I tried to use the financing option to pay for the camera. Story of my life, I was rejected for some stupid reason. I also had a lot of hours cut from work, so I didn’t get paid a whole lot. I ended up having to make the purchase in full, which left me with very little money. Other than that (I’m not holding it against anyone; the universe hates me lol), my experience shopping here was excellent. I didn’t have to pay any sales tax like I thought I would and shipping was free. The camera also arrived one day earlier than the initial estimate.
The system has been installed in our vehicle for only three or four days. I wanted to get the hardwire kit, but that’ll have to wait until next pay check. The power adapter that was included seems a little questionable. A little green disk lights up when it’s receiving power, which I like, and it includes two USB ports. I assume one to power the camera (duh) and the other for your phone or whatever. It has a three amp current output, but I don’t know how much the camera system uses. I figured probably 2 amps for the camera(s) and the last amp for your device. I didn’t like that it doesn’t list the input current, but that could just be me being picky. The power cord is plenty long enough for us. We installed it so that the cable runs out of the camera and then drops straight to the floor and back up to the power adapter. Absolutely nothing fancy about it. Well, we have a medium binder clip clipped onto one of the hvac vents and then the cable is ran inside of the...the flippy things you squeeze to open the clip.
The rear camera was a different story. I used the included wire clips to take the cable across the top of the windshield (to the passenger side), then I sent the cable over the sun visor, using it as support. Then I used the little hook over the back seat (the one you can put hangers and stuff on) as another support (did I mention this is an 05 Chevy cobalt). I then used another of the included hooks to hold the cable to the back windshield. There was a lot of leftover cable, so I lowered the back seat backrest and dropped the excess behind the seat. I do wish that both ends of the cable were angled or that the connector on the rear cam was angled. I had to place it fairly low on the window to allow the cable to plug in. It would also be pretty cool if there were some bigger cable clips included too so that I could stuff both cords into one clamp. I’d only need a couple though, as the two cables would depart ways early in the routing.
Installing the camera system was easy. Maybe a little too easy. I found a great spot to place the front cam first. It was right behind the rear view, and the mesh allowed me to get the camera installed level. I took the film off the sticky pad and very gently touched it to the glass to line it up before pressing it firmly. I got it just a little bit uneven, but the sticky pad had already taken a strong hold to the glass. It isn’t noticeable at all, which is good because I never got it unstuck to realign. I did take the gps unit off (since it is the base) and mounted /it/ to the window.
The rear cam went about the same, but I did have to peel it off a few times. Once because I misaligned it, again because I couldn’t fit the cable into the port, and yet again for the same reason. Other than those nuances, installation was fairly straightforward. I also downloaded the app (which only has two stars on the App Store!!) to assist in the installation (yay for live view lol). My first issue with the app was when I put my phone into landscape mode. It would seem like the app developers would have accounted for people who rotate their phone in different directions. I flipped mine in a direction the app wasn’t proud of, and I was getting an upside down view of everything. Of course, when I flipped my phone the other way, the view was right side up. But surely that’s not the reason it was given only 2 stars (I’ll come back to this. I’m writing this review chronologically).
The captured videos are massive in size. Almost a half gigabyte or more for a 10 minute recording. The instructions imply the cameras WiFi has a 5G mode. Either this is wrong, or the option is very, very well hidden. It takes about as much time to download a video as the videos duration is (10 minutes for a 10 minute video). It looks crisp on smaller displays, but on a 1440x1080 monitor (which is basically standard these days), the view becomes degraded rather obviously. As with basically all wide-angle cameras, it’s hard to get a good judge of distance and speed, which is part of why I wanted the gps (the leading factor was so that our speed would be stamped in the video, so no one could claim we were speeding or something if something happened).
Next came what I’m going to refer to as long-term testing. When I initially tested a video, there was still plenty of free space left on the included uSD card. My precious camera gave a weird issue. It’s videos ...
