The answer is quite situational depending on what you are looking for. Like you, I have been look around for reliable budget dashcam myself, The problem with other dashcams on the market is that they won’t record if the car is powered down. They are a few dashcams that record when the car is powered down, but they can record only for an extremely very limited period of time.
Recently, I found a few dashcams that meet those requirement: Ring Car Cam and Garmin Dash Cam Mini powered with OBD power adapter. Unfortunately, both dashcams require draw battery power from your car via OBD port and they requires month subscription. The battery drain will probably wear out the car battery faster.
So I continued my search and found Wyze Outdoor Cam v2 that meets my requirement. It has a travel mode you can use with scheduled recording to record on motion detection. It is advertised to last up to 6 months although, you can only schedule recording up to 30 days on the app.
It doesn’t make sense all newer cars except Tesla have cameras installed (back and a few front), but there is no way to record them. What worse is that there is no product offered by the dealer or by the manufacturer or on the market that allows you connect those cameras to a DVR. It doesn’t make sense.
Oh, I did not know that. I gave the camera a day test and it turns out that it did record, but it doesn’t always record. So it indeed doesn’t work effectively.
Also, the camera battery is advertised to last 6 months. It doesn’t last any more than a day on travel mode. Well, I will be returning it.
@rbbartho Oh, that is a great idea. One problem though. I am not very knowledgeable when it involves with car wiring. Got any recommendation on the rechargeable battery pack and the camera and the wiring needed?
I have Outdoor V2 cameras that last nearly 6 months. They only average one motion trigger a week.
My driveway camera that gets 10 or more motion triggers per day lasts 1-2 months.
Using one of these in a car is going to get hundreds of triggers per hour while your driving! That will kill the battery very fast - just as you observed.
Yes, but I would use a V3 with the largest USB card. It wont be able to record to the cloud at all, but you can enable continuous recording to the card.
Also power it from a USB jack or lighter adapter that is always on so it works while parked.
That’s what I’m doing. I have a V2 pointed at the driver and a V3 and a V3 Pro both pointed forward. All have 256GB uSD cards that are set to continuous recording.
