I understand that everything is just a dream.
Realistically, the possible improvements are:
1.Audio enhancement
2.Image quality improvement (shutter speed stability, white balance, brightness at night)
Those are the important things, good evidence for insurance claims/police, and nice video/audio for road movies.
I'm sure a lot more can be done for the Audio, we seem to be stuck with a single microphone, and yet the marketing for the iPhone 16 says:
Audio recordings will sound even better on the iPhone 16 Pro models. This is because the iPhone 16 Pro models are equipped with 4 studio-quality microphones. In addition, it is also possible to record with spatial audio, which makes the sound even more realistic. The Pro models are equipped with an audio mixing tool. This allows you to easily adjust the sound of a recording afterwards. It is possible to isolate the sound of a person in the image. This is ideal, for example, when you are conducting an interview in a noisy place or when several people talk over each other during your podcast and you would like to highlight one of the voices.
I would be happy if we just moved to stereo for dashcams, the audio from the rear camera often sounds very different, with different details to the front audio, and the front audio of people speaking is often obscured by noise from the engine/wheels coming off the glass and through the dashcam mount, which a good dashcam should be removing from the recording!
Not enough people are asking for better audio, and no dashcams are really setting a high standard, none have more than one microphone, none seem to have noise canceling microphones. We need some proper competition for best dashcam audio, and people asking for the best...
Instead, the dashcam manufacturers want to sell us ADAS AI systems!
DOL-HDR makes license plates of passing cars appear double and unreadable during the day, but at night, if the headlights illuminate them, it is possible to read the license plates of passing cars.
ClearHDR, on the other hand, provides excellent HDR visuals both during the day and at night, but at night, it becomes impossible to read the license plates of passing cars.
However, HDR technology was not originally developed for reading license plates of passing cars, so I don't think it's wise to focus too much on the accuracy of license plate reading.
DOL-HDR does not need to make plates unreadable during the day, the current implementation needs improving, although the A329 is already improved a bit.
Clear-HDR does not give a double image, which is good, but it does give a blurred image, day and night, for fast movement. Excellent for movies, but not for license plate reading.
Some people want to use both the in-car camera and the telephoto camera while using the rear camera.
Yes, that requires 4 channels, so the 3 channel A329T will not be able to do that.
You can add an extra separate extra camera, the VS1 makes a nice rear camera.
I'm sure a 4 channel camera will be on Viofo's development list.
If possible, could you tell me the audio bitrate of A329?
I think it is 96Kb/s with the latest firmware, certainly 90 something. It would be nice to have it a bit higher, but it is enough for a dashcam. Having the 48KHz sample rate is a big improvement, voices are a lot clearer with a frequency range up to 16KHz, instead of only 8KHz! It now sounds better than the old A129 Pro.
Regarding codecs, since there is no single option that satisfies everyone, I have decided to tolerate H.264 for now.
H264 is quite good, H265 is not any better image quality, it just has more compression for smaller files, but most of the extra compression doesn't work for moving dashcam video, so there is not much difference when driving, only when stopped, and the compression is not needed then because we use fixed bitrates, so most of the bitrate gets wasted!
AV1 should be better when it arrives in dashcams, which might not be too far away now.
The white balance issue that I find problematic is the shift from correct colors to an unnatural yellow-green hue. This issue occurs on my A229Pro (latest version).
Yes, all video cameras have some difficulties with colour balance changes. The A229 does seem to have had more issues than other recent cameras, I don't hear so many people complaining about the A329.
It is difficult to get colour balance correct all the time, there isn't actually a correct result. The sudden changes can be annoying, but if you drive into a tunnel lit by sodium lamps, then you want a sudden adjustment. Not many sodium lamps about these days though, all lamps have changed to LED in most places, much easier for colour balance, although sometimes they flicker! I used to use a dashcam with an option for fixed colour balance, it wasn't always right, but it didn't keep shifting, seemed to work fine except when under sodium street lamps, so I'm not sure why dashcams are still having difficulties under LED lamps. Maybe we should ask for a fixed colour balance option?
