Panorama X2 (1.02.04) vs Lukas LK-7950 WD (Fi07) - Evening

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The Lukas is gathering lots of interest at the moment and rightly so as it is a very high featured dual camera.

The X2 has been available since October 2014 and the Lukas has just hit the market this month (March 2015).

Both cameras are high end Korean models featuring parking modes and builtin battery discharge prevention.

The Panorama has a touch screen display, whereas the Lukas goes for the minimal approach with just an old school LCD text display like the old clocks you saw in cars or on the front of a VHS player.

To balance things out, the Lukas has Wi-Fi connectivity and connects to your smart phone.

The Panorama runs at 15Mbps on both channels so 30Mbps total, and the Lukas runs at 7Mbps on the front channel and 5Mbps on the rear channel so uses just 12Mbps total for both channels - less than half the data.

The Panorama uses seperate microSD cards for front and rear video, whereas the Lukas uses one full size SD for normal driving video for both channels.

For these comparisons the X2 was running firmware 1.02.04 and the Lukas Fi07 - both the latest version available for each camera at the time of writing this.

So how much difference in picture quality is there?

Let's find out what evening footage looks like.
 
You can see from the example screenshots that the Lukas has a noisier image due to extra sharpening and the lower bitrate on offer. If anything it has potentially too much sharpening on Fi07 although this does sometimes help with reading numberplates and road signs as you can see.

You can see the X2 has the brighter image initially, but then as it gets darker it gets darker than the LK7950 - this is because I run the X2 on lowest brightness to help with reading numberplates and the X2 brightness setting only affects night time video. As it gets darker you can see this setting starting to kick in.

The X2 still has the edge during the evemning, producing cleaner footage, but at the same time is using more than double the amount of storage that the Lukas does so it is a trade off.

Both cameras are using the same Sony Exmor IMX322 sensor.

Picking between these two is going to be a choice between all out image quality or features - for all out image quality the X2 is better, but for features such as Wi-Fi the Lukas is better so it will all come down to your specific requirements.

There is not a huge difference between the two at dusk thanks to the Sony image sensor, but as with the daytime video the X2 produces cleaner video due to having double the bitrate.

Both cameras do the job of a dashcam well but firmware improvements will improve both.
 
I think it is the same sharpening on my Lk-7500 that is bothering me a little, as i have watched more and more footage from that little camera there has been somthing bothering me about the look.

It is as if the lukas handle the fading light a little better than the X2, but then it have to be converted into film and the lukas loose out.
 
Yeah it's a strange one mate, I don't think the massively low bitrate the Lukas uses does it the most justice - unfortunately they decided that 7Mbps is enough.

In all fairness the screenshots do tend to look better than the video does on my machine which is strange - I half wonder if it's maybe something to do with my video driver that is applying some strange processing to the Lukas video as screenshots look better.

At night it's improved in Fi07 and is better than Fi05.
 
Not 100% confirmed yet mate but looks like the Texas Instruments TMS320DM8148 ARM Cortex A8

The firmware looks that way for sure.

It can definitely do better like @alexsoll and co have shown with the BlackVue - at some point I'd love to find a way in to up the bitrate and tweak some settings like they have done on there as the TI can definitely produce some great video and to be honest it's not bad to say it's running at just 7Mbps currently. I've just had lots of failed attempts of mounting the ubifs file system so far in Linux but one day maybe I'll get lucky :)

For whatever reasons the Korean manufacturers seem ultra cautious and I'm guessing that's because of reliability and maximising card compatibility - not sure why else they'd do it tbh as microSD card and SD card speeds have increased to the point where they can start to push the hardware more. Having both channels writing to the same card ties their hands a bit though.
 
To be fair I think only the Russian firmware has got the most out of this platform, none of the factory efforts are outstanding
 
If there's a way in then it can be improved :)
 
Not sure whats in my LK-7500 but at least it can and do 11 Mbps, not 100% sure but i think 7 is the minimum Bitrate that one can select.
 
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