If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

- George Washington

Friday, 25 January 2013

Dashcams Pt 2

OK, it's a slow night at work and I have been on eBay.  I've had a good think about this camera business (see previous post), and I have decided that expecting something to live in the car and be available for day-to-day recording, and at the same time be a good video camera for bike rides is unreasonable.  So I have decided to buy the cheapest thing I can find which fits the minimum requirements, and save the bike cam purchase for another day.

I am getting one of these:



which comes from eBay and costs the princely sum of £22.95 with free postage. It's got some good features, too:
  • runs off a battery and a 12v charger
  • records in chunks, choice of 2, 5 or 15 minutes
  • automatically over-writes the oldest file when the SC card is full
  • powers on with the car ignition
  • IR illumination for night recording
  • time and date stamp on recordings
  • motion detection, which might be interesting filming the wildlife that visits the garden overnight
  • will support an SD card up to 32GB.
The only downside I can see is that it's got a wide angle lens but the image may not fit a computer screen very well.  The videograbs I have seen have a weird compressed perspective, although this may be a function of the small, square screen and a wide-angle image.  We shall see.  For under 25 beer tokens, if it works as described for a year I shall be happy.

And it is shipped from Pontypridd by a UK seller, not shipped from a warehouse in an industrial estate off the M25 by a seller in China.  Pontypridd is almost local.

It should arrive in a few days.  I will let you know how I get on.

5 comments:

  1. I'm really looking forward to the endless vlogs of your journeys to and from work posted on youtube....

    (yes, I use sarcasm a lot - it's my second name...)

    All in the spirit of humour of course!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm guessing it certainly came from China originally, however. From the features list:
    Rotatable LCD, up to 270 degree. Make operate more convenience
    Real Time & Date display on video, don’t need to read on computer
    Motion Detect – select this function, it will automatically record if an object movement

    Still, not as bad as the translation in this:
    winterson.com/2009/01/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west-redux.html
    Can't remember where I first saw this linked (might even have been here somewhere), but it's always worth reposting. Even on a really flimsy premise!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, I'm sure it's Chinese. They are sold all over the place, and always with the same poorly-translated blurb in the 'specification' blurb. Those subtitles are a hoot.

    ReplyDelete

Comment is free, according to C P Scott, so go for it. Word verification is turned off for the time being. Play nicely.

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