I’m just waiting for any last bit of information before I place my order and before the end of the month deal on the free 128G sd card.
The reason for there being not much footage posted at present is that it is still being worked on, and footage posted now may not match the production hardware/firmware. There have been some hardware modifications for the production units that should improve the night time footage, which has been a bit noisy on the pre-production units. There have also been modifications to the HDR related firmware, again we are not quite sure how good it will end up.
However production units should now have been shipped, with production firmware, so I expect some new footage, including nighttime will be posted in the next day or two.
I don't think the engineers have finished with the firmware yet though, so there may be additional improvements over the next few months, as has happened with previous cameras.
Is it better than the DR900? Yes, definitely, the sensor is a significant step forward. The main issue at the moment is that the sensor is sensitive enough to see a lot of flicker in sodium lamps and fluorescent tubes that flicker at 50/60Hz, plus LED traffic lights and tail lights that flicker at a few hundred Hz. To avoid seeing this flicker it is necessary to extend the exposure time, which in turn causes quite a lot of motion blur, so the results are not as good as hoped for, and not as good as they could be if we didn't have to record flickering LED lamps, it is in some ways a bit disappointing! But it is definitely an improvement in many ways over previous cameras. Another issue is that the HDR works great if your headlights are illuminating the reflective number plate/road sign that you want to read, but it doesn't work for plates that are out of the headlamp beam, so the results depend on the beam produced by your headlamps, and different people are getting different results. It will be interesting to see what people make of the production units, I expect some people to be happier than others.
I’ve got my cart ready to go. Doubled up on the hardwire kit, remote, front camera gps mount, and rear camera so I can move the front camera between vehicles.
Well don't miss any special offers! I don't think you are going to be able to buy a better dashcam anytime soon.
Any other gotchas before I ship it? Thanks for the entertainment!
Just be aware that it is a new camera, just released, so you are taking a little extra risk over the more established dashcams. It is based on the standard A139 that has been very reliable though, so I don't think there is much reason to be worried.
Hopefully I’ll never need the camera footage due to an accident. All in all, pretty cheap insurance if you do have a mishap. Or maybe I’m just watching too many YouTube videos.
Chances are that your insurance would sort everything out anyway, but it can save a lot of hassle if you do have an accident, hassle that can sometimes last for years and may require lawyers if there is an argument about what happened , it is definitely worth it for that.
In some countries it is also well worth having so that you can report dangerous driving to the police and so make our roads safer for everyone. A 4K dashcam that can read speeding number plates at a bit of distance is a big advantage for that since our police will only take an interest if they can read the plates.