SG9665GC Firmware Wishlist

[jokiin]

On a personal note i think the FOV on the GC is alright, but as you know i personal can make do with a little smaller, but then again i am far from the average dashcam user,,, or for that matter average anything

it's about as wide as we would want to go, won't be looking at anything wider than this

 

[Dashmellow]

The barrel distortion on the SG9665GC is very minimal and the lens on the camera is otherwise excellent with the exception of some occasional flare in certain extreme situations. I find the FOV on this lens to be just about perfect for a dash cam. In fact the high quality of the optic and the metal barrel and base module is one of the camera's best attributes.

The idea of dewarping on a dash cam, especially for a well corrected and relatively narrow 120 degree lens like on the GC is completely unnecessary. The whole point of a dash cam is to capture what happens, not to have perfect perspective. We are not shooting feature films here.

My single wish for SG9665GC would be to see further improvements with the exposure and dynamic range issues.

 

[jokiin]

My single wish for SG9665GC would be to see further improvements with the exposure and dynamic range issues.

that is by far much more important than any geometric correction, no need to mention where we are spending our time, there's actually a lot of gimmick features the chipset and SDK support that we don't use as to be honest a lot of the functionality offered does not work well, would rather have less functionality and just concentrate on making what we do use the best that it can be

 

[StrikeZone]

Here is a suggestion...
If you turn the car engine off and power to the camera is lost, the G-sensor should be disabled immediately. This because sometimes I dismount the camera pretty quickly (while it is still powering down) and then that clip gets saved as if it detected a G-sensor event.

 

[jokiin]

you must be real quick on the dismount

 

[Feitelijk]

That's what she said!

 

[Edgardo]

Speaking of barrel distortion, or fish eye, I see a cam on Amazon with a big lens claimed to have no fisheye effect, the "EBORN HD Dash Cam with Built in GPS". Has a claimed 170° view but after looking at the posted video samples I suspect they are just using the middle part of the lens to minimize the fish eye. I see nothing about this model here. Maybe under a different name? Seems to me optically is the way to correct fish eye.

Opinions please.

 

[Harsh]

Speaking of barrel distortion, or fish eye, I see a cam on Amazon with a big lens claimed to have no fisheye effect, the "EBORN HD Dash Cam with Built in GPS". Has a claimed 170° view but after looking at the posted video samples I suspect they are just using the middle part of the lens to minimize the fish eye. I see nothing about this model here. Maybe under a different name? Seems to me optically is the way to correct fish eye.

Opinions please.

Depends on the chipset. The Novatek chipset in the GC doesn't support it.

 

[jokiin]

Speaking of barrel distortion, or fish eye, I see a cam on Amazon with a big lens claimed to have no fisheye effect, the "EBORN HD Dash Cam with Built in GPS". Has a claimed 170° view but after looking at the posted video samples I suspect they are just using the middle part of the lens to minimize the fish eye. I see nothing about this model here. Maybe under a different name? Seems to me optically is the way to correct fish eye.

Opinions please.

Ambarella chipset has a dewarp option which allows for a bit of correction, from the screenshots posted for this model though it looks like the lens is giving around 100° of horizontal view, nothing like the 170° claimed, the amount of correction needed with a 100° field of view is quite minimal

 

[lacibaci]

Depends on the chipset. The Novatek chipset in the GC doesn't support it.

Actually, according to Novatek, NT96655 does support it.

 

[puny]

I would really like the ability to record in 720p60, and have more, smaller FOV options

 

[Street Guardian USA]

I would really like the ability to record in 720p60, and have more, smaller FOV options

It makes more sense to buy a larger memory card than cut out and lose all the detail. There are plenty of budget 720P systems out there.

 

[puny]

It makes more sense to buy a larger memory card than cut out and lose all the detail. There are plenty of budget 720P systems out there.

Can the current v2 (or v3?) hardware support 1080p60? I assumed it couldn't but if it can then I'd love 1080p60 instead Just want more frames!

 

[Street Guardian USA]

V2/V3 is 1080p30

The new dual channel systems in development have potential 1080p60 options.

 

[arcticfire]

It makes more sense to buy a larger memory card than cut out and lose all the detail. There are plenty of budget 720P systems out there.

But what if your primary requirement is reliability? The option would be nice especially if like me having to upgrade the cards can be very expensive as I'm running eleven cameras.

 

[kamkar]

Going 720p is counterintuitive, but i am sure if enough people ask for the option then SG will make it available, but as is i think they have deemed it not worth the effort to do 720p on a 1080p sensor.

I could better understand if it was a 2.5K sensor and then people just had the option to do 1080p on it, but thats not the case.

 

[Edgardo]

In 2014 when I first got my LS300W I tested it set up to 720p 60 then 1080p 30 looking out the front window of my house at cars going up and down my street. 720 60 gave clearer still frames and twice as many per second on playback. File size was similar as I recall, been a couple of years. Anyway after that I always ran it at 720p 60 so I would have a better chance of catching action. (This is also the camera which has battery damage and upon recommendation from a friend in Arizona led me to buy the CAPACITOR SG9665XS.)

I was a little dismayed that my new SG9665XS has none, zero settings for quality and frame rate, or exposure. I figured that was standard by now. But I can live with it. Makes darned nice video but oncoming license plates are a pixelated blur. I know what to look for next time.

 

[mlapaglia]

When I click the button that protects the clip being recorded, it would be nice if in RegistratorViewer there was an indicator of when the button was pressed on the timeline.

 

[jokiin]

Registrator Viewer does mark the group with a key symbol to indicate that there is a locked file and if you ungroup it will show which specific file, showing on the timeline as well would be good but not something we can control unfortunately

 

[albertr]

Not sure if it has been discussed before, but would it be possible to add timezone file support? Assuming it runs linux, that shouldn't be too difficult? I'm on US/Eastern time zone and in our day and age I don't see any reasons to keep manually adjusting daylight saving time two times a year.

-albertr