Does anyone keep a dash cam in their cars?

This video has been floating around Toronto area car club forums. Tempted to buy one as they are only about $50.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0kcLnTQgJ0

 

Never thought about this, but when you own a modified car, you attrack more attention and a lot of times people will think that you were either driving hard, driving to fast due to the modifications of the car.

I cant imagine, someone rolling the car back to hit another car...I seen something similar in philly, that people with manual cars will roll the cars back until they almost touch to then accelerate, but always thought that was them being diaks and not trying to file a claim...

Do you have a link or a site for a good mounting hardware for the camaras?

Thanks for the post.

 

Huh, hadn't really thought about this being an issue. Guess there is always someone trying to run a scam. Thanks for posting this up.

 

Happens all the time...people back up

Or two cars box u in then the front car slams the brakes. U either hit the guy in front or swirve and hit the other on the side...

Personally if u feel suspicious, pull out ur phone n start recording. I can't imagine how much data is being saved if it's always on. Good for safety, but borderline paranoid

 

As the video is only 360p it’s safe to assume the dash cam only records maybe a max of 480p. So at the resolution you can have hours of video and be less than 100-200 Mega Bytes. Now if you were recording in 1080p with a very high bit rate 1 hour can easily be 4-8 Gigabytes. I want to buy a GoPro HD Camera and use it as a dash cam but it will make massive files for long trips. Good thing I have close to 6 Terabytes of hard drive space lol.

I just spend about an hour on YouTube watching dash cam videos because of this post lol.

 

There are several different types of cams out there so it really depends on which one you purchase. You can get these in lots of places from car shops to spy shops. It doesn't even have to be a car specific cam, it can be an ordinary outdoors cam you wear on a helmet.

Most of the cams take a standard a 32GB SDHC chip, and depending on the resolution can record hours of video even at the max 1080p. When the chip fills up it just replaces the older video files automatically. So the camera will always contain the last few hours of video. More than enough for whenever you run into problems and want evidence.

Eg this one from Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TDOKRS/


YouTube videos of this cam in action:

Rainy days
http://youtu.be/D5KaHJVvl9E
Driving facing the Sun
http://youtu.be/ICjwztkor4Y
Clear night w/ night vision ON
http://youtu.be/XbneEaVs2ZM
Snowy Night w/ night vision OFF
http://youtu.be/to3IW6q9LMs
Videos from Nextmod.com (local car shop in Toronto)


You know.... Smartphone cameras are almost there. Just get a decent mount that doesn't cover the camera. Fire up the camera app and hit record! Handy if you have 64gb, not so much if you have 8gb. However you might want to look into apps (if any are available) that can adjust for lower resolutions and other things to save space like recording over files after 2-3hrs.

 

you amazon link is dead but the videos are cool. do you recored every day then save on your pc hardrive?

 

Link must have parsed wrong... Updated!

I don't have a cam, still undecided on if I want one or not. The guys that I know that have the cams just keep them going and going and don't save them to their computers at all. They only transfer the files to their computers when they are driving along and come across an exotic car or a hot girl walking down the street and want to watch it again. But otherwise the cam is constantly going each time they drive, it's just a matter of them pulling it out of the glove box and hitting record. The battery usually lasts for a good amount of time.

No need to save the files to your computer if all it is is you driving along in stop and go traffic. Or going 70 in a 50.

 

that video = epic win

 

I have a window mount for my iPhone 4 and use a timelapse program (MotionPics or Camera Awesome) to capture timelapse movies.