Which Blackvue should we get for our Model X vehicles? Any way to find good installers that know what they are doing? And is it really worth paying double to have GPS and cloud/wifi capabilities? Thanks for any advice, experience shared.
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Torn between Dashcams...
- Thread starter DrivingTheFuture
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- Model X
For the money the 750S is the top choice.
I think they could still improve their image quality, but I'm hopeful the current firmware has a setting. Its not quite everything they advertise for visual recording, but its probably still a top contender. The Cloud functions have improved over what they had earlier in the year; which I prefer.
I think they could still improve their image quality, but I'm hopeful the current firmware has a setting. Its not quite everything they advertise for visual recording, but its probably still a top contender. The Cloud functions have improved over what they had earlier in the year; which I prefer.
Consider if you really need parking mode and other usecases.
If you don't - get one of the drop in models that plug under the mirror - simple install that you can do yourself and save $$$.
Personally I feel like gps is not really important because I don't see too many valid usecases for it, esp. since car already logs gps data independently anyway.
If you plan to get 2 2-channel systems - only one would need to be gps even if you feel like you need the gps functionality.
Similarly for wifi - what's the usecase are you aiming for? Somebody breaking into the car and taking the dashcam too? Would it have enough time to upload stuff when taken? Discreet appearance that looks like part of the car is probably better to help here (just need to find a way to power it all the time while car is idle.)
Do pay attention to picture quality: 2 important parameters: resolution (higher horizontal is better, higher vertical - not so much unless you plan to film meteors and low-flying planes. I wish 4k option to appear soon) and bitrate (higher is better).
Additional consideration - if you plan to get a 2-channel system - consider going with 2 1-channel systems - every one would have their own dedicated sdcard - better fault tolerance AND since the card is dedicated - better bitrate from every unit instead of crippling the second channel bitrate-wise (and often resolution-wise too) to accommodate sdcard write limitations.
I've been out of the loop on latest blackvue dashcams, but old versions were quite hackable allowing you to get additional bitrate out of the unit if your sdcard allowed it and other useful stuff.
4k blackvue is supposed to drop in the 1st quarter or so.
Blackvue DR900S 4K Dashcam Officially Announced - Vortex Radar
Just ordered a $67 Dashcam that can tide us over until we make a more permanent decision. I just don't see how Blackvue is charging so much for their top of the line camera... The looks are really the only reason I like there's best. I believe the Model X has a cigarette lighter plug in the trunk so I could just order a second camera facing out the back, only question is how do I mount it?
I guess just stick it on the window like I would the front camera but I wonder what I would need to do with leaving amole cable for when the trunk opens and closes. If Tesla could release their Dashcam feature this would all be solved!
prediction: tesla dashcam feature would not have parking mode (drains battery). Tesla dashcam feature would only provide forward-looking camera footage,
It's also possible that the footage would only be available in small clips that you would need to manually activate within 10 seconds of an interesting event (usecase = accidents and other such stuff, would also activate on airbag deploy) because internal storage is limited (writing to usb storage in real time would have own problems - slow internal network, slow cid and slow usb interface on the cid).
Fact: resolution of in-car cameras is low, so if you are planning to have the dashcams to also edit out interesting footage and then post on youtube - it won't be suitable, get a real high-resolution dashcam instead.
It's also unclear if they'd bother with doing color footage or not.
Route the cable to the top of liftgate, jump to inside the car and then route to the 12V socket (plenty of howtos on that) - this way you'll just leave a bit of wiggle-room in the cable for the small amount of play between the top of liftgate and the car body.
Nosken
Active Member
Don't forget to look at ThinkWare. I left BlackVue after it failed twice when needed. I like the ThinkWare better. I had the Blackvue 650 and now have the ThinkWare F770. They now make the F800.
Is this data accessible anywhere? I had to use GPS data to defeat a speeding ticket and fine the police for their faulty equipment a while back. Dashcam with GPS saved me from that scam.
It's available if you're logging it externally with something like TeslaFi. The data may not have the same level of granularity as it does on the dashcam though and there will be gaps if your cell signal is spotty.
That's a whole separate can of worms. I don't know about you, but for me that would be used mostly against me
Also different jurisdictions have different admissibility rules for evidence coming from untrusted non-blackbox sources (of which dashcams are usually not since they did not undergo any certification as such and are often trivially forgeable)
you can attach various loggers to the car can bus or internal network and log the gps and speed values (don't even need gps! can just log what car reports on IC as the current speed and what was set as TACC speed limit - that's all you see anyway, and gps could be wrong).
Although if OP doesn't like the price point on Blackvue's top of the line dashcams, ThinkWare's right there with them. Plus their cameras have a much more noticeable footprint which he said was a concern to him.
We're holding on to our Blackvue 650S unit for now. Looked at the 750S but don't care for how they've changed the bitrate and a few other things on the newer model. Gave us the feeling that while they make the cameras maybe someone else is doing the video software for it. Also feel they could have improved their software for the 650S and gotten better quality in low light but that never happened in the upgrades the camera got. With our 650S we're able to use a 128K mini SD in it and get enough reasonable hours of video coverage to run it 24/7. We bought the dashcam for accident coverage but also liked Blackvue 650S' parking recording mode that runs off our car so no power adapater needed. Also found the footprint to be a winner for us.
From reading the 750S' manual and looking at the user videos here, decided what we would loose by switching to that model wasn't worth it for us. The higher resolution on the back camera and lower light settings just weren't compelling enough to give up the record length of a more or less decent 650S. Without higher capacity memory cards available to use with the higher resolution sensors to offset the loss in recording time, it's keeping us where we are for now. We're not interested in using BV's Cloud as a compromise and don't like how BV makes users' cars with this subscribed feature visible on the app ("anonymous" but when your car parks in your driveway, not really). Probably a fine compromise for fleet vehicles depending on the business.
We'll take a look at the new 4K version but wondering if we'll encounter some of the same concerns as the 750S. One of the things we did really like about the 650S was the always on of the parking mode and did not like how Thinkware imlemented their parking mode with clips instead of full continuous recording coverage. Nothing was perfect for us so it's a matter of weighing what's important for you.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
"Stop the madness!" Who needs a 4K dashcam? We're recording red lights and potential accidents.. we're not making hollywood movies. Sheesh.
I made this example in the other thread about the topic half a year ago.
Not sure about you, but interesting things tend to happen somewhat in distance for me so you need to heavily crop resultant image to show the action. And in order to heavily crop it you need to have a lot of pixels.
Imagine how much better this video would have been resolution-wise if I had a 4k dashcam?
I saw a transformer blow up as I was passing by the other day, tried to see it on the dashcam and no amount of cropping with 1080p footage would make it really visible even though I could see it with my eyes.
btw also on a side note, beware of speaker reflections in your dashcam footage on X (And probably S?) - it's a very fine mesh that makes camera compression codecs work really hard thinking they are important when they are not. even at 10mbps bitrate the resulting image loses a lot of quality due to that. Here's a sample of raw footage: https://app.box.com/s/7qij5om7w0omx8atfpztoodja8anfjit - pay attention at how the reflection appears and disappears in steps, the speaker itself is somewhat finely detailed which is certainly not the area where I'd want the camera to concentrate on maintaining detalization, though.
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Insureit1
Member
I also left Blackview after the camera failed. I just picked up a Blacksys after researching this quite a bit. Less expansive and parking mode does not require a separate adapter like Blackvue does. Worth a shot for me and much less than Blackvue. I also considered the ThinkWare F770 and F800 but I was buying three Blacksys included rear camera and hardwire kit. The whole uploading to the cloud was not something I was concerned about.
@Nosken and @Insureit1
How exactly did your Blacvues fail? Outright shutdown not to be powered ever again? Just didn’t record? Powered but trip record event didn’t happen during event/hit? I’m confused. I just purchase two new 750S’s and am interested in your responses. Thanks in advance for any info or what to look out for.
Ski
How exactly did your Blacvues fail? Outright shutdown not to be powered ever again? Just didn’t record? Powered but trip record event didn’t happen during event/hit? I’m confused. I just purchase two new 750S’s and am interested in your responses. Thanks in advance for any info or what to look out for.
Ski
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Yeah, there are certainly circumstances where the "crop/zoom-in/crop/zoom-in" might be nice for dashcam footage, but I honestly think that >95% of the footage captured by regular 720 or 1080 dashcams is more than adequate to serve the purpose of proof or evidence of an accident or to assign fault or capture insurance fraud attempts.
Point of reference, the Blackvue does not require the Power Magic Pro for Teslas, definitely not on the Model S and from what I recall from here on the forum not on the Model X either; not sure anyone has posted how dashcams can be wired into the Model 3 yet. Our installer wired ours directly to our car's wiring (mic speaker power?) and it's a very clean, neat looking install for a constant power supply for parking mode. There's plenty of videos on TMC showing how people can wire it themselves but any good dashcam installer familiar with the car should know this.
We bought a Blackvue 128GB microSD card some time ago and have not had any problems with it. We have done the maintenance on the card a few times as recommended by the manufacturer to prevent card corruption through constant write/rewrite use.
During our really hot inland summer this past year with the car parked in the sun, we did encounter video corruption on the card on a few occasions (weren't using car's Cabin Overheat Protection to cool the interior temp so interior temp surely exceeded the maximum operating range). Video on the rear camera only (which had the heat exposure) got all pink and green. Once it overheated the rear camera continued to record corrupted files. The front camera continued to record just fine during this time. We didn't have any trouble clearing the issue once we noticed it and continued to use the same card. Card still works fine. Overheating of dashcams with video corruption can happen on any manufacturer's unit and dashcam users should routinely check their video files to catch the problem early and correct.
Here's our front DR650S-2ch installed on our Model S. All wiring except what you see here is hidden inside the Tesla mirror/headliner components. Our rear camera at the liftgate is similarly elegantly installed.
We bought a Blackvue 128GB microSD card some time ago and have not had any problems with it. We have done the maintenance on the card a few times as recommended by the manufacturer to prevent card corruption through constant write/rewrite use.
During our really hot inland summer this past year with the car parked in the sun, we did encounter video corruption on the card on a few occasions (weren't using car's Cabin Overheat Protection to cool the interior temp so interior temp surely exceeded the maximum operating range). Video on the rear camera only (which had the heat exposure) got all pink and green. Once it overheated the rear camera continued to record corrupted files. The front camera continued to record just fine during this time. We didn't have any trouble clearing the issue once we noticed it and continued to use the same card. Card still works fine. Overheating of dashcams with video corruption can happen on any manufacturer's unit and dashcam users should routinely check their video files to catch the problem early and correct.
Here's our front DR650S-2ch installed on our Model S. All wiring except what you see here is hidden inside the Tesla mirror/headliner components. Our rear camera at the liftgate is similarly elegantly installed.
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