Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is an updated review, with the latest software updates installed. First, the good: 1. Having two cameras recording on a single Micro SD card is convenient. While BlackVue pretty aggressively tries to sell you cheap Chinese MicroSD cards for a premium price, any MicroSD card will work. I use Samsung EVO 128GB cards without issues. 2. After my initial review, where I said that the dynamic range of the camera is poor, they’ve released a software update, which added what they call “HDR” mode. It’s not the real HDR by any means, but it did improve the daytime dynamic range quite a bit, so on a sunny day the details in both shadows and highlights are resolved much better. The night performance, however, is terrible. Now for the bad parts: 1. The software is INCREDIBLY bad! There’s a setting in the firmware configuration, which allows you to schedule the camera reboots. This alone is a strong indicator of how bad their software is. But even with the scheduled reboots, the camera crashes 2-3 times a day. That’s how terrible the firmware is. 2. The GPS is probably the worst I’ve ever seen in an electronic device. It works maybe about 30% of the time. Even when the car is parked under a wide open sky - the GPS has a very hard time getting a position fix. 3. The G-sensor is terrible: it gets set off even by the slightest bump in the road, or by a loud sounds in the music you’re listening to! Yet, it doesn’t get set off by an actual impact. I’ve had a minor fender-bender about 2 months ago, which the camera did not detect. But every day I get several dozens of impact notifications from just regular driving. Most of those are from the music I’m listening to while driving. 3. Low light (night) performance, as mentioned above, is terrible. No details resolve outside of the headlight cone. Compare that to Sony FDR-X3000, which costs about as much, but shoots video at 4K resolution, and at night with no light it still manages to resolve all the details in the darkest areas of the frame, with very little noise! (Yes. Sony X3000 still has the noise, but it’s very uniform and nearly invisible, when the video is played back) 4. The WiFi connection is very flimsy. When the camera is set up to connect to a 5GHz WiFi network - it takes several minutes for it to connect. When connected - the throughput is very slow, you can’t watch a video from the camera without constant buffering interruptions, even when you connect directly to the camera’s WiFi. If it’s connected to the “cloud” - then watching the video becomes pretty much impossible. 5. The mounts that come with the camera are not adjustable. You can’t move the camera once it’s installed. You can tilt the camera up or down, but not left and right. I had wasted 3 (three!!!) adhesive pads before I could get the front camera leveled and well centered. 6. The iPhone app is really bad. The UI is insanely convoluted, with no apparent logic what’s where. There’s an option to “delete” clips in the clip list menu, but no way to select the clips to delete. Clips can only be imported one at a time, no way to select multiple clips. No way to format the SD card either. 7. When connected to the camera via WiFi directly, the camera “announces” itself as the default router, so no internet connection on your phone, while it’s connected to the camera - just one more indicator as to how clueless the software developers are, in addition to all the software issues I have (and those I have not) mentioned. With all that said, the camera does have a value. It will help you prove your innocence in an insurance dispute. But, if you hope to get any footage off of it for the purposes other than insurance - I suggest you get something like Sony FDR-X3000 camera. Much better image quality, and none of the issues I’ve mentioned above. And it costs about the same. Or you can get 4 (!!!) more reliable dashcams with much, MUCH better software that don’t crash, like Rove 4K, for the same price. This is a good example of how somewhat decent hardware can be ruined by terrible software.