Review: Vantrue OnDash T2 Capacitor Dashcam with OBD and wave guard

[Sunny]

Thank you @JIVAN for sending Vantrue T2 for review.
This camera is based upon Novatek NT96655 processor and Sony IMX323 sensor.
- Wave Guard Parking Mode& Time Lapse】Equipped with Wave Guard Indicator, easy to detect distance, consume low power with OBD installation.
Once the microwave from the car camera recorder senses moving object in front of car, the indicator is on and will start auto-recording. With Time Lapse function, the dashboard camera will take photos at specified intervals to create a video.
- Supports up to 256GB microSD cards
For more details, visit product link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/B07DV9DHVR****************************************
Summary: Daytime videos look very good. Sharp and clear videos from both front and rear (in cabin) cameras during the day.
Night video is pretty bright and decent.
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Unboxing Vantrue T2 1080p Dashcam with Day and Night Videos:
Day videos @ 0:30, Night videos @ 1:40.

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Package contents: Dashcam, Mount with charging port, car charger with USB port, mini usb cable, OBD power cable with 12v to 5v converter, thank you and registration cards, product manual.

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Vantrue T2 Images: MicroSD slot and mini HDMI are under the cover.
Buttons are on the bottom.


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Vantrue T2 folders, files, bit rate:
Root has EVENT, NORMAL and PHOTO folders.
Overall bit rate is 13.1 mbps with 11.9 mbps video and 512 kbps audio.
Files have date and time.


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Vantrue T2 from inside and outside the vehicle:



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continued...
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[Sunny]

Heavy rain and hail few minutes after sunshine:

 

[kamkar]

More ?

 

[Nigel]

Mega download link (135MB): https://mega.nz/#!o15kjKTb!pWvQUfxkYaPZdR4LV_xdpGBz_7YEZEl62Ibl6w9phJc

Vantrue T2 Dashcam (With radar parking sensor)

The Vantrue T2 is an interesting dashcam, a bit different to the rest. At first sight it appears expensive for the specification, but if your requirements match its specification then it is worth considering.

The most interesting feature is what they call “24H Wave Guard Parking Monitoring”, turns out this is radar based motion detection. They never actually refer to it as radar, not sure why, some of the documentation refers to it as microwave. I assume it is X band radar, same as supermarket automatic door openers since my radar detector doesn’t pick it up, or at least it doesn’t pick it up until I disconnect the camera from its power, then the radar detector detects strong Ka band radar for the next 3 minutes! Bit surprising since it doesn’t have a battery, it is supercapacitor based, clearly the radar sensor doesn’t use much power.

So why use a radar detector? First it is not affected if the wind blows the trees about, or by anything over 10 meters away, it only detects cars and people moving near the car, and occasionally a big cat. The range for people is about 6 meters and for cars about 8 meters, occasionally 10 meters. Second it requires almost zero power, my USB power meter reads 0.00 watts when in parking mode, so it is only using a few milliwatts of power instead of around 2 watts for image sensor based motion detection. This camera in parking mode will not drain your car battery unless it is parked on a street with constant traffic on the same side of the road. Third, it reliably detects people and cars at around 6 meters distance with a field of view of about 180°, without any false alarms. Unlike a g-sensor which will only detect contact, and even then will always miss if someone uses a spray can on your car, or image sensor based motion detection which will detect any movement at any distance so will always have a lot of false alerts. The radar even works reliably in the dark, although of course the image sensor doesn’t do so well at recording!

The radar also has a red LED facing the outside that flashes when it detects something moving, so anyone walking passed the car at night is going to know they are being watched, it flashes every time they move. Not sure if that is good or not, but there is a setting to turn it off.

The only issue I’ve found with the radar is that there is no video buffering when it is sleeping and after triggering it takes about 3 seconds to start recording. A passing car can travel a fair distance in 3 seconds. It then continues recording until 10 seconds after the last movement it detects, which works very well. A camera with pre-buffering would solve the 3 second issue, but then it would use watts instead of milliwatts and will drain the car battery fairly fast instead of being fine for several weeks of parking.

The image sensor is a Sony IMX323 with 1080 resolution, as used in many of the cheaper dashcams, this puts it in competition with the Blueskysea B1W which is a similar cylinder shape. The price however is considerably more than the B1W, you need to look elsewhere to find justification.

The processor is a Novatek NT96655, a commonly used processor for single channel dashcams so nothing special there, except that Vantrue has extracted surprisingly decent image quality from it while also getting very low power consumption. Number plate readability is not far from the B1W which is one of the best for 1080 resolution, and the images are somewhat nicer overall quality, some of the best I’ve seen from an IMX323. The video bitrate is only 11.8 Mbps, 13.8 Mbps overall, so it does get quite a lot of pixilation in the sky from the compression when moving quickly, but at the same time it does manage to maintain the number plate readability surprisingly well for such a low bitrate, I think Novatek must have improved their NT96655 compression since I last looked at low bitrate video from that processor and the T2 is using a recent SDK for its firmware.

The mount is also interesting, instead of the normal sticky pad it comes with a suction cup, nicely made and apparently very reliable. I’m not a fan of suction cup mounts, it does take up a lot of space compared to a B1W, and there is a noticeable amount of vibration on rough roads, but if you regularly drive different cars and want to take the camera with you then it is a nice mount. In fact for when I’m driving hire cars etc., the camera is good not just because of the mount but also the low power consumption makes it easily usable with a small USB power bank instead of having to run cables around the car, although it does need to be a USB power bank that doesn’t auto turn off when the T2 uses almost zero power.

It is supplied with both accessory socket plug and OBD plug, the OBD plug being to support parking mode since ODB is always powered. The ODB plug includes a low voltage cut off which you are unlikely to ever use due to the low power consumption. It failed to power up when I first installed it because my battery was only at 11.8 volts, it needs a bit more than that to power up but a bit less to power down.

 

[Nigel]

Things I don’t like so much

It is quite a large for a cylinder shaped camera and looks a bit of a giant when compared to the B1W, but being cylinder shaped it does blend in and is not too obvious from outside. Not much chance of hiding it behind a mirror though since the suction mount also needs quite a lot of space.

Despite the camera being fairly large, the buttons are almost too small to see! Using them is a bit too fiddly with some mounted on the bottom and others next to the screen, they do work though. There is no wi-fi so using an app is not an option.

It gives a nice warning if you power it on with no memory card inserted, but the warning is not repeated so if you miss it then your journey doesn’t get recorded.

The memory card is hidden behind a rubber cover, it’s a bit inconvenient, not easy to use, I might even chop the cover off!

It was supplied with a firmware that didn’t save the settings, obviously got launched as soon as the hardware was ready, not when it was working and tested. After updating the firmware it does work reliably so that’s not a problem.

Vibrations from suction mount do spoil the video on rough roads, it is worse than some other suction mounts because of the length of the mount.

There is no GPS as standard, the MPH indicator reads “0” unless you turn it off in the settings.

I can't tell when it is powered; it does have a little blue LED that flashes when it is recording but it is hard to see in sunlight and is off when in parking mode. Being off in parking mode contributes to it using zero power, which is good, but when I first plug the camera in to power it starts up in parking mode so there is no indication that it is on until I hit it, or wave my hand in front of the radar.

Problems

There is no “off” button, so when it is plugged into OBD with permanent power I don’t know how you are supposed to remove the memory card. Only safe way seems to be to hit it to wake it up and start recording, then press “OK” to stop recording, then it should be safe to remove the memory card. Alternatively, you can remove the camera from its mount and take the camera into the house to plug into your computer.

The suction mount has a ball joint in it for adjusting the view, plus a slide in socket for the camera. It seems impossible to remove and replace the camera, or to remove and replace the memory card without moving the ball joint. So every time you view you videos, you have to readjust the position of the camera and make sure it is pointing at the road again.

You can’t use a normal USB powerbank for parking mode, because it uses zero power so the powerbank shuts down! Even worse, if it goes into parking mode when you stop for a minute and the powerbank shuts down then it doesn’t record the rest of your journey. And to restart it recording, you not only have to turn the power bank back on, but you also have to hit the camera to start it recording and using a little power, some power banks will still shut down though because even when recording it still doesn’t use much power, only a little over 1 watt!

It triggers my radar detector when it loses power. Not sure why, if you don’t have a radar detector then it won’t be a problem, or if your radar detector gets its power from the same source then it won’t be a problem.

When using the OBD power cable, removing the memory card leaves screen powered with the message “Insert memory card”, this uses power and flattens the car battery. It should power off after a while.

Some comparisons with the Viofo A129 where the A129 has a CPL but still shows half the motion blur, the T2 does not have a CPL. T2 images first:

Vantrue T2 dashcam supplied for review by Vantrue at zero cost.

 

[Nigel]

Something a bit strange, every video player I've tried shows blocky compression artefacts in the sky:

However my edited video has nice smooth sky, and apart from that I can't see any difference, except that VLC player (used above) gives higher contrast:

 

[Harsh]

The most interesting feature is what they call “24H Wave Guard Parking Monitoring”, turns out this is radar based motion detection. They never actually refer to it as radar, not sure why, some of the documentation refers to it as microwave. I assume it is X band radar, same as supermarket automatic door openers since my radar detector doesn’t pick it up, or at least it doesn’t pick it up until I disconnect the camera from its power, then the radar detector detects strong Ka band radar for the next 3 minutes! Bit surprising since it doesn’t have a battery, it is supercapacitor based, clearly the radar sensor doesn’t use much power.

So why use a radar detector? First it is not affected if the wind blows the trees about, or by anything over 10 meters away, it only detects cars and people moving near the car, and occasionally a big cat. The range for people is about 6 meters and for cars about 8 meters, occasionally 10 meters. Second it requires almost zero power, my USB power meter reads 0.00 watts when in parking mode, so it is only using a few milliwatts of power instead of around 2 watts for image sensor based motion detection. This camera in parking mode will not drain your car battery unless it is parked on a street with constant traffic on the same side of the road. Third, it reliably detects people and cars at around 6 meters distance with a field of view of about 180°, without any false alarms. Unlike a g-sensor which will only detect contact, and even then will always miss if someone uses a spray can on your car, or image sensor based motion detection which will detect any movement at any distance so will always have a lot of false alerts. The radar even works reliably in the dark, although of course the image sensor doesn’t do so well at recording!

The radar also has a red LED facing the outside that flashes when it detects something moving, so anyone walking passed the car at night is going to know they are being watched, it flashes every time they move. Not sure if that is good or not, but there is a setting to turn it off.

The only issue I’ve found with the radar is that there is no video buffering when it is sleeping and after triggering it takes about 3 seconds to start recording. A passing car can travel a fair distance in 3 seconds. It then continues recording until 10 seconds after the last movement it detects, which works very well. A camera with pre-buffering would solve the 3 second issue, but then it would use watts instead of milliwatts and will drain the car battery fairly fast instead of being fine for several weeks of parking.

Interesting, was looking forward to knowing more after you'd mentioned about the 'radar' thing a few days back. Bummer about the 3 second delay and the sensor not being sensitive enough to take advantage of the radar feature.

 

[Nigel]

Interesting, was looking forward to knowing more after you'd mentioned about the 'radar' thing a few days back. Bummer about the 3 second delay and the sensor not being sensitive enough to take advantage of the radar feature.

The 3 seconds is just about fast enough most of the time, although if someone hit your wing mirror at speed then it would be too slow. Parking dings in the supermarket car park are likely to be recorded. Obviously -3 seconds would be better, but the low power consumption is very nice.

Might be nice if it could turn on an IR flood lamp so the sensor works in the dark, although it would probably only catch large cats and that would drain the battery. It does OK under street lights.