Just received mine yesterday. I managed to snag one at the older pricing some how
It came with just the suction mount and 12V to USB mini adapter. I won't be using the latter because my car's accessory outlets are on ALL the time -- even with the key removed. Fortunately, I have installed an after-market stereo head unit with 2x1A USB connectors. I attached a USB cable to one of these and now I can turn the cam on and off with my keys.
A side effect is that I can actually access the camera as a disk drive through my stereo. To do this, I have to unplug the camera, select the correct USB outlet using my stereo, then plug in the camera. My stereo can't play any of the movie files (even sound only), but it did correctly read a few audio files that I happened to already have on the card. This is probably not a terribly useful thing since I will probably want to record my driving and listen to music simultaneously.
The suction mount is very strong. In fact, I was able to pick up a heavy 10 inch tablet computer using it. It isn't as enormous as people are making it out to be either. Technomoan mounted it upside down in his video in an effort to move the lens about an inch closer to the windshield. I drive a VW New Beetle which has a ridiculously long windshield and short bonnet. I could just about get away with leaving the cam upside down on my dash -- literally a dash cam, but doing so would 1) force me to flip the video in post processing 2) make the buttons impossible to reach while driving and 3) introduce a potential overheating situation by operating the device in a manner opposite to how its engineers anticipated the flow of waste heat.
I might have been interested in buying the smaller, square, 3M permanent mount with quick release because of the ability to quickly remove the camera when parked in a high-theft area, or to move it back and forth between two different vehicles. But I note with dissatisfaction that the Chinese sellers have increased the price on those as well (were $7.50, now $12). So I'll stick with the suction mount. It's really not that difficult to remove quickly if you use the pull tab.
Mtz mentioned using an O-ring to cover the eye-catching silver circle around the lens over in the firmware thread. But I've come up with my own solution for dealing with it. I took one of those foam donut inserts that you find packaged with blank CD/DVD/Bluray spindles, and I spray painted it black using a matte black spray paint. I pushed it over the lens and it seems to stay in place fairly well without the use of an adhesive. [See attached picture.] I find that this approach is better than using black magic markers ("Sharpies") because the marker leaves brush stroke marks and this way you can easily revert back to stock condition in one second. The net result is a fairly discrete installation, but it's still not as discrete as a Blackvue, ITB, or Jaewon.
I took the cam out on a short test drive using a 2GB card and with the recording interval set to 1 minute. The files averaged 90.5 MB in size so that a 2GB card is good for recording the last 20 minutes or so of your life :-O The manufacturer's estimate appears to be dead on and I would anticipate that a 32GB card would indeed hold 6 hours worth of your hopefully uneventful life. Oh, and just for the love of science, I inserted an almost full genuine 64GB Sandisk Ultra class 10 microsdxc card formatted in exFAT format. Guess what? It worked just fine! You should be able to document your entire road trip from Madrid to Paris. Or New York to Louisville. Or Los Angeles to Santa Fe.
As has been noted, the video quality is pretty respectable. I can read license plate numbers, but only if I'm about three feet away from the other vehicle. I did notice a slight wobble now and then due to vibration. It wasn't too terrible. I drive a 4-cylinder gas-powered vehicle (with a fairly recent oil change), but the wobble might be something to consider if you drive an old diesel. The cam would probably benefit from some type of mechanical image stabilization that doesn't interfere with the G-shock feature.
Nevertheless, the video isn't perfect. While I haven't yet observed the color streaking some have mentioned, I did observe the problem Technomoan mentioned: At twilight, the camera definitely seems to hunt for the correct exposure. I have a clip where the sky appears to look posterized, then becomes washed out white, then goes back to being posterized again. I could upload it if there's interest, but I think Techno's already covered this. I think a reasonable solution to this problem would be to have the camera measure exposure only according to what's happening in the bottom half of the screen.
I can confirm what someone else already said about the 720p modes; They are just a crop of the center of the sensor -- essentially useless on a camera such as this.
The optics do suffer from some flare when driving directly into the sun. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any easy way to add a multi-coated polarizing filter. The lense is about 0.75" (19mm) in diameter and has no threads.
In terms of audio, the good news is that my specific unit doesn't appear to suffer from the overdriven sound signal problem. It's either spec'd with the older microphone hardware or it shipped with the latest firmware already installed. As others have noted, there doesn't appear to be an easy way to check what version firmware is on the camera. The name "HETAI" is overlaid in the top right of the video along with the time stamp. It hasn't frozen up yet (knock on wood).
That said, every time I hit a pothole or big bump in the road, you can hear a loud ka-boom! sound in the audio -- almost like a gun going off. It's not a major concern since I'm much more interested in the video than the audio. Still, the camera would probably benefit from a low-cut filter on the audio.
For what I paid, I'm pretty happy so far. I don't know if I'd be equally happy under the new pricing regime, but sellers adding a second mounting option and bonus memory card seems to be lessening the blow for some. It may not be what the manufacturer originally intended, but I guess one way to think about it is that the early adopters were basically beta testers and the $99 was merely the introductory pricing.
In a few days I'll be posting some videos of the DR32 used as an everyday video camera over in the
"DR32 as an action-cam" thread.
Wow! Sorry this turned out so long
