Have you made the leap and bought a dashcam yet? The devices are becoming increasingly popular as an added safety measure on the roads, providing an impartial eye in the case of any incident.
There are so many now that it can be difficult to choose the right one for you. So what exactly do you need to look out for?
The first thing to think about is your budget. You can spend hundreds on a dashcam with all manner of extras, including super-high-resolution footage, emergency SOS messages and voice control through digital assistants.
But the good news is that you don’t need to spend a fortune if all you are after is a decent video camera.
Take, for example, the Canyon CND-DVR25GPS. It sits firmly in the middle of the road pricewise at €170 (€140 currently in Harvey Norman’s sale) and cheaper than the DVR40GPS. By dropping the 4K footage in favour of the slightly lower resolution WQHD, or 2560x1440P, the price is brought down to a more reasonable level.
Price isn’t everything, though. You also need something that is simple to use, can transfer footage easily when needed, and has the necessary resolution should you need to pull something from the camera’s memory.
The Canyon dashcam manages to pass all those hurdles, linking up to an app to allow you to transfer the footage from the cameras directly to your phone. That footage is good quality. It uses a Sony Starvis sensor with a night vision mode to handle the lower-light scenarios such as night driving. For the most part it performs well, although it struggles occasionally.
It can take still images, too, at 5 megapixel resolution, which turn out okay. It supports continuous shooting at 60 frames per second.
So you lose the 4K footage for 2.5K, but you won’t really miss it.
It doesn’t scrimp on other features either. The GPS in the name, for example, refers to the GPS module that will track location and speed, which is something you might not think will be useful – until you need that data.
The camera itself looks good. Canyon prides itself on its design. Let’s be honest, there isn’t too much room for manoeuvre with a dashcam: camera on the front, display on the back, and some way to stick it to the windshield. But Canyon has focused on making the camera look high end, even if the price veers more to the middle of the road. That means a glossy black finish that is meant to evoke a feeling of premium rather than budget, and a large 3-inch display on the back that you can use as a touchscreen.
That big display gives you not only a decent preview of the footage the camera is capturing, but it also shows extra information such as speed, and enables you to clear out older videos you no longer need. The camera also has cyclic recording, so it will overwrite footage once the memory is full.
However, that doesn’t mean you will lose potentially valuable video. Locked videos will be kept safe until you can transfer the footage.
It’s not all positive though. Although the device has some internal memory, it is only 16MB, and it’s not available for video recording. That makes the Canyon camera a bit useless out of the box, so be prepared and buy a decent quality microSD card, one that is reasonably fast and meets the requirements of the recorder. There is no point in trying to cheap out here; you may end up with a useless card that either develops a fault or simply will not work in the dashcam.
Good
You won’t miss 4K here. The footage is decent quality, enough to make out other cars should you need to use the video in the case of a traffic incident. And the suction cup makes it easy to reposition the GPS unit on the windscreen so if you find that wide angle lens isn’t capturing enough, you can move it quickly and without having to lever the sticky pads off the windscreen.
Bad
No memory card in the box makes this difficult to use immediately, unless you plan ahead. The wireless connection can be a little temperamental too, so it can take a couple of attempts to transfer files.
Everything else
The device comes with a lengthy USB cable for power, and a plug for the 12V socket in your car to keep the device powered. However, you need a constant power supply, and once you unplug the device, it shuts down.
Verdict
A decently priced dashcam that treads the middle of the road.
