The OWL Cam - developed by engineers from Apple, Drop Cam and Microsoft

The security light looks like it blinks really bright too.
They have a picture on their website that makes it look like it illuminates their whole car haha, is it really that bright?
I assume you can turn it off though, surely?
 
WesleyEng.com said:
All my windows are tinted, so you can't see it during the day and at night all you'll see is a blinking security light from the camera. If you're from NYC you know you don't want to hit up cars with blinking lights, because lights = alarm

Plus Owl replaces your camera if it's gets stolen for up to 3 years.
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When I lived in NYC (Manhattan and Queens) nothing would stop a determined junkie or crack freak. You'd hear car alarms going off all night, but I understand things are better now as are car security systems.

Anyway, sounds like your camera should be reasonably secure. I wonder how many cameras OWL cam has replaced so far? :)
 
Wow, those white lights work well.

Have you been trying to win $1000 a day by uploading your stuff to Owl?:LOL:
 
Dashmellow said:
The video quality looks pretty good! One thing that bothers me which was mentioned earlier in this thread and which your videos seem to confirm and that is that there is no time or date embedded in the video. I think this might be a drawback if you need to submit the video to a court or an insurance company for instance.
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I'm not so sure. I haven't seen another camera on here that fails to pick up a plate from close range. Unless Youtube has had a seriously bad effect on quality, this is less than impressive to me given the proximity:




I couldn't even pick up a plate on the vehicle directly in front when it was closer from the Youtube video. The inward camera by comparison seems much better. It's almost as if the best camera is facing inwards.
 
Certainly not the best video capture we've seen. As discussed earlier in this thread, the camera seems more optimized for parking mode than road capture. Probably an issue evaluating this camera is that "RAW" video is somewhat of an abstract term.

P.S. If you haven't seen another camera that fails to capture license plates, you haven't been looking too hard.
 
Dashmellow said:
P.S. If you haven't seen another camera that fails to capture license plates, you haven't been looking too hard.
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Maybe I should have said out of the major brands I've seen.
 
One thing to consider here is that @WesleyEng.com has a traditional dash cam as well as the OWL cam. Any video quality shortcomings or lack of date and time stamp or lack of memory card on the OWL could be compensated for with the other cam.

The two together could make for an interesting and useful optimized dash cam "system" that would provide great parking security as well as good road capture.

For eight months now I've been rolling with a SG9665GC and a Mobius with a 12MM zoom telephoto so I've really come to appreciate the possibilities of running two different front facing dash cams that feature different capabilities. What started as an experiment is something I wouldn't give up now.
 
Dashmellow said:
For eight months now I've been rolling with a SG9665GC and a Mobius with a 12MM zoom telephoto so I've really come to appreciate the possibilities of running two different front facing dash cams that feature different capabilities. What started as an experiment is something I wouldn't give up now.
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certainly beneficial to be able to have an overview of a situation, as well as a close up look at the detail
 
jokiin said:
certainly beneficial to be able to have an overview of a situation, as well as a close up look at the detail
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You and I discussed this concept almost five years ago and in certain ways it probably influenced my current set-up since it was probably simmering somewhere in the back of my brain since then. We were talking about day and night cams but two different focal lengths are just as easy to do.

https://dashcamtalk.com/forum/threads/wide-dynamic-range-myth.2774/post-30684

And then there was this strange dual camera I found back then.

dualcam.jpg
 
have considered doing a dual lens cam with one wide and one close up lens, it's a fairly limited market that we don't have the resources for at this stage, I think there's some potential there though all the same
 
jokiin said:
have considered doing a dual lens cam with one wide and one close up lens, it's a fairly limited market that we don't have the resources for at this stage, I think there's some potential there though all the same
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That's almost exactly what you said five years ago about a dual night/day camera. :)

"Simplest solution would be just use two cameras, have contemplated doing this, one with great day quality and one that's great for night, easy to do but not sure how commercially viable it would be " -jokiin - October 18, 2013

Marketability aside, at least now the technology is here to make it doable. I'll bet the components from a dual channel camera such as the SG9663DC or mini-0906 could be fashioned into a dual focal length front facing camera without too much trouble.
 
Dashmellow said:
That's almost exactly what you said five years ago about a dual night/day camera. :)

"Simplest solution would be just use two cameras, have contemplated doing this, one with great day quality and one that's great for night, easy to do but not sure how commercially viable it would be " -jokiin - October 18, 2013

Marketability aside, at least now the technology is here to make it doable. I'll bet the components from a dual channel camera such as the SG9663DC or mini-0906 could be fashioned into a dual focal length front facing camera without too much trouble.
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a little different to what we discussed then where night quality wasn't that great, we have better night quality now already (and you'll see some further improvements in that respect soon also), back then we were talking about one lens for night, one for day, if we were to look at it now I think it might be closer to what you've achieved in your DIY setup, have one camera that captured a wider overall view with good all around performance and one lens that had a closer view, I think that could be beneficial
 
jokiin said:
a little different to what we discussed then where night quality wasn't that great, we have better night quality now already (and you'll see some further improvements in that respect soon also), back then we were talking about one lens for night, one for day, if we were to look at it now I think it might be closer to what you've achieved in your DIY setup, have one camera that captured a wider overall view with good all around performance and one lens that had a closer view, I think that could be beneficial
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Yes, we were talking about trying to optimize for low light back then. I guess what I'm saying is that not only do we now have much improved low light sensors, we also have DSPs that have two video channels, so the whole thing could be built into one small housing with two lens modules. I'd definitely buy one. :happy:
 
I’ve been chatting with them about getting a review sample and am awaiting it to become available. Does anyone here have one yet?

I asked them about the video quality as well and they said that the image quality is from early prototype samples and isn’t necessarily representative of the production dashcams so I’m curious how the quality will really look.
 
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