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Do You Need a Dash Cam?
While the promise of capturing something great while driving is exciting, dash cams prove invaluable after a traffic incident or accident. “The dash cam captures and records road activity,” said Janet Ruiz, director of strategic communications for the Insurance Information Institute. Car and Driver. “Video footage can provide law enforcement and your insurer with direct evidence of what caused the accident.”
Bob Passmore of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association agrees, noting the value of dashcam footage in incidents such as hit-and-runs or accidents where a person is injured (or worse) and in accidents where details and information are difficult (or impossible). stop by He also noted that drivers involved in traffic incidents can only present their own point of view and sometimes deliberately or deliberately distort the facts. “The dashcam doesn’t lie and can’t convince itself of a different version of events,” he says. “The data tells the story.”
When asked why a dash cam doesn’t mean lower auto insurance premiums like a home or business security camera, Passmore says it’s because the value of a dash cam is only realized after the fact; It does not deter potential risks the way a security camera does. Ruiz argues that lower premiums could be a result of dashcam use. While insurance companies typically don’t offer discounts for dash cameras, they can help prevent insurance premiums from rising by providing proof that the driver was not at fault, he said.
A law enforcement source we spoke with claims that drivers who use dashcams drive more carefully. “People tend to drive a little more safely if they know their vehicle has a dashcam,” says Ralph Scianni, a former police chief in Bayonne, New Jersey, who has 34 years of law enforcement experience. Scianni told us that with the widespread availability of dash cams to the public, the Bayonne Police Department has seen a clear decrease in property damage and injuries resulting from vehicle crashes. “I don’t see any downsides for anyone using a dashcam,” he says. “[They] It contributes to overall safety,” Ruiz agrees, saying in an email that “drivers who wear dashcams tend to pay more attention to and monitor their own driving behavior.”
Clearly, dashcam use provides a lot of value to professional drivers such as rideshare operators and over-the-road truck drivers. Whether you use one of these in your personal vehicle is up to you.
How We Tested Dash Cams
Vehicle cameras; They are resistant to various environmental factors that affect their performance, such as speed, time of day, distance, ambient light and weather. Three days of objective testing in equal conditions allowed us to simulate a variety of real-world scenarios and evaluate the performance of each dash cam both individually and comparatively.
On the first day, we unboxed each dash camera and noted its reports. resolution and field of view. Also, we downloaded and evaluated it. availability of each relevant application.
On the second day of testing, we took the cameras through a specific local route, first on a cloudy day and then after sunset to evaluate the nighttime performance of each.
We evaluated it on the last day openness On a bright, sunny day, he took the dashcams again along the same route in the sunlight. We also evaluated licence number plate clarity at different distances (5, 10, 25 and 50 feet) uses still images taken directly from each dash camera to determine the maximum distance at which the camera can effectively capture and record details such as street signs and numbers and letters on license plates.
FAQ
How do I install a dash cam?
Most dash cameras are a simple plug-and-play that plugs into your vehicle’s USB or 12-volt outlet. They are usually mounted on the windshield or dashboard; some offer multiple mounting options.
The real challenge comes with cable management. You’ll probably want to route the power cord through your headliner or floor to minimize hanging wires in your vehicle cabin. Most units come with a trimming tool to assist with this process.
How do I hide the cables of the in-car camera?
To hide your dash cam wiring, you’ll need to run them behind your windshield or headliner. Most dash cam kits provide a simple trimming tool designed to gently pull and remove the trim while you connect the cable to the power source.
How much storage space does my dash cam have?
It depends. Most dash cams store data locally on a micro SD card; Some devices allow (or require) images to be stored in the cloud, which usually requires a subscription fee. The amount of images a device can store depends on the GB capacity of your micro SD card or the amount of data your cloud storage subscription allows.
Dash cameras that use memory cards often automatically overwrite the oldest data on the micro SD when the card reaches its capacity; Purchase your subscription or micro SD card accordingly to prevent accidental overwriting of vital images.
How do I know if my dash cam is recording?
Most dash cameras usually have a flashing light to indicate that a recording is in progress. But this is only true sometimes. For our testing, we had to verify that our devices were recording in a variety of ways, including looking for an indicator light or confirming through the app. Check your user manual to confirm operating modes.
How do I get images from my dash cam?
It depends on the device. Dash camera footage can be accessed via your micro SD card, an app, or the cloud where your camera is installed. You will need to confirm how and where your data is recorded and act accordingly.
Am I legally required to show my dashcam footage to authorities?
Not necessarily. Most law enforcement agencies and insurance companies will request access to your footage if they want to investigate. In some cases you may need to turn it. If in doubt, consult your lawyer.
A Little About Image Quality
When it comes to image quality, you have three main components: sensor, optics, and image processing. These three elements together will determine how good or bad the video quality of any dash cam is.
First there is the sensor. Even when talking about the sensor, there are two factors that determine how clearly an image can be captured: physical size and dynamic range. Generally speaking, and all else being equal, the physically larger the sensor, the better the image quality, especially in low light. This is because at any resolution a larger sensor means each pixel is larger. As a result, each pixel has more area to capture photons.
The next factor is dynamic range. This refers to how much range the sensor can capture between the brightest white and the darkest black. Although post-processing can also affect the final result, the more dynamic range an image sensor can capture, the more information you have to work with when reviewing images. This can be critical in high-contrast scenes where you may need to see a license plate in shadow at noon. Image sensors with low dynamic range will struggle to display this level of detail across the tonal range of any scene.
The next element is optical quality. As with any camera, from your smartphone to a $100,000 Ferrari Hasselblad, the lens(es) in front of the sensor are as important, if not more important, than the sensor itself. In the case of dash cameras, lenses are typically made from multiple separate optical elements, which are often molded from plastic or glass (and sometimes a combination of the two for different elements in the same lens array). Glass elements almost always outperform plastic elements, but they usually come with a higher cost of production, and this is always passed on to the consumer in some way.
Another feature of the lens in a dash cam is its focal length, which determines the field of view offered by the dash cam. The wider the field of view, the more scene you capture in the frame. However, you get more distortion, especially around the edges of the frame. Some companies try to combat this problem through distortion correction, but any correction will affect image quality in other ways, so ultimately it’s a balance between how much you want in the frame and how distorted you want the shot to appear. As you can see from the images in our tests, cameras like Garmin have wide fields of view at the expense of very circular images that don’t replicate what the human eye sees. Meanwhile, cameras like the Escort offer a more “normal” field of view that more accurately reflects how the human eye sees the scene.
The last element is image processing. No matter which dash cam you use, the manufacturer has default settings that will determine how the data from the image sensor is translated from raw data into a format that you can play back as video or view as a still image. While there are countless variables going on behind the scenes, the most important factor that will play a role in the image quality of a dash cam is noise reduction.
Noise reduction is applied to control digital noise (colored speckles you can occasionally see in digital video) coming from a sensor. However, doing this means that details in the image may be “smeared” or blurred. Specifically, we noticed that several camera models implemented so much noise reduction that the letters and numbers on the license plates became almost impossible to read from certain distances, especially in low-light scenes where noise reduction was applied more liberally during image processing. The best image quality cameras use enough noise reduction to keep out digital noise without creating a “watercolor effect” where details start to blend together.
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Hearst Autos combines the talents, resources and expertise of three of the world’s largest, most influential automotive publications. The Gear Team has tested a wide variety of automotive products, parts, accessories, and hardware, including backup cameras, portable jumpers, and OBD-II scanners. We put our hands on every product we test. Most were purchased; some are provided by manufacturers.
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