What Dashcam Should You Buy?

一月 19, 2018

With the decreasing costs of portable video recorders, dash cams have become popular with ordinary drivers for a number of reasons. One of the biggest of these is to record evidence to show your insurance company or the court. If it comes to that in the event of a wreck since it can be hard to determine who's telling the truth and witnesses aren't always available.

In fact, many insurance companies now offer discounts to drivers with dash cams, giving drivers and even bigger incentive to buy one. However, which one or what type of Dash Cam should you pick?

At first glance, buying a dashcam seems like a pretty straightforward affair since they're just cameras that sit on your dashboard and record everything, however some dash cams have nicer features that can make your life a little bit easier, because dash cams record continuously on a limited amount of storage such as an SD card. A good idea is to get something with a LOOPING function that will automatically record over your old video that you no longer need when the card reaches its capacity.

But what if someone hits me because they were playing Pokemon Go behind the wheel instead of paying attention to the road, will my dash cam just record over it if I leave it sitting for too long?

Well if you bought a quality model, it shouldn't. As many dash cams also have a G-FORCE sensor that can detect sudden changes in acceleration, including impacts with other vehicles. When this happens your camera will remember to save whatever it was recording at that time, instead of overwriting it.

Of course making sure your footage gets saved won't be much help if you had an accident while driving at night and your camera is struggling to record in the darkness, so it's also not a bad idea to check a dash cams nighttime video quality.

Unfortunately dash cams that have infrared or night-vision which you can learn more about ads aren't all that reliable. So a camera that advertises that as a feature might not necessarily work as promised. Other bells and whistles include things like lane departure warning, motion sensors that can switch the camera on when you're parked to record things, like break-ins or battery backup, so you can use it outside of your car if need be.

But none of these are a substitute for good old-fashioned image quality given that it's quite easy to find full 1080p dash cams for well under a hundred US dollars these days. There’s not much reason to go with anything lower and you might want to consider getting something with a wider resolution such as 2560 by 1080, so you'll end up capturing more of the stuff that's going on in the sides of your car as well.

Before you rush out to buy a new dashcam, make sure you know what's legal in your area while some countries, like the US generally allow video recording in public spaces like highways, other countries like Austria ban them outright, in a number of other European countries like Germany have placed restrictions on their use and restrictions on where you can post footage due to concerns over privacy, but if the local cops have no problem with dashcam usage, do your homework and pick up something reliable, not only will you have greater peace of mind, but you might just capture the next viral video of a falling meteor or kangaroo attack on your next daily commute.