The Lukas LK7950-WD has landed - dual channel TI / Sony IMX322 dashcam with Wi-Fi - Ongoing review

Oh man, finally getting around to updating the firmware on the lukas. uploading my innovv review part 2 which took longer than I had hoped so NOW I feel like I can go full swing into the Lukas (and blackvue 750).

Reverend, if you don't mind, could you give me a tl;dr of your experience so far, for lazy me. I saw you had a few issues with the mileage and also the event recording recording few seconds after the previous recording?
 
Sorry mate just read that - the bug with the milage is definitely still there - I'm away again this week and a 138 mile trip according to the other two cameras in the car (they both match what TomTom reports as the milage) comes up as over 170 miles on the Lukas.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a new version of the firmware as it's been wrong in Fi05 and Fi07.

Here's some front and rear footage from yesterday - the rear is definitely looking better.

 
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Sorry mate just read that - the bug with the milage is definitely still there - I'm away again this week and a 138 mile trip according to the other two cameras in the car (they both match what TomTom reports as the milage) comes up as over 170 miles on the Lukas.

Hopefully this will be fixed in a new version of the firmware as it's been wrong in Fi05 and Fi07.

Here's some front and rear footage from yesterday - the rear is definitely looking better.


You guys sure have HUGE license plate numbers.
I guess that's why a lot of EU users give great reviews for the same cam than US where the numbers are small and hard to read. :D

About the mileage issue, does it happen in short drive as well at the same % level of longer distance? I mean if 100km is off by 25km, is 25km off by 5km?
I have only driven less than 50 miles in a single drive and looks accurate.

And about the video title 'stop picking nose', I'm equally guilty of that. :D
I think over 90% drivers do that frequently with 50% doing it almost all the time.
I see some drivers picking nose all the 1/2 hour of my drive continuously, especially in rush hour stop and go traffic. Every time I look in the rearview, finger in the nose. ;)
 
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I think the milage is out on the highway trips for sure - I'm working away again at the moment and had a new issue yesterday - basically chunks of video are just missing completely - someone pulled in front of me yesterday and it just completely missed it.


That's not good - I'm guessing they have issues with cards after a while and is why they have auto formatting options in the setup tool? This happened with the Lukas supplied cards on firmware Fi07.
 
Did you have wifi on when it happened?
I had few rear clips missing but that happened only once when I was using wifi live stream on my phone while driving to check out a tailgating car.
It shutdown after few minutes and rear clips didn't save on the card.
 
No mate I don't use wifi at all other than changing the config - it seems like some sort of memory card issue tbh

Fi05 had a similar problem when an event occurred in that the footage would be missing from the normal folders
 
Hello everyone, new here....

I bought two of these bad boys for my driving school cars. Both are regularly display CHk on the LED segment display, and missing large parts of the recordings, similar the video posted above. I have used the supplied 8GB cards, as well as a couple other clas10 cards, but nothing seems to fix it. The error message is displayed at least half of the time, sometimes 90%.

The file sizes it creates are HUGE. The front channel typically records 180mb clips (3 minute) and the rear anything from 180-220mb per clip. Changing the quality has little/no effect.

I am in talks with the distributer about the problems, who is just as confused and frustrated as I am. I have tried running the cameras off different power supplies in case it didn't like the power from my car.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 

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Hello everyone, new here....

I bought two of these bad boys for my driving school cars. Both are regularly display CHk on the LED segment display, and missing large parts of the recordings, similar the video posted above. I have used the supplied 8GB cards, as well as a couple other clas10 cards, but nothing seems to fix it. The error message is displayed at least half of the time, sometimes 90%.

The file sizes it creates are HUGE. The front channel typically records 180mb clips (3 minute) and the rear anything from 180-220mb per clip. Changing the quality has little/no effect.

I am in talks with the distributer about the problems, who is just as confused and frustrated as I am. I have tried running the cameras off different power supplies in case it didn't like the power from my car.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I am using the supplied 8gb microSD and 32gb full size SD cards.
No issues on the file recordings yet.
Check your other cards with h2testw program.
 
It sounds like a fundamental issue as I'm guessing you get a lot of usage as a driving instructor and I'm doing around 700 miles a week at the moment. Are they doing this from day one or have you had some milage on there.

I have seen the CHK error too today - the manual says that it's a card error when that happens so like Sunny says try running the card through h2testw - I'll do the same with mine later, but in all honesty it's bad news that card errors are happening on such a low bitrate camera after just 4 weeks of use.

I'd like to hope it's a firmware issue but Lukas haven't responded to any of my emails in a month now so who knows.

It's the supplied cards are giving the error - it doesn't help they're writing two data streams to the one card as that's more difficult for any SD card - if they used both cards simultaneously it would make life easier for them potentially.
 
The cameras have done it since day one. With the supplied Lukas branded cards and with other cards.
I'm running firmware 7 and have reinstalled the firmware just in case.

My initial thoughts were that the supplied card is faulty, but changing brands hasn't helped. The distributers have been working hard with me to help, and have sent me a mega fast card to try out (read/write 90mb/s) but it still has errors. Fewer, but still not right.

The errors come up more in bright conditions where there is lots of shadows through trees and rapid changing light conditions, and seemingly less in overcast or darker conditions. I might be looking too far into it?

From the research I've done, I can't help notice that the sizes of the files it writes seem much bigger than others.

Average front clips are about 120-180mb in size, and rear clips >200mb for 3 minutes segments on any quality setting. I normally use the lowest. I would appreciate if anyone could compare their recording to mine.

Just checking the recordings now, the rear camera is almost continually recording motion clips even though nothing is happening. But the image looks kinda noisy and speckly, especially at dusk. It's as if the image noise is registering as movement, and could explain the large files?image.jpg
 

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Average front clips are about 120-180mb in size, and rear clips >200mb for 3 minutes segments on any quality setting. I normally use the lowest. I would appreciate if anyone could compare their recording to mine.

Just checking the recordings now, the rear camera is almost continually recording motion clips even though nothing is happening. But the image looks kinda noisy and speckly, especially at dusk. It's as if the image noise is registering as movement, and could explain the large files?View attachment 12891

Check my post here for filesize, vbr and other things:
https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threa...-rear-dashcam-review.10300/page-3#post-132764

Rear over 220mb is too high. Mine are only around 115mb for rear and around 160mb for front.

lukas-file-size-after-fw-upgrade-jpg.12055


Try changing/upgrading firmware and see if the issue is resolved.
 
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Thanks for your reply. Makes sense that it can't write the files quick enough if they're that large. I am running the latest firmware and have reinstalled it a few times.
 
I'm having the same "CHK" error while driving. Tried re-installing firmware, using different cards, etc. I think this one is going back to Lukas and I'll purchase something more reliable.
 
To be honest the 90MB/sec cards should be able to easily handle it - this camera even with your files there is only generating less than 10Mbps for the rear channel - that's just 1.24MB/sec.

It is sounding like they've got a firmware issue here as the card should easily be able to handle the low bitrates it uses across both channels.
 
I'm having the same "CHK" error while driving. Tried re-installing firmware, using different cards, etc. I think this one is going back to Lukas and I'll purchase something more reliable.
Is that with the Lukas cards too?

I know they have the autoformat routine in firmware which suggests they've recognised an issue somewhere.
 
Yes, that's with the stock cards, as well as Sandisk. To me, it's not worth the risk of potentially missing recordings on a dashcam. I'll look elsewhere for a dual channel system (maybe Panorama X2?).
 
The X2 definitely has better picture quality and to be fair the best of any dual channel system out there right now - it's not without it's own issues but there's a new firmware update due soon that should resolve those.

Mine works great on 1.02.04 with the Lexar 633x cards though.
 
I have been testing and testing the cameras and have come up with these findings.

When the environment is bland, and there is not much contrast due to strong sunlight (overcast and dull) the cameras work pretty well.

When there is bright sunshine, and when there is lots of detail on the surroundings (trees are the worst), the camera has CHK error after CHK error. As soon as there isn't much going on again, fewer trees, less contrast, it works again.

File sizes seem to tally with this. Going down country lanes in bright sunshine creates huge files, and videos with bits missing. Going through town slowly without much going on, especially if tis dull, I get much smaller files, and ones that play fine. And importantly, fewer if any CHK errors and no missing data.

The back camera is very grainy, especially in lowish light. It will continuously record motion files (the noise and graininess is triggering itself off) non-stop until the voltage cut-off comes in. With nothing but a brick wall behind, no shadows or anything that is moving, it is detecting motion continuously. This is with the setting set to 1 (insensitive).

What are the chances of having 2 cameras with the exact same issues?

My feelings were it was a problem with memory cards, but it is something a lot deeper than this.
 
Geoff, this is my exact problem to a tee. Clearly this camera was not ready to be released. I think it is an issue of writing 2 files to the card at the same time. Not sure if they can update the firmware to record front to SD card, rear to MicroSD.

I'll be sending mine back. I ordered the Panorama X2, hopefully the firmware on that gets corrected as well.

I'd highly recommend that anyone considering purchasing a Lukas 7900 hold off until this problem is addressed/corrected in the firmware.
 
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