TCL CDV300X: user reviews

tmanz

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I thought I'd take some time to provide my mostly positive experience with the TCL CDV300X dashcam. I have complied two contrasting videos taken from my commutes. The first is a night time video and the second a day time video (my timestamp is incorrect, should be 2015).

Videos are not edited in anyway, quality is 1296P @ 29.97fps, and upon upload YouTube applies its standards.

Nighttime video performance

- OK to Good video quality
- Glare from light sources: traffic lights, headlights and taillights
- License plates legible only when reflected well, close or slow moving

Video sample:


The sample is comprised of 4 clips with different lighting scenarios
- Seg 1: twilight lighting
- Seg 2: nighttime with traffic and street lighting
- Seg 3: nighttime lighting using low-beams
- Seg 4: nighttime lighting using high-beams

Daytime video performance (no sound because of private conversations)

- Good to excellent video quality
- Camera is susceptible to windshield reflections
- License plates legible

Video sample:


The sample is comprised of 2 clips
- Seg 1: low speed to stop (motorbike cop)
- Seg 2: high speed highway (watch the white van)

Dascham features

Pro's
- GPS locks within a minute on average: I've seen mine lock within 30 secs, if not it seems to retry at 1 min intervals.
- Dashcam menu is simple and can easily be navigated
- Screen is just the right size and not to many blinking lights (only one to be exact) - very covert
- Housing looks factory and is inconspicuous when mounted, the easy detachability of the camera from the cradle is great and means no messing with wires.
- In my opinion, excellent daytime and good nighttime video quality

Con's
- Sounds cannot be muted from the menu, needs to be silenced at a firmware level
- It has a small battery capacity: some users have mentioned corrupted files because of this, I have not experienced any problem with the battery or corruption to date.
- Cannot change the recording stamp from the menu: i.e. typing in your license plate info (was told custom stamps will be available in the next firmware release form TCL via Foxoffer)
- Slight electrical noise in background of recordings (listen to my nighttime recordings - could be power supply related and will differ between each vehicle, i.e if you have a cleaner supply you will have less noise and vice versa)

To be improved
- Sync time with GPS
- Show speed in timestamp from GPS data

Bugs - needs more info/occurrences
- On two occasions my camera has not started recording on power-on (GPS locks and manual press of the record button starts recording as normal - very hard to reproduce, approximately 10 sessions per occurrence so far).

I purchased my unit from Foxoffer on eBay (seller: foxoffer1, @billknow). I've been monitoring it's performance for the last couple of weeks and am pleased with its performance.

As always, I'll keep updating my experience. If you have clips to share or your own experiences, positive or negative, please share!
 
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Thanks for the reviews, about the customs stamp, it will be supported in next firmware, I will share the firmware once the completed.
 
A comparison against the A118C, from user ZenithMach3 on YouTube:

 
I've been able to run the Cambox and Street Guardian firmwares on the TCL CDV300X with success. Both firmwares have their good points. Cambox wins on power stability and functionality whereas Street Guardian wins on video quality.

The underlying issue of the CDV300X model is its weak battery, which causes abrupt shutdowns on power-off and sometimes failure to record on power-on (the latter is a very rare occurrence). Both of these symptoms can be observed on the TCL and Street Guardian firmware, and it seems Cambox has somehow mitigated these issues in their firmware.

There are talks of GPS taking 4 mins to lock, and I have only observed this with high occurrence on the Street Guardian firmware. The stock TCL firmware took my unit on average < 1 min to lock and the Cambox firmware trumps all with < 30 sec lock on average. This shows that Cambox has done a very good job of controlling the hardware in these dash cams.

Saying this, Street Guardian has handled the video bitrate and quality very well. Both the day and night video quality is head and shoulders above TCL and Cambox. Street Guardian has enabled the user to choose the video resolution at three different bitrate levels, with the max at ~22Mpbs. I think this is the sweet-spot for these dash cams and going any higher, like what is done with the Cambox firmware, causes issues. Too high a bitrate causes the image to be over sampled such that the output video exhibits what looks like noise to the human eye. Although there is more information per pixel the resulting video looks as if it is degraded in quality, this is very prevalent in low light scenarios. Also, running the dash cam at high bitrates means that the onboard processor is running harder to parse and write these video files, meaning it will run hot! this will happen if you run the Cambox firmware.

The max bitrates on average: TCL ~15Mbps, Street Guardian ~22Mpbs, Cambox ~27Mbps

Video sample, flashed with Cambox firmware:


Video sample, flashed with Street Guardian firmware:


Cool features:
- Street Guardian: Selectable video bitrates, custom user stamp, sync time with GPS, simplified UI
- Cambox: custom user stamp, ability to record speed, detailed functional control to turn on/off: GPS tracking, GPS standard, speed stamp

What about the TCL firmware?
- @billknow says a new version with upgraded feature set is on the verge of release, this was told to me two-three weeks ago and I've received no update yet.
 
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When checking the fw version it states 141219 for your firmware and 0.4.3 for Cambox's
 
From the original .bin file it states last date modified is May 5th 2014.

I would have thought revision numbers are more important than date...
 
From the original .bin file it states last date modified is May 5th 2014.

I would have thought revision numbers are more important than date...

I don't know their version numbers and what date that might relate to, would certainly be newer than May last year, if they've sorted some power issues it must be more recent as last year this still hadn't happened, we stopped any further development on this last year as it still wasn't fixed and not something you can wait forever for, no point having great picture quality without stability
 
You guys should collaborate, you'd have a winning combination that way :p (running competing businesses aside). Good job on your image quality work, top notch.
 
You guys should collaborate, you'd have a winning combination that way :p (running competing businesses aside). Good job on your image quality work, top notch.

it has probably had further work done, you'd hope so, it still wasn't sorted when we stopped work on this model and there were still things that needed doing

we always work on refining video performance, maybe they think just upping the bitrate is the answer to everything, different developers have different ideas I guess
 
Given that the CDV300 series is probably deader than a dodo in a British pantry, and the SG9665GC does not have an internal GPS, are there any other dashcams with a similar form factor and a built-in GPS?

That's because I would like to both have GPS and avoid excessive cluttering...

Thanks.
 
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Yep, that sounds interesting, I have started following those threads.

Thank you.
 
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