Why use a dash cam?

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably seen footage of the meteor explosions and ridiculous traffic collisions captured by Russian drivers. As WIRED explains, drivers in Russia and elsewhere use dash cams to have legal evidence to protect them from insurance fraud. In a place like Russia (or anywhere, really), there’s the potential for depraved drivers to, for example, back into your front end and claim it as you rear-ending them.

With a camera rolling, you have proof of the grift—and in a country with potentially unscrupulous law enforcement, this can be especially valuable. With globalization and the quick shrinking of technology, dash cams are cheap and reliable enough to be a worthwhile buy if you think you’d benefit from one.

I need to emphasize that hd video camera are not meant to capture memories. In fact, a dash cam is meant to be completely ignored until an event happens. Consider them more like a security camera (or an airplane black box, as Techmoan describes them). They record constantly so when a con man reverses and claims that you rear-ended him, you have footage that shows the stop, his reverse lights, and the impact. While a dash cam holds hours of footage, its sole purpose is to capture a very decisive few seconds of a collision.

We have more details below, but understand that these cameras are to prove your own innocence, not to identify and capture the guy who nicked your bumper in a hit and run. The dash cam is used to show how a collision went down from your perspective and show that you were driving legally. These cameras might not capture every license plate or the face of other drivers, but they will show that you were being safe.

How we picked

Fortunately, there are several websites with reviews that are, despite their non-professional appearance, extremely evaluative. For now, these are the only sites conducting thorough reviews of dash cams: Techmoan, Dashboard Camera Reviews, Car Cam Central, and Dash Cam Talk.

(There are other dash cam reviewers like The Gadgeteer and Auto Express, but none of them are nearly as comprehensive or as well-versed in this product category as the aforementioned sites).

Since there are hundreds of dash cams in production and even the great ones can come from no-name Chinese and Korean manufacturers, we read these sites’ reviews to come up with a list of the dash cams that were well-esteemed across multiple sources.

From there, we contacted the editors of Car Cam Central and Dash Cam Talk, who helped us sort out questions about features and rank the various models based on what average users would need in a dash cam—details on that can be found under “What to look for.”

We also spoke to the folks at the Spy Tec shop in New York City, where they sell many of these obscure dash cams. Their staff have visited the factories producing these cams and picked what they consider the best models. We considered their advice with caution since they are a retailer, but their expertise helped us negotiate the differences between models.

From there, we ordered Car recorder dvr in the top contenders, models that had the basic features like looping, 1080-pixel resolution, small size, and solid night vision. We then drove around with them through a variety of conditions—sunny Hawaii highways, overcast and potholed San Francisco streets, and tours through suburban New Jersey woods.

We were particularly attentive to how well each camera could “disappear” from our attention while driving. That’s because a good dash cam should mount in an inconspicuous place and function on its own without intervention. A cam would lose points if, for example, it went wonky from being in the hot sun or if its looping system malfunctioned and inexplicably filled the memory card.

We evaluated the footage from the various cameras according to practical review. If the camera could reliably capture license plates and street signs during the day, and at night if the headlights were turned on, the camera would pass.

Besides those criteria, generally build quality was weighed against price as we do for all our product reviews.

The $70 G1W does everything you need a dash cam to do just as well as much more expensive models. Simply put, it captures video at the quality that you’d need (1080 pixels) and it has an interface that’s simple enough for anyone to use. For a vast majority of drivers looking to protect themselves against insurance fraud, this is the cam to buy. The fact that it performs this well for this little money is astounding.

It records at 1080p at 30 frames per second, which is standard for most dash cams. Once uploaded to a computer, however, it’s clear that its chipset and sensor work together to produce exceptional video quality. This, coupled with the cam’s price and simplicity of use, is what makes it the best dash cam for most drivers.

If you’ve ever used a digital camera, you can navigate the G1W. You make all the tweaks on its 2.7-inch screen, which lets you format the card quickly, set the frame rate, and turn off the motion sensor. A lot of the options in there are features you’ll never use, but after testing many cams, we learned that the usability improvements of having a display far outweigh the bulk it adds. For example, there’s no ambiguity as to what’s happening when it’s happening: a blinking red dot tells you it’s recording and a microphone logo tells you that it’s capturing audio.

The simple UI made setup a breeze. I opened the box in the test car, mounted the G1W on the included suction cup, connected the 12-volt cigarette lighter adapter to the camera, inserted the microSD card I bought, and turned on the car. The G1W fired up with its welcome screen and began a live feed from the lens to the rear LCD. Two presses of the top-right “M” button opened up the second menu.

I then hit the arrows to scroll down to “Format,” then pressed the hard “Record” button (which works as the selector in the menus) to confirm. The G1W formatted the card in seconds. From there, I set the screen lockout to three minutes so it would go black after starting driving. I hit record and a flashing red dot indicated it was rolling.

After stopping for gas then starting up again, the G1W fired up, showed it was recording both video and audio (as shown by the microphone on the screen), then blacked out after three minutes. It remained completely autonomous through several more cycles of turning the car on and off.

Being easy to use is important, but it’s really the G1W’s exceptional resolution and image quality that make it a winner. This time last year, 1080p was a luxury that wasn’t worth paying for, but it’s hard to say no when you can have it at the same price as a 720p camera. While testing, we used it under intense sunshine and overcast gray skies as well as at night, and every time, the G1W managed to capture the scenes with such clarity that you could always see the relevant details like street signs and license plates. During the daytime, HD sport camera is every bit as good as cameras twice as expensive.

Besides the hardware performance, the G1W’s build quality is solid for something this cheap. Don’t get me wrong — when held next to other, more expensive cameras, the G1W feels about as cheap as it is, but in our testing, it proved plenty capable.

According to other reviewers, some dash cams simply can’t withstand the sun and will develop a blurry picture, but the G1W never failed. We ran it in the hot Hawaiian sun for a full day, which included upwards of four hours spent in an unshaded parking lot with the windows up, and the G1W remained fixed to the windshield and continued to function normally without overheating. For comparison, the much more expensive BlackVue DR500-GW, when fired up after sitting in the sun, was so hot that it felt like it would melt its own plastic–something Dash Cam Talk found in their testing of a slightly different BlackVue.