reliable right now. I am afraid it takes half a year to to have a dashcam with full image quality and reliable. :)
Even A119 or A119s have so many issues now although they had a very long time to test.
So i dont think suggest ppl buy dashcam with imx291 now is a good point.
 
Wow, I thought purchasing a dash am was going to be easy. Great video, thank you. So after reading all these posts, it seems there is no perfect cam. It looks like the SG is probably the best so far, at least in my price range. The IMX is unreliable? Is the F770 worth almost double the cost of the SG, or should I just purchase the SG and be done with it?
 
Well, Thank you everyone for your help. I ended up ordering a Blacksys CH-100B. It will be here Friday, so this weekend I will install it. It seems to have everything I wanted, parking monitor, wifi, built in battery drain protection, etc.. It was a little over my budget of 200, but I would rather buy once and pay more, than buy multiple times trying to get what I want, and end up paying even more. Thanks again everyone. Very helpful forum, looking forward to hanging around here and using/sharing all this knowledge.
 
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