Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

EDIT: After using the dashcam now for a few months, I dropped it down to 2-star from the 3-star review I wrote below. Here's why: - The nighttime operation of this dashcam is abysmal and basically unusable without a light point source. The dashcam has no IR emitters. If you are looking to protect your vehicle at night in your driveway, the area must be lit in front of the dashcam. - Software constantly crashes while manipulating videos requiring restarts. Software is also unintuitive for timeline playback. Saving video from an event may require separate software to concatenate and compress 1 min videos. - Having to pull the SD card instead of utilizing the full functionality of 5G WIFI is too much of a pain. There NEEDS to be a firmware update to access the dashcam via web interface to pull individual videos for review. I was hoping to utilize much more functionality and use of this dashcam, but unless an event occurs, to me it's just an insurance policy and expensive toy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- I decided on this dashcam since it's considered one of the best out right now according to most video reviewers. I'm a few days in after install and feel I'm ready to say how I feel about it. They say presentation is everything. The product box and packaging of individual bits is exquisite, reminiscent of when my iPhone arrived. While nice to see, it's definitely not necessary. I can see where the $500 price tag is being spent. However, the design and construction of the front and rear cams are wonderful. They are sure to look good and blend with any automotive interior. Also, everything needed is there for install, so you shouldn't have to go running to the hardware store. Install was a breeze, but took almost a full day due to fully hardwiring and neatly routing everything. The initial setup of the dashcam was easy - it pretty much formats and initialized the card and gets right to work recording. Modifying the firmware is a bit of a learning curve. There is no real help on any of the settings in the app/PC viewer, so I had to rely on the manual (which lags behind the latest software build). No issues connecting iPhone to dashcam, but connecting the dashcam to home WIFI was a real pain. The range of the dashcam's WIFI is horrendous (Blackvue advertises 10m), so my vehicle has to be in the garage to get somewhat decent signal. When connected to WIFI (aka hotspot), your only real option from Blackvue is to use their cloud. This is where the product fails miserably IMO. Plan on spending an extra $15/month for a mobile hotspot in the vehicle in order to view live. To get any real use from the cloud, you're going to have to register your camera. This may not seem like a big deal, but to me it's a huge security concern. While you do retain the option of withholding location-based data, your daily videos (and possibly still location) are all linked to a public sharing service. I for one do not blindly trust companies to secure such data, so I will not be using the cloud. Also, any real-time viewing past 10min/day and any more than 5GB storage is a paid service. The thing that really gets me is that if you don't use the cloud, you can only access the dashcam vids either through the app (connected to dashcam WIFI within around 10m) or remove the SD card and plug it into computer. Fortunately there are open source programs out there to retrieve the recorded files for UHD viewing on computer without the need to remove the SD card. My main goal is to review the daily recordings after work on my home PC without having to touch a thing on the dashcam. I'm still tinkering with this, but think it will work. Aside from the disappointing cloud service, the video quality is quite nice from both front and rear cams, but the audio quality could be better. Not sure how much I'll be relying on the G (shock) sensor while my vehicle is in a parking lot. Even after adjusting the sensitivity, anything I do similar to what would cause a door ding did not register. I'm sure a real collision causing deformation would register, but was hoping to catch the inconsiderate in their acts. Despite some glaring downsides of this product, I'm glad to see that firmware is constantly being updated and there are open source programs out there. I feel this dashcam should be in the $300 range.