Wife needs a Dash Cam

GadgetX

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New member here. Glad I found this forum. Wife needs a Dash cam System. So we were driving to Doctors appointment and some driver with RR just about wiped us out. I reviewed the recorded video on my Tesla Model S and got the license plate. The light bulb click on and she said I need that. And she is right. She has a GMC Acadia Denali. Has wonderful camera system but no recording. I checked and have not found any way to record the internal camera system. Looking for a front and at least a back camera system. Read around some on the forum but haven't settled on any system. Thought I would put this out to the forum members to get some ideas. Amazon has a bunch with reviews but not sure about validity. No budget, don't mind paying for quality and ease of use.

Thank you !

M
 
Welcome to the forum GadgetX.
Judging on a quick search on the mentioned GMC Acadia Denali, it dont seem to be equipped with a HUGE sensor array you see on some cars, so your selection of cameras are pretty much wide open.

I personally prefer the wedge shaped cameras, when installed they often come off as just another sensor on the glass, and stealth is a big must in my book.
Of course you still need to mount it up high and center or as good as you can, my own little car have the mirror coming off the roof, and it being cheap and 2012 mean it have no sensors at all on the glass.
I even have a shade area on top in the middle, which is nice CUZ i can mount on that so only the bottom 1/3 of the camera with the lens are directly visible.

Today you really have to look at systems using the latest Sony Starvis 2 sensors, these are in all 3 resolutions so 1080 - 1440 and 4K, but really you should just look at the 1440p or 4K flavors.
You might want to look at a 1440p rear camera, at least if you are in 1 plate in the back terrortory, CUZ in that case with oncoming offenders your rear camera will be all that could give a identifying plate capture as it pass by.

Viofo have systems out with the new sensors, Vantrue also have a few out, and there are also others

Some times you can mount off the sensor array plastic housing, of course that will often make the screen hard to see, but really once set up you should not need to look at that, also today most cameras have WIFI to access them to do settings - see the preview and of course DL recordings to your phone.
A issue doing that is the provided 3 M dual sided tape might not hold well, so you might have to replace that with another 3M tape model.

Alternative you might have to mount a little offset from your sensor array, this is also fine, it do mean you loose a little in one side and have more in the other, but all good with the wide angle lens dashcams use, but due to curvature of windscreen there will be a little offset.
You need to be mindful installing it a few inched from the sensor array so it is not n the picture, you can power the camera up in hand before you install it, maybe have preview going on phone so you can see what you will get where you mount it.
General for the correct up / down alignment, you want a 50 /50 split of earth and sky at the horizon, so the front few inches of your dashboard will probably be in the footage, this is for the camera to have best chance of choosing a correct metering of the brightness.
Some tend to allign the lens too high to not have any hood in the future, but you are just as likely to capture anything interesting in the more sky you then have in the footage.

On all dashcams you have up / down adjustment on the lens of the camera, but most wedge cameras do not have any side to side adjustment there, but if you install the system plumb on the glass you should be fine.

There is the " where did you mount your dashcam thread " with plenty of pictures, you can browse it to find examples of cars with sort of your layout, and see how / what they have installed.


EDIT: for memory card, you of course have to buy a compatible one, and you should go for one in the 256 GB size
 
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